BCS IT Leaders Forum: Papers

Transparency - Software is the elephant in the room
September 2024

Most of our business and personal activities depend on services which include digital systems. These are based on software. This is a problem, because software, unlike other widely used products, fails unpredictably. This Policy Brief explores the results of a two-year project researching software failures, their causes and their consequences.

Driving business innovation and growth
January 2024

To help organisations transform, grow and flourish, the BCS IT Leaders Forum believes a new approach is needed. It believes people who have been developed to combine both IT leadership and entrepreneurship are ideally placed to enable change.

Service Resilience and Software Risk
November 2023 

This report identifies the risk from software failure as a hurdle to national resilience; resilience is defined as “action to prevent or mitigate risk”. We – people and organisations in the UK - are increasingly dependent on services that are at risk from software failure. This report makes recommendations to prevent software failures and to mitigate the risk from these software failures to the resilience of service delivery.

Boosting confidence in the resilience of services dependent on software
September 2023

In making a living and in living our lives, we increasingly rely on services of digital systems. The software components of these systems are mostly sourced by the service providers from open source consortia or purchased from specialist suppliers, many based outside the UK.

IT Leaders could be doing more to drive business innovation and growth
June 2023

IT Leadership and Entrepreneurship are – have always been – intimately related.

Information technology, computer technology, software and systems, applications, and the now rapid ‘digitalisation of everything’ and AI, are existentially pioneering, inventive and disruptive. Commercially, they are potentially massively financially powerful, and profitable.

How does the IT profession build the leaderpreneur for the future, enabling the profession to succeed in these opportunities?

Digitalisation – software risk and resilience
August 2022

Recent events – the pandemic, global supply chain disruption, extreme weather – have increased the awareness of the consequences of lack of resilience in our economy and society.

Digital systems are increasingly a crucial part of the economy: but there is evidence that digital systems are increasingly liable to service breaches due to failures in software systems among other causes, and that these breaches are increasing in scale and duration.

The risks are similar to those from global warming or pandemics, in that major shocks are certain, but not their location or timing. This report was written is to increase awareness and to provide actionable recommendations.

Pressing reset on IT management methods
24 November 2021

This is output from a Forum Working Group set up after the 2021 BCS IT Leaders Conference where the question was raised in the annual IT Leaders Survey, “Is it time to press reset on our IT management methods”. The results can be found at the ‘Articles opinion and research’ pages of the BCS web site and it will be discussed at the 2022 conference.

The Digital CIO: Communications and the reporting lines
February 2018

As part of its mission to assist personal development, BCS ELITE the Computing Leadership Forum, is commissioning a series of digital leadership white papers to facilitate knowledge sharing for digital leadership. This first white paper focusses on CIO communication through interviews with three C-level panellists, each of whom works within different reporting structures, in order to compare and contrast their role and influence in their respective organisations.

The interviews surfaced some important realities:

• For a non-digital ‘pure play’, the digital/non-digital boundary - the digital divide - is tangible. The boundary can exist within the business, in the supply chain, and/or with customers, but must be bridged for digital to succeed
• It is an encompassing digital strategy, not just digital technology, that drives change
• Communications within and without the digital business must be carefully crafted in order to be effective; successful communications are conducted through multiple channels, including board level stakeholders, broader business leadership and customers
• Shadow IT often results from people being left behind in digital transformation

Highlights of interviews with Dominic Aslan, VP of IT, ShipServ, Ben Booth interim CIO, currently at Arup, and Sean Sadler, CIO of CTIL (joint infrastructure venture between Vodafone and Telefonica) are contained within.’

There is a survey associated with this report: www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/V7MX82D

Gardeners not mechanics
June 2016

Gary Lloyd MBCS CITP reports on why change needs gardeners not mechanics to deliver usable value, following recent research with BCS ELITE members. The full report on Gary's research is listed below under "Organisational Change Survey".

Musings on IT strategy
May 2016

Steve Burrows and Jon G. Hall, Chair and Immediate Past Chair of BCS Effective Leadership in IT Group (ELITE), discuss if IT strategy is more about problem solving than about the adoption of new technologies.

Organisational Change Survey
January 2016

Towards the end of 2015, ELITE members were asked to contribute to a survey, compiled by Gary Lloyd, an ELITE member, of the success or otherwise of organisational change initiatives. The results of that survey can now be downloaded from the following link on the ELITE website. It summarise, 159 responses, 110 of those from ELITE members.

Two speed IT
August 2015

Steve Burrows, vice-Chair ELITE, compares and contrasts the impacts of two popular project management methods, namely Waterfall and Agile, on business evolution and IT leadership.

Women digital leaders
July 2015

ELITE committee member Jacqui Hogan MBCS deliberates on the current lack of female leadership within the information technology industry.

The cost of privacy
March 2014

Rick Chandler of the BCS ELITE committee asks whether the internet needs a new economic model.

CIO DNA
September 2012

This article arises from the discussion on the BCS Elite group on LinkedIn ‘Just how responsible is IT for the financial troubles the world finds itself in?’ Jon Hall, Chair of BCS ELITE.

Business mentoring - does it add value to innovation?
May 2011

Steve Burrows of the ELITE Committee.

Budgets: the art of spending well
May 2005

Be sure your investment strategy has a clear client focus said Ben Booth, Chair of ELITE.