Carl Bate

Carl Bate is a Partner at Atos Consulting where he leads its Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Next Practice Advisory practice. Carl is an advisor to business and government, and working with people from different professional perspectives, works to solve some of the complex problems organisations face in the connected world by applying 'next' not just 'best' practices. Carl has cross-industry and cross-geography experience and has served as an advisor and line executive across many organisations. Carl has served clients as an advisor in cross-border policing, global energy, global financial services, global hi-tech, global law, global logistics, global media, global pharmaceutical, UK financial services, UK retail, UK services, and UK Government, including the Cabinet Office, Home Office and UK Criminal Justice System. A British Computer Society Fellow, formerly Chair of the BCS Futures Group, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Capgemini UK & Ireland and Head of its Technology Consulting Group, Carl has a track-record in helping organisations address long-standing issues and embrace new opportunities. Carl is co-author of ‘Lost in Translation – a handbook for information systems in the 21st century’. Published in 2007, it is a best-selling management book about 5 words which describe how organisations behave in the connected world, and which help ‘business’ and ‘IT’ speak a common language. This Systems thinking framework, VPEC-T, is being adopted as a way to aid analysis of complex business and societal situations – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPEC-T Carl is a guest speaker on the Boston University MBA Programme for CIOs.

The Next Norm?

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April 29th, 2010 Tags: , , ,
Posted in Connected World, Innovation, Technology, The Changing Customer, The Future!

We have heard much over the past months about the New Norm. How living in a highly connected world is having a major impact on the way people behave. People have been empowered and this has changed both our social lives and the way we do business.

So what’s next? Where do we go from here? What is the “Next Norm” and what can we expect from it?

The Internet of Things

Over the next few years expect to see even more use of the words “smart”, “pervasive”, “semantics”, “context aware” and “connected” as the “Next Norm” emerges from its shell.

The “Internet of things” describes the “Next Norm” perfectly. It is a world of pervasive networked computing where things are joined up over a vast network – the Internet – and many of those things have computing capability (smartness) and/or awareness of their context (e.g. location, temperature, time, …). Things might be physical objects or equally they might be virtual.

They could be mobile devices, household appliances, vehicles parts, or in fact anything you can touch or hold, or software such as online avatars, software agents. Cars, fridges, TVs, machinery, plant, food packaging, wallpaper, clothing, buildings … you try and think of something that isn’t a potential thing. A thing could also be a software agent, or a virtual real thing (or even person) – your online persona could be a thing.

Things will simply become nodes within a massively networked smarter world. Every thing being uniquely identifiable, with RFID tags likely to be commonly used for identifying physical things.

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Trust in Motion

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September 25th, 2009 Tags: ,
Posted in Collaboration, Connected World, Innovation, IT Leadership, The Future!

Trust has been a word used quite a lot recently. First we had the lack of trust in the global financial system. Now in the UK we have a lack of trust in politicians and their expenses. Stephen M. R. Covey has recently written an excellent book all about it called ‘The Speed of Trust – the one thing that changes everything’.

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The Story of the 2 Boys

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July 29th, 2009 Tags: ,
Posted in Collaboration, Connected World, Enterprise, Government, IT Leadership, The Changing Customer

In the scientific world, it is well known that light can act both as a wave (like waves in a pond) and as a particle (like a thrown rock). The ‘Double-slit’ experiment in physics shows this mystery. Richard Feynman, a famous American physicist, apparently quoted in his lectures: “We choose to examine this phenomenon which is impossible to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains the only mystery.”

In business and government, the classical ways of management, policy and politics – ways which were developed and matured before the world was connected through information – seem to be of limited use to help leaders in the post-connected world. People often say that the ‘post-connected world’ – the shift we are experiencing in business and society as a result of the Web – is being led by individuals, as opposed to by corporates or government. Individuals are collaborating en masse – doing business, changing politics, connecting with friends and family.

But the foundational aspects of ‘led by the individual’ and ‘mass collaboration’ can often pass one by – specifically what this means for established organisations of business and government. One of the most interesting stories to highlight what ‘led by people’ means, and to highlight some of the considerations for established organisations, comes courtesy of Frank Smilda of the Netherlands police.

This is ‘The Story of the 2 Boys’, and in a way like the experiment with the Double-slits, it has in it the heart of what mass-collaboration means….

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In Security We Trust…

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July 17th, 2009 Tags: , , ,
Posted in Government, Health, IT Leadership, Transport, Working in IT

Transport for London has recently started a trial to help sooth passengers as we cram together on the tube and try and remain terribly British about everything on our way to work each day. Tube drivers are quoting the words of Gandhi, Einstein, Jean Paul Sartre and other great thinkers to help introduce some humour to the ups and downs of travelling on the tube.

Last week I had the good fortune to experience the test, and, as well as a pretty decent a cappella rendition of ‘Bring me Sunshine’ – which got the giggles going even with the most stoic in our carriage – we were also treated to the story of underground’s first escalator. This was installed at Earl’s Court and went operational in October 1911.

However, there was public fear and resistance to this new way of getting up and down, and so to show passengers how safe and easy the new escalators were, the clerk of works for the installation, ‘Bumper’ Harris, was employed to ride the escalator up and down each day to encourage people to use it. ‘Bumper’ had a wooden leg – with the idea being to show just how easy the escalator was to get on and off. Nevertheless, many passengers remained sceptical, believing they in fact knew how Bumper had got the wooden leg in the first place! On the other hand, the newspapers reported that some passengers were breaking their journey at Earl’s Court just to ride the escalator.

Nearly 100 years on, the fundamentals in bringing change about in any business or societal system remains pretty much the same.

And it was with high interest that Times recently reported that under a new Conservative government, Google or Microsoft could hold NHS patient data. The thinking is that that Patients will be given the option of moving their medical notes to private companies after the Conservatives said that they would replace “Labour’s centrally determined and unresponsive national IT system”. Predictably, this has raised issues of privacy and security, with MPs and health professionals warning it could hamper doctors’ ability to access medical records quickly in an emergency.

Big ‘P’ politics aside,
the political, emotional and rational battleground has been drawn for some time on the use of external services over the Web to provide reliable and secure services for mainstream public sector delivery. For the IT industry and specifically its security profession, the cloud and the Software as a Service debate thunders on.

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The next level of innovation is human

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June 19th, 2009 Tags: , ,
Posted in Collaboration, Innovation, IT Leadership, The Future!, Working in IT

Making that next leap in innovation is more psychologist than technologist

It is said that Einstein’s genius lay in asking the questions that no-one had either thought – or dared – to ask before. His two breakthrough questions were apparently: ‘I wonder what things look like when travelling on the end of a beam of light?’, and ‘I wonder how gravity works when I jump up while travelling in a descending lift?’.

Interesting questions are not just the preserve of scientists of course – Henry Ford famously said ‘if I’d have asked my customers what they want, they’d have said they wanted a faster horse’.

It is well known that it’s often finding the new question that drives innovation in business and genuine reform in government, not seeking new solutions to existing questions. Some of today’s biggest brand names address questions which hadn’t been asked before – like ‘how do we get a PC in every home’? and ‘how do we organise the world’s information?’

The natural language of the new venture is to ask the new question. Mature organisations on the other hand face the innovators dilemma – the paradox of challenging the very question they have spent years addressing that has made the organisation successful to this point. It is this that often drives the mature business or established government to continually seek out new solutions to the same questions they have been grappling with for a long time, rather than to seek out new questions. Innovation becomes a solutions race, not a questions race. Yet the race often switches to the wrong track as the more solutions in a marketplace, the more saturated it gets, and the more it helps perpetuate the paradigm shift to new competition embracing new markets.

It’s not that solutions by themselves are the wrong things for management to find – rather, it’s a matter of balance of finding new solutions to the existing questions with seeking out the new questions….

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The Death of the IT Profession?

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May 11th, 2009 Tags: ,
Posted in Government, IT Leadership, The Future!, Working in IT

Last week, in my capacity as chair of its working group on IT futures, I had the privilege to participate in the British Computer Society’s thought leadership debate on ‘The death of the IT profession’ – the provocative title for a debate on the direction of IT professionalism.

This is a very timely debate of course. As information sharing becomes more central to the day to day of business and society, the professionalism of those providing the enabling products and services becomes more central too.

It was a productive evening, with 30 people or so in various leadership roles in the industry engaged in the debate. The evening was kicked off by Chris Yapp and Kate Silver, by providing a few minutes each on some serious thought provocation to get us going. And so with people sat at one of four tables the debate began. The fact that the food was good but hardly got a mention in edgeways is a good indicator of the level of intensity of debate that ensued.

One of the thought provoking inputs to the debate was, given the rise of the Web, are the IT professionals of the future going to be solely those that work for Google and the like, or, is everyone going to become an IT professional in some sense?

This debate is an important one not least because the usefulness and ubiquity of IT to each of us in our daily lives is being matched by the fall in the perception of the usefulness of the IT we have access to at work, and yet there remain many considerations in the corporate environment which require professional attention.

Or to put it simply, the IT we use at home seems better now than the IT we use at work – and it’s a heck of a lot cheaper.

Of course, the question isn’t helped by the wide definition of ‘IT professional’ and perhaps here is the central point. Chris Yapp provided a view that rather than a single IT profession, we are already seeing three professions emerging specialising around information, people, and software engineering. And David Flint, one of the table rapporteurs of the evening, to my mind summed up the feeling of the room neatly by articulating how many professions will contain a significant element of IT professionalism within them.

In embracing the issues, UK government is to be commended for its work here with its IT professionalism agenda – and Lesley Hume, recently appointed as Director of the Government IT Profession, was at the debate (and was a very significant contributor at our table!)

The consensus view is that the IT profession is evolving rapidly, and an executive remit to embrace the emergence head-on feels like a must do rather than a nice to have. And perhaps as a way to make a practical difference, organisations could do worse than take a leaf out of Cabinet Office’s book and create or boost a leadership role with responsibility specifically focused on IT professionalism – both on best practices and perhaps even more importantly, the next practices for the many ‘IT related’ professions.

This is for sure a lively debate, and expect to see it develop on the BCS Futures blog too.