Competition, collaboration and leadership

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Ewan McIntosh is blogging on collaboration at the moment and his words – and the discussions they’re catalysing – are well worth a read. I don’t intend to cover all the ground he is treading but I would like to pick up on one topic around which we exchanged comments: competition, collaboration and leadership. I want to raise it here because I think it brings to light a healthy debate about the role of competition and leadership in education. As an aside, it is also a great example of how to develop one’s thinking using a blog.

Ewan cites Morten Hansen’s book Collaboration (check out Morten’s new book ‘Great by Choice’ as well) and discusses one of the six ways (that Morten lists in his book) in which collaboration may fail, that is collaborating in a hostile environment. Ewan writes that schools exhibit many of the characteristics of the hostile environment and that this may explain why we see relatively little collaboration between schools and even less between teachers within schools. I pick up on his comments (using different colours to make it easier to follow):

Excerpt from blog by Ewan McIntosh: “Sony was a company that took pride in its decentralised specialist divisions, divisions whose pride led to them competing against each other. When five divisions were asked to collaborate to create a new music behemoth, Sony Connect, the result was disastrous.

The personal computer division based in Tokyo, the portable audio team behind the Walkman, the flash memory player team, Sony Music in the US and Sony Music back in Japan just couldn’t work together, so strong was their competition. The PC and Walkman groups released their own competing portable music players, and the Music and other electronics divisions of the company released three competing music download portals. The US group wanted to use flash memory and the MP3 format. The Japan group wanted to use minidisc and Sony’s proprietary ATRAC format for music downloads. By May 2004, a very disconnected Sony Connect finally launched and was taken apart by the media and users.

In the meantime, Apple innovated its narrow, well thought-through line of MP3 player products with no competition worth the name. Apple’s divisions had, through Steve Jobs and a culture of unity, collaborated on one perfect player. Sony’s interior competition had decimated any chance of creating one dream competitive product.

So, then, what does this mean for education? In a school there are many competitive units: individual teachers have, traditionally, been the kings or queens of their manor, the closed-door profession meaning that what happens in their classroom, good or bad, is their responsibility. The result can be a competitive one – “my kids”, “my class”, “my results”. Where teachers are recompensed on performance in any way, even in the form of feedback from superiors, this heightens the sense of competitiveness, making collaboration between teachers in a school impossible. The ingredients of competition – closed doors, one-teacher-one-class, rewards and praise for good performance – may have to be dismantled first, before collaboration can be encouraged.”

Comment by Phil Dawson: “I’d love to see hard evidence for the assertions put forward by Morten T. Hansen. They feel to me to be correlated with non-collaboration rather than causal. Competitive units cannot collaborate? I disagree and I think analysis of the nature of competition bears out my view.

The key psychological variable is goal alignment. Competition is social goal-oriented behaviour. Competitors become collaborators when both social and practical goals are aligned. For example, a competitive situation can be transformed into a collaborative one if individuals adopt a shared group affiliation (education rather than school) and perceive a shared opportunity for social gain (recognition or reputational enhancement) that is, at least, not in conflict with other group affiliations (the situation in Sony).

Through the BSF programme, I saw schools collaborate very effectively as they recognised their shared interests were served by behaving as a coherent group rather than individual schools. In fact, I think the removal of competitive elements is a mistake because I think, if focused appropriately, competition is also an engine of innovation and creativity. Successful businesses collaborate and compete in equal measure and I would say the same is true of schools. Effective leaders are, I think, a more important factor in establishing a healthy balance between competition and collaboration.”

Comment by Ewan McIntosh: “I think the notion of taking away competition is an interesting one, for which there is a LOT of evidence, particularly in the education of girls, whereas with boys competitive elements are often seen as helping progress.

Where (generally) men have not seen competition help is in the cockpit. This is why, when landing and taking off, it is often the copilot flying the plane while the pilot gets ready to comment. This became a rule of flying thumb after a terrible Air Mexico accident when the copilot was too nervous to fight with the hierarchy of the pilot – the competitive element inspired by a hierarchy led to the plane flying into the sea instead of the runway.

In Hansen’s book there are ample examples from the professional world and business world showing why competition, more often than not, destroys collaboration, but this is because the competition is INTERNAL. He argues that competition, to help collaboration thrive, needs to be directed outside the organisation: so a school staff uniting to get something (at the expense of another school getting it); a district of schools uniting (so that other districts get less); a country of districts collaborating (so that other countries or commercial organisations don’t realise the same gains).

Competition and collaboration are not mutually exclusive – but the competition needs to be directed OUTSIDE the organisation, and it is this competition, WITHIN the institution that will break collaborations. It’s also this kind of competition, I’d argue, that we see most often inside schools and inside districts.”

Ewan McIntosh update to blog: “Competition within an institution breaks collaboration. But competition and collaboration are not mutually exclusive. If a leader can unite an organisation in collaboration and turn competitiveness to the outside, then the collaboration will work very well – think: football teams, corporations, or a country of school districts uniting to realise the benefits of scale that come from a nationwide online learning community, rather than letting commercial organisations pick up the financial benefits by uniting to pick off 32 Local Authorities at once.)”

Comment by Phil Dawson: “I agree that the issue identified in the cockpit of planes (first I think with North Korean airline pilots who are almost always ex-military) is about hierarchy (status). Although the purpose of having two pilots in the cockpit is to provide a cross-checking and therefore resilient environment, North Korean co-pilots would not challenge their captains because their military training and culture placed very high value on the chain of command (for general review of cockpit dynamics see: Status and Cockpit Dynamics: A Review and Empirical Study 1998, by Milanovich, Driskell, Stout & Salas). As a consequence, captains became the single point of failure and the airline had a poor safety record. However, this was not manifested as competitive pressure in the cockpit; quite the reverse: it manifested as dominant/submissive behaviour.All people (both sexes) are socially hierarchical but the manifestation of this behaviour may be different in boys and girls. Hierarchy and competition are discrete but linked concepts in psychology, both of which, if undirected, may lead to conflict.

My point is that the boundary between outside and inside is not definitive. It is relative and fluid and may be manipulated. Hansen’s examples (picked to make his point I think) are – in my opinion – the consequence of poor management, culture and leadership, not an inherent incompatibility between internal competition and collaboration.”

Comment by Peter Hirst: “Enjoying this series so far Ewan. Thought I’d link you to an article that intrigued me and certainly got a lot of comments in the US. The main basis is that by removing competition in Finnish schools collaboration thrives and they succeed – there’s no private schools, no school league tables, no performance pay and no standardised tests…”

Ewan McIntosh update to blog: “It is no surprise, therefore, that international collaborations of the kind that eTwinning encourages might work better for teachers and schools than collaborating closer to home, but the question that now remains, is collaborating for what? If there’s nothing to be lost through competition, there is also, perhaps, a perception that there is nothing to be gained. Cue: collaboration for collaboration’s sake.”

Comment by Phil Dawson: “I strongly recommend reading Pasi Sahlberg’s book, Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? By coincidence I mentioned it on Twitter only last week. Having read it, I think the key point Sahlberg makes is that Finland’s education system is successful because it it is uniquely egalitarian and every young person believes she or he will be treated equally and fairly. It creates a healthy meritocracy. I’d venture to suggest though that this does not mean there’s no competition; just that the playing field is a level one and that the competition does not manifest itself in a culture of failure. Healthy competition is when one’s reaction to others’ success is to be inspired.”

OK, so that’s where we’ve got to so far… I would just sum up by saying I often ‘discuss’ by adopting a standpoint that is (slightly) more extreme than my actual view. I find it helpful to test how far an opinion might be stretched before it breaks. In this case, the key points that I’m continuing to think about are the role of good leadership in creating a balanced culture of collaboration and competition, both inside and outside an organisation.

I’m also interested in how competition can be a positive and creative force, rather than a destructive one. I think that there is wariness in education of the concept of competition that arises from the assumption that it is about winners and losers rather than finding creative solutions to problems. Once again, I believe leaders have an important role in steering the culture of their organisations to be about healthy and inspiring competition.

UPDATE: Check out this video by Rachel Botsman on ‘Collaborative Consumption’. She has a really progressive view on web-enabled collaboration per the likes of airbnb.com and rabbit.com. The collaboration is a product of both the material value and the social capital it builds. Trust is a vital part of collaboration because it means we understand and accept that the group’s goals are aligned. Reputation is a primer for trusting relationships and therefore for collaboration.

Gove on ICT

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I’ve just read a great blog post from Josie Frasier called ‘Computer Science is not Digital Literacy’. I completely agree with her sentiments when she says: “I’m a huge fan of the current wave of enthusiasm and political will to transform the way that ICT is delivered in schools.” She also name checks Code Academy and Coding for Kids, suggesting you check out the #codingfokidrs hash tag on Twitter for related links, discussion and resources. I repeat them here because I agree! However, I also agree with her that Gove’s speech at BETT 2012 crashed together some terminology and ideas that are best differentiated.In the comments on Josie’s blog I can see some disagreement on how to define Digital Literacy and Computer Science, particularly whether having a grasp of Computer Science is necessary to be proficiently digitally literate. Personally I see the distinction as quite clear. Computer Science is a subject area and Digital Literacy is a skill-set that could be deployed across all subjects. Naturally there may be some Computer Science in Digital Literacy (and visa versa) just as there is Maths in Computer Science. The key point is that Computer Science is a discrete subject area in which skills such as logic and coding may be learned. The thrust of Gove’s argument is that the IT industry needs the skills and knowledge represented by the qualification in Computer Science.

In Gove’s speech, the current ICT curriculum is targeted as the root cause of the lack of relevant computer skills in young people and for being “dull”. I would remind everyone that a curriculum is a framework and that the ICT curriculum isn’t dull, the teaching of it is (or too often is).

Digital literacy is a set of competencies and knowledge that all young people should be taught for application across all subjects, much as literacy and numeracy. See Josie’s blog entry for a more in depth exploration. However my key point is that the current ICT curriculum does nothing to inhibit the teaching of Digital Literacy (nor indeed does it specifically encourage it). Neither does the ICT curriculum prohibit the teaching of Computer Science material.

In my opinion, if Digital Literacy and/or Computer Science material are not taught, either as discrete subjects or part of another (Maths or ICT, for example), this is a function of education leaders, teachers and exams, not the ICT curriculum per se. Unfortunately teachers are not, in general, well prepared. Out of 28,000 teachers who qualified in 2010, just 3 had a computer-related degree. In my opinion, the deeper issue here is threefold:

1. Leaders who accept a “lock and block attitude” to the digital age
2. An exam system that tests knowledge and skills that lack relevance in the current digital age
3. Teachers that lack the mandate and the skills to fully embrace the digital age

Whilst I welcome the initiatives that Gove has outlined in his speech in the spirit in which they’re intended, I think that they risk casting adrift, in a large ocean, many leaders, teachers and schools who were already adrift and lost in a pond.

The reason that so many schools turn out pupils inadequately prepared for the IT industry and the digital age is that they use the ICT curriculum as a lifeboat, clinging to it for dear life and keeping the water of the digital age as far away as possible. Taking away the lifeboat and ‘asking’ them to sink or swim… Well, I can almost feel the sharks circling.

Beyond eSafety

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While exploring yesterday, I discovered a blog entry about what is generally termed eSafety, a subject I’ve been meaning to blog about. The editorial slant was not victim-oriented, but rather led with the potentially undesirable consequences of using the Internet in terms of privacy. In particular, it referenced MMS sexting by minors and the potential longevity of the personal consequences. The phrase that caught my attention was “permanent and public”. That is, everything and anything that one puts out into the aether (mobile or Net) may be, or become, permanent and public. For me, the key challenge is – if you’ll excuse the semantics – not so much eSafety as eSense; that is, an understanding of how to use technology in such a way as to avoid undesirable consequences, most of which have little to do with safety in the traditionally understood sense of the word.This is a subject that interests me because I believe that technology has a central role to play in facilitating learning and that means introducing young people to technology in an authentic but responsible manner. For simplicity, we can talk about three broad stages: primary (to age 11), secondary (11 to 18) and tertiary (18+). These stages broadly align with the same categories in the UK school system. I think there’s justifiable clarity about a zero tolerance approach to inappropriate content and contact in the primary stage. Equally, I think it’s clear that individuals over the age of eighteen take full responsibility for their actions.

The challenging category is the secondary stage as it represents the transition from child to adult with the associated dynamic boundaries and, inevitably, conflicting views. It is the stage during which schools are, at least in part, responsible for ensuring there’s a managed transition from complete technology regulation to free choice. At least it should be, but actually I think in many cases schools abrogate their responsibility by adopting a default position of full regulation, usually by blocking access to personal devices and undesirable Internet sites. A common refrain from frustrated students is that their technology experience outside of school is far richer than in school. This is a deplorable position but one which schools may justify using three broad categories of argumentation:

1. Legal – regulation justified by schools’ legal obligations
2. Protection – regulation justified by concern for general well-being
3. Education – regulation of technology justified by distraction

In my opinion, full regulation during this transitional period is unjustifiable, both in a purist educational sense, and in terms of schools’ more general social responsibilities. With regard to the former, schools must prepare young people for a digital world through engagement with the full Internet experience and all that it brings. This means a 21st Century digital curriculum that embraces technology and the experiences it facilitates across all subjects and stages. With regard to the latter, young people must be allowed to learn how to self-regulate their behaviour in the digital world as they would in any other environment.

There are two fundamental reasons I believe schools have, in the main, adopted an undifferentiated approach to the regulation of technology. One is that they do not understand the risks and fear the worst, for example a parent backlash, potential legal implications and/or adverse publicity. The second is that they do not think they can manage the undesirable behaviours such as texting while the teacher is speaking. It is simply easier to impose a blanket ban on mobile phones and all undesirable Internet sites and avoid a whole range of undesirable behaviours altogether. Of course, in so doing they also vastly diminish the educational experience of technology and the opportunities for learned self-regulation. My antidote to this approach begins by redefining the challenge as follows:

1. eLegality: ensuring the school organisation operates within the law
2. eSafety: ensuring young people understand how they might be harmed
3. eSense: ensuring young people learn how to use technology positively

The reason for the obsessive semantics is that this differentiation demands a strategic differentiation rather than a homogeneous approach. The protocol that describes a school’s response to eLegality issues such as data protection, freedom of speech, privacy, plagiarism and copyright is unambiguous. A breach of these protocols by any member of a school, staff and students alike, would carry appropriate consequences.

The eSafety protocol would reflect the more generally understood meaning of the word as intended by such organisations as the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre. It is focused on preventing young people from placing themselves in potentially harmful situations or indeed causing harm to others through their actions, for example by cyber-bullying. The key word in this context is “harm”. There is a process of education involved in recognising potentially harmful situations but it is quite clear-cut and well suited to being addressed through a protocol or code and delivered as a discrete eSafety module.

This leaves eSense as the purer educational strand of the three. I define eSense as learning how to make good judgements about the use of technology, fully cognisant of the consequences of one’s actions. In other words, the pursuit of self-regulation. It’s a set of skills that takes time to learn and although may be summarised in a protocol, is actually the substance of a 21st Century digital curriculum that is threaded through all subjects and stages. It also embraces a more values-oriented element in terms of acceptable behaviour. For example, young people generally know it’s not OK to text while the teacher is talking but the broader principle is: we demonstrate respect for educators by giving them our full attention when they request it. It doesn’t matter whether the distraction was a mobile phone or a magazine, it was a breach of a core organisational value.

An important consequence of a more granular and differentiated approach is that risks and consequences are more clearly defined and placed in perspective. There is risk in every action and it is the responsibility of leaders to put in place protection proportionate to the risk. I take the safety of young people very seriously, especially as a parent of a 14 year old daughter. However, I also know that the statistical risk of her coming to harm as a result of her behaviour online is a fraction of the risk I allow her to take when she rides her bicycle on the road. As a parent I must balance the risk with the rewards. This is the very same judgement education leaders must make and, in my view, a lack of understanding is leading to a significant over-reaction to the potential risk, the consequence of which diminishes the educational experience.

In developing differentiated, granular and clear protocols, schools support learned self-regulation, thereby managing the transition through the secondary stage in a constructive and progressive manner. Understanding the nature of the digital environment through feedback of this sort is also more likely to lead to the generalisation of appropriate behaviour beyond the school gates in partnership with parents. For example, part of eSense is the recognition that the fingerprint we create in the digital world through our behaviour is very persistent. Ask Eric Schmidt about his Google fingerprint! Even he couldn’t get Google to erase his tracks. “Public and permanent”.

In order to be successful, the learned self-regulation approach needs two key ingredients:

1. A system to monitor behaviour
2. Consistent consequences for inappropriate behaviour

N.B. The positive reinforcement is unregulated access to a rich digital experience

Well, seeing as we’re talking about technology, you won’t be surprised to learn that there’re a variety of audit systems available which can record both Internet and local network activity down to individual users and devices. These systems often integrate a rules-based alerting system that will ensure there is timely feedback of inappropriate behaviour. Most young people quickly learn to modify their behaviour through consistent and rational feedback. As with most systems of this type, there is an initial investment of time to re-set expectations, but the reward is well worth the investment.

So rather than ban the technology, why not embrace it using learned self-regulation as the core approach?Take the opportunity to thread an eSense strand through your existing curriculum, focusing on using technology to enrich and extend the entire learning experience. Use this as the basis for creating a 21st Century digital curriculum.

Leading technology

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We have a lodger staying at the moment – a primary school teacher. While chatting I discovered that the laptop she was using was a school-supplied unit from the Laptops for Teachers (LfT) initiative, a programme kicked off by the DfES and Becta in 2002. “Of course I can’t do anything useful with it,” she said. “Huh?” I replied (in my usual articulate fashion). “They don’t like me to put any of my own stuff on it.” I’ll admit this floored me. One of two things was possible:

a)  Working on national projects with aspirations at the cutting interface of education and technology has unhitched me from the reality of technology in schools at the coalface, or
b)  My lodger’s school is at the end of a, no doubt, long, trailing technology tail.

I think it’s probably a bit of both. I won’t go into the conversation that ensued, but it became clear to me that the technology in her school was being managed, not to enhance learning and teaching, but to minimise technical issues. Even now, it seems this is far too common.

I’ve been very lucky in my career so far to have visited many hundreds of education organisations. I’ve engaged with all manner of staff from leaders to technicians. What’s become clear to me over time – and please accept that this is a generalisation to which there are notable exceptions – is that the majority of education leaders built their education experience in a pre-digital age. They are not digital natives and regard technology as something between an expensive distraction and an interesting diversion. They don’t intuitively ‘get’ technology and they certainly don’t trust it to make a significant difference to learning outcomes or life chances. Their perception is that budget allocated to ICT is displacing spend on things they do understand, like teachers, and this is uncomfortable and so unwelcome. Furthermore, technology is evolving rapidly and so the knowledge they do have is constantly challenged and there’s relentless pressure on them to refresh their investment in terms of stuff and skills.

As a general rule, leaders are not very good at being out of control and I think technology is one of those areas where many leaders feel exactly that. I’ve met many heads who’ve been proud to tell me they don’t even own a computer, yet their organisation’s raison d’être is to prepare young people for a digital age. It’s also not uncommon to see a head wielding his or her iPad as evidence of a progressive attitude to ICT while their school languishes in the middle ground of technology adoption. It is one thing to be a user of technology and appreciate its merits, but quite another to develop and drive an ICT strategy for an organisation.

So technology is often perceived by leaders as a threat rather than a valuable ally in achieving successful outcomes. The usual responses to a threat are either to marginalise it or dominate it. Given that the former is becoming more and more difficult in a digital age, the latter is the usual course of action. The most common way of dominating technology is to regulate it into submission by creating ring-fenced, in-house control structures, both curricular and technical.

An internal structure is far less likely to expose or challenge than an external one. Better the devil you know. The technology manager in a secondary school usually becomes the trusted source of technical advice, despite the fact that he/she is probably under-qualified to be making learning-focused, strategic decisions about technology adoption. Yes, I know there may be another member of the SMT with the  portfolio for technology, but I’m as wary of technology enthusiasts as I am of Luddites. I can count with the fingers of one hand the number of technology leaders I’ve met in schools who have any significant professional technology experience outside of their school. They usually mean well but lack perspective.

My contention is that in-house technology management is almost always inefficient and a distraction from the core organisational mission. In my opinion, the necessity for an ICT department has become a self-perpetuating myth in most schools and colleges. To change would involve asking the turkeys to vote for Christmas. This is of course why leaders need to get to grips with technology and lead their organisations from the front, not by becoming experts, but by taking expert advice.

To be clear, this is not a gratuitous critique of education leaders. The reason for making these observations is to shed light on the current state of technology in education organisations. In general, we see a very conservative landscape, with significant tracts of technology experience out of bounds for learners, let alone staff. We see tragic waste through under-utilisation of technology assets. We see technology managed to reduce support rather than to enhance learning and teaching. We see inefficient procurement. Mobile phones are a threat. Social networking is a threat. Parental access to school data is a threat. Data is a threat!

I see the proliferation of Interactive Whiteboards as a symptom of this malaise. It is a comfortable choice of technology because they simply perpetuate the same didactic techniques as before but delivered with elevated anxiety. Do they improve learning outcomes? Where is the evidence? Yet the idea of engaging young people through their mobile phones in social learning is almost non-existent in schools. Did you know that 1 in every 5 minutes of Internet time was spent using Facebook in 2011? Where does the opportunity really lie?

My intention over the coming few weeks is to challenge the status quo and blog about how technology in schools can be different and better while costing less. I want to engage education leaders in a dialogue that’s about relinquishing technology control and focusing all their effort on their organisations’ core mission. The trend is already well underway in business, with many SMEs letting their CIOs go and outsourcing their ICT. They see they get better advice, better value, a more agile organisation and better outcomes. I think the education sector is ripe for a revolution and I’m delighted to be one of those waving a red flag.

2012 and beyond (part 5)

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I know, I know, this flurry of blogging activity is more than you can keep up with. Don’t worry, it’ll ease off in the New Year. I blame Techmarketview for running their 2012 predictions in five parts. This is the fifth and final part of their series in which John O’Brien does business process services (BPS). You know the routine by now: my edu-speak comments in blue… 1. ‘BPS’ term will become mainstream – The term ‘business process services’ (BPS) will replace the outdated acronym ‘BPO’, very much associated with old era ‘lift and shift’ and delivering ‘your mess for less’. ‘BPS’ in our view, is BPO coming of age, using technology as an enabler, to help drive business process change, and delivering measurable service outcomes back to the customer.

In K12 education, the traditional provider of most business process services has been the Local Authority. The current economic pressure on the public purse combined with acceleration in the number of schools breaking free of the Authority by converting to Academies, means some Local Authorities are losing their advantage of scale. The creation of Free Schools is relevant because, as new schools, they usually have to scale slowly to full capacity and therefore need services to scale with them. It is also a general truth that LAs are often less competitive and agile than they’d have us believe. The consequence for schools is that they’re having to take decisions about how they procure services more efficiently and they’re trying to work out who the successors to Authorities will be. I think we will see a small but perfectly formed proliferation of education-specific BPS providers in 2012 and beyond.

2. Market leaders will cede share – Newer and more agile platform-based BPS players will see their market shares grow. Indian tier ones will continue to gain momentum through new platform innovations, and specialists such as Diligenta and The Innovation Group (TIG) in hot areas such as life and pensions and general insurance will gain further market share. However we expect a fight back by the ‘old guard’ as they embrace M&A in both vertical and platform capability, and flex their muscles on new business and renewals. 

The large BPS providers like Capita and Northgate already have a strong foothold in education but their current offerings are products of a previous world that is rapidly slipping away. Their lack of agility may well leave room for other education-specific BPS offerings to proliferate in 2012 and beyond, delivering value into areas such as Management Information Systems, HR, payroll, Learning Support and CPD. 

3. ‘Unusual suspects’ will disrupt the market – The construction sector is now looking to partner or acquire support service and BPS capability for ‘bundled’ BPS deals, notably in local government and the broader public sector. Costain and Interserve made moves on Mouchel during 2011, although in the end pulled out after spotting ‘something under the covers’. Nonetheless, there are plenty of other partner or M&A opportunities, so we expect one of these ‘unusual suspects’ to make their first big move in 2012. 

In education, the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme was instrumental in forcing those Authorities and schools who were involved to look at the lifecycle costs of running schools. Towards the end of the programme, we saw the ‘Facilities Management’ and ICT offerings broadening their scope to include BPS as a way of driving down the overall lifecycle cost of schools. Once again, this is all about scale. The Local Education Partnerships (LEPs) created through the BSF programme were supposed to act as points of aggregation to generate the scale required for more effective procurement of a range of services. The termination of the BSF programme put paid to that ambition. In the ensuing vacuum, there is yet to emerge a clear pattern of aggregation and this will act as a brake on the adoption of BPS. 

4. ‘Big will eat small’ – The big players will look to buy up platform-based BPS rivals as they attempt to close the gap. Insurance specialist TIG, and HR and public sector player Northgate will find themselves subject to M&A approaches. Weak players are also likely to be approached, albeit at far lower valuations. Embattled Mouchel for instance, is likely to sell off larger, more attractive chunks of its business in 2012 in an effort to stay afloat. 

I refer my esteemed reader to (2). Ever has it been thus that big players look to absorb the small in an effort to stabilise their borders. In the education space, I think the players are still feeling their way and so it will be a while before a clear map for BPS in education emerges. After a generation of labour education policies, the upheaval in the political landscape has brought an equivalent upheaval in education. Nevertheless the ‘more for less’ mantra will drive activity. 

5. Perfect storm of disruption – These trends will create a perfect storm of disruption for the UK BPS market in 2012. The risks to large BPS incumbents like Capita, Xchanging and Serco will only increase as a result, making new business wins and retaining client relationships at renewal a far tougher prospect. ‘Staying relevant’ amidst all of this change has to be the number one priority in 2012.

I think I’m in danger of trying to say the same thing in a slightly different way if I give this prediction an education context. Perhaps I’ll just summarise by saying there’s everything to play for. There’s political disruption, economic disruption and, if the 2011 UK riots are anything to go by, social disruption. Against this backdrop, schools are trying to work out how to do the best by their young people. But they’re not business specialists and learning and teaching should be their central focus. Even though the adoption of BPS makes real sense for schools, it will no doubt take both schools and the market some time to work out how to make it work.

2012 and beyond (part 4)

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Here we go again with my edu-speak interpretation of the next  flock of predictions from Techmarketview. Flock? What is the collective noun for predictions? I checked here but it’s not yet listed although I did like “an annoyance of mobile phones.” Perhaps I could propose “an inaccuracy of predictions.” Anyway, I digress. This time Phil Codling picks out the headlines for the UK infrastructure services market. My comments in blue…1. Cloud-based infrastructure services will grow at double digit rates – But where cloud is replacing an existing service, it’s a more-for-less substitution that is shrinking the overall market. 2012 is another year of clients putting costs first.

Cloud is a paradigm shift in technology that represents a partial displacement of existing spend. The effect of cloud is to improve utilisation and efficiency while driving down management overheads. Sometimes though, on-premise is the right answer. Optimising the blend of off and on-premise infrastructure will be the evolutionary trend of 2012 and beyond. A consequence of moving off-premise is an increasing requirement for high quality bandwidth. Taken in the round, we may be seeing a redistribution of budget spend rather than an absolute decrease in 2012 but as scale bites, the overall cost-base should be driven down leading to lower prices. What is clear is that the economic climate is helping to drive the speed of transition to cloud services in business and this trend is beginning to emerge in the education sector too. Technology delivery in education, particularly in K12 is often highly inefficient with inadequate local technical support. Cloud infrastructure and services offer schools a real chance to shift their focus away from managing technology to managing learning while at the same time reducing IT budget, if not immediately, then certainly over time. Bring it on!

2. Public cloud won’t make it to the mainstream – Private cloud remains the preferred option in 2012. Small businesses and niche/non-critical applications provide the exceptions to this rule.

A public cloud is one in which a service provider makes resources such as storage and applications, available to the general public over the Internet. The term ‘public cloud’ arose to differentiate between this standard model and the private cloud, which is a proprietary network or data centre that uses cloud computing technologies, such as virtualisation. A private cloud is managed by the organisation it serves. A blended model, the hybrid cloud, is a combination of cloud services managed by both internal and external providers. In fact it is this latter category that will, I think, emerge as relevant to education in 2012 and beyond. Scale is all important here and clearly it is SMEs and education-equivalent organisations that benefit from public clouds because private isn’t really an option. However, larger educational aggregations such as the Regional Broadband Consortia (for example SWGfL) do provide the scale for private clouds. Thus education organisations will probably find themselves in a blended environment.

3. Bring Your Own Technology becomes a market opportunity – Forward-thinking players will seize the chance to help CIOs turn BYOT [Bring Your Own Technology] into a positive for their organisation. Meanwhile the technology in question will include a major new entrant, as Amazon “Fires up” competition in the tablet space.

I’ve already blogged on BYOT and I make no secret of the fact that I believe education is ripe for this trend. The benefits of personally owned tech, for the organisation and the individual, are numerous and profound. Addressing the issue of equal access in education is the challenge. The mention of the Amazon Fire tablet does however give me an opportunity to evangelise about a parallel trend that I think is just around the corner: eTextbooks. Having a 14 year old daughter as I do, I know how many textbooks she lugs around the place. Not only that, but her teenage brain is adept at forgetting most things, including textbooks, at crucial moments, such as the day before an exam. One of the huge benefits of personally owned technology would be anywhere, anytime access to eTextbooks. I find it astounding that it has not taken off. Not only would eTextbooks offer a better quality of experience including multimedia assets and links to extended or remedial resources, but they would be available whenever and wherever a learner required them. It would be possible for teachers and learners to annotate them and otherwise add value. As electronic documents they could also be subject to the range of social tools, such as reviews and rating. Imagine as well being able to measure how a young person used their textbook. That data would be extremely valuable in identifying patterns and trends for understanding learning and timely interventions. The list goes on and on. Yet it hasn’t happened. Perhaps 2012 is the year…

There were a couple of other predictions too but they were very tech-infrastructure-sector-specific and I couldn’t see how I could add any edu-value. So there you have it for this instalment.

2012 and beyond (part 3)

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“With a yo ho ho and a bottle of rum I bring you…” No, wait… I mean “Yo ho ho. Merrrrrry Christmas!” Yep, it’s almost here and Santa (minus the rum, honest) has another sacklet of goodies for you. This is part three of my ‘education-speak’ version of Techmarketview‘s 2012 predictions. My comments in blue. Enjoy!

1.  More SaaS vendors will lose money – Lack of consistent profitability is a telling sign that the commercial aspect of SaaS [Software as a Service] has not been mastered by SaaS pure plays. Higher prices and better cost control are one approach to addressing the problem but few will get the opportunity because acquisition activity will ramp up in 2012..

To make sense of this prediction, I think it’d be handy to understand what exactly “pure play SaaS” is. Helpfully, the September 12th 2008 Gartner report, “Market Trends: Software as a Service, Worldwide, 2007-2012,” states: “Gartner defines SaaS as software that is owned, delivered and managed remotely by one or more providers. The provider delivers an application based on a single set of common code and data definitions, which are consumed in a one-to-many model by all contracted customers anytime on a pay-for-use basis, or as a subscription based on use metrics.” Vendors that strictly adhere to this definition, and whose software is only available by SaaS, are often referred to as ‘pure plays’.

For some organisations, SaaS is the right answer. For example, if the organisation does not have sufficient capital budget to make the initial investment for an on-premise solution then a predictable monthly cost and payment out of a revenue budget might be attractive. Also, if the organisation does not have in-house technical expertise, a SaaS deployment managed remotely by the vendor might be the best option. Sound familiar? If you’re in education you’ll recognise these constraints. But what about the downside? Well, it is not necessarily cheap and it’s difficult (or impossible) to integrate with other systems. The May 29th 2009 Gartner report, “Dataquest Insight: SaaS Adoption Trends in the U.S. and U.K.” pointed out these issues with the top two barriers to purchase being high cost of services (42% of respondents) and difficulty with integration (38% of respondents).

With these points in mind, I think the SaaS vendors, and indeed the markets, are still working out where it really delivers value and 2012 will inevitably bring a distillation of vendors. As we know, education and particularly K12, suffer from the twin challenges of limited on-premise technical support and tight capital budgets. For this reason, I think there is a significant and largely untapped market in that sector. As is often the case, education is a little behind the curve in technology adoption. I would predict that through 2012 and beyond, schools in particular will begin to recognise the value in SaaS and that Management Information Systems will be a particular target. 

2. Social platforms will challenge enterprise platforms – Relentless pressure from employees and customers will ensure enterprises get the social and collaboration bug despite the negative pull of rigid and hierarchical organisational structures and traditional software.

It’s hard to argue with the mind-boggling adoption metrics of Facebook and Twitter, let alone fly in the face of millions of years of evolution. Homo sapiens is a social species. Who’d have guessed, eh? OK, so it’s easy to be wise after the event, but I think social platforms are leading the charge towards the general socialisation of software rather than displacing enterprise platforms as such. That is to say, pure play social (yep, even I’m doing it now) platforms offer the full social experience (like going to a Christmas party) whereas I think we will see the evolution of social features in enterprise software (like facilitating corridor meetings). Social features such as rating, reward, reputation etc will be integrated into enterprise platforms and converge the social with productivity, leveraging the benefits that we already know and love in the physical work place. For education, the convergence will be ‘social’ and ‘learning’ and here I believe there’s massive as yet untapped potential. Young people are exceptionally good at ‘social’ and harnessing this to support learning is going to be transformational. Which makes it all the more amazing that social platforms are usually non grata in schools. 

3. MEAPs will prove more ‘mobile’ than incumbents – Software suppliers will not have the mobile opportunity to themselves. They will be challenged by nimble Mobile Enterprise Application Providers (MEAPs) looking to claim a portion of the revenue software suppliers are eyeing up to help maintain growth.

Just one word: Darwinism. In a previous blog entry (Open or closed) I explored the role of natural selection in the technology ecosystem so I will not labour the points here. Suffice to say, the barriers for entry to development on mobile platforms are relatively low and so this market is wide open to massive competition. Massive competition generates rapid evolution (innovation) and so will continue to put pressure on even the big players, in some cases rendering them irrelevant because they simply take too long to bring their products to market. Small is beautiful (and mobile).

4. Big Data will move from hype to reality – Large data volumes are a fact, unstructured (and structured) data is a fact. They have to be managed and interrogated and this real need will convert hype to reality in a shorter period of time than is usual.

I’ve been listening to (thanks again Audible) ‘In The Plex’ by Steven Levy. This is the story of Googol (doh, my spelling is dreadful). And my memory… Where was I? Oh yes, so Google basically knows everything and I no longer need a memory. Well not quite everything, but you know what I mean. They know enough to be scary. One of the elements of Google I hadn’t appreciated was the centrality of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to their vision. The reason the dynamic duo of Page and Brin were so excited by large datasets is that massive amounts of data were required to enable their machines to learn meaningful things. And it’s still the case. Their view is: “If it moves, measure it.” And then they work out how to use the data. Clearly it works for them. We’re definitely in the age of ‘Big Data’ but the key will be how to convert that data into information, and that information into knowledge. Turning knowledge into wisdom may be a step too far although the idea of ‘Google Wisdom’ as our new deity is not entirely implausible.

From an education perspective, I’d say this is a largely untapped well. Culturally many education organisations find that data capture and analytics are too difficult. If you’re a parent of a child in school, you’ll certainly be aware that your child’s report is fairly one dimensional and more or less unchanged from your childhood. This is a massive missed opportunity and given that technology in schools is pretty ubiquitous, there are really exciting opportunities for capturing enormous amounts of data about learning pathways and using this data to understand what learning looks like, bringing incremental improvements in efficiency and effectiveness. I will probably blog on this specific subject in 2012, but meantime I think analytics is a significant trend to watch out for in education. 

5. Security will take centre stage – End-point security and data loss prevention will be hotbeds of activity as more businesses ramp up their use of the cloud and mobile platforms. It is not just data that is at stake, but reputations that once lost are hard to win back.

Data security and eSafety are significant concerns for education organisations too. Why? Because they hold potentially sensitive information about individuals and, for minors, they have a duty of care, acting in loco parentis. For this reason, issues of identity and security will continue to grow in importance through 2012 and beyond. Of the two issues, in education I think eSafety will be the greater concern.

While it’s easy to condemn schools for trying to control the experience of their young people while using technology, schools in particular are very vulnerable to accusations of carelessness and even negligence. As a consequence they over-compensate and ban platforms that might expose their young people to bullying, manipulation, grooming and so on. It is the reason why education so often tries to create walled gardens and why the issue of identity is particularly important for schools. Arguably this may indeed be appropriate in primary schools, but by the time young people reach secondary school, and indeed beyond, we should be supporting them to understand the risks and manage their own eSafety. The alternative – banning significant portions of the Internet experience – is ineffective (because they will usually access this experience outside of the school) and counter-productive for learning (because higher order skills required in the digital world need to be taught). Once again, this is a topic all on its own and I may come back to it in 2012.

Digital history

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I love it when technology does things better, not just differently (or sometimes less well).For the last decade or so I’ve been interested in family history. Not uncommonly for this interest, it emerged with the birth of my daughter. The long journey that had brought her into the world suddenly seemed more relevant to me. So I set about researching my family history and, with my characteristic obsession, soon had a family tree of more than 6,000 connected individuals.

Over the course of this last decade, more and more reference resources have been made available on the Internet, making it easier to conduct research from the comfort of my kitchen table, only venturing out into dusty archives on occasion. One of my favourite resources is Google Books. Google’s mission of digitising the world’s knowledge has already created an invaluable library of digitised, searchable books, many of them historical for reasons of copyright. For a genealogist and a historian, this archive is gold dust (as opposed to the other variety). It’s one thing to know the date of birth, marriage and death for a given individual, it’s quite another to know the individual, who they were and what they did with their lives. Archives like Google Books bring family history alive and I think family history brings history alive by making it relevant.

Before I set out on my family history quest I would characterise my relationship with history as ‘distant’. At school I found the subject dry and uninspiring. Occasionally I would be allowed to pursue project work which I found more engaging. I remember one such project on the Battle of Jutland which interested me because it was a naval battle and my father had been in the Navy. Mostly I couldn’t link these events to my life. Since embarking on the exploration of my family history, I’ve become fascinated with history in all its forms. I can see how it shaped the lives of my ancestors and, in some cases, how my ancestors shaped history. It’s exciting, authentic and personal.

The most amazing thing about these digital resources is that they bring immense power to your fingertips. A decade ago, if I’d wanted to search the contents of a million historical documents I’d have had to employ an army. Today, I can do it by myself in seconds, revealing intimate details about the lives of my ancestors. A recent and fascinating new resource is the British Library Newspaper Archive, offering more than 3.2 million digitised pages, a number growing day by day. In graphic detail, it charts the national, regional and local history of our country, our institutions and our ancestors, opening up the possibility of making history relevant to each and every one of us.

Yes, it is a subscription service, but this is an example of a resource worth its weight in gold (dust), especially when we learn how to mine it (or ‘pan it’ if I’m to stick to the gold dust metaphor). To illustrate my point I’d like to use the example of my 2nd great grandfather, William Smith Binnie. He was a marine engineer, born in Glasgow, who emigrated to Australia in 1876 (by choice rather than at Her Majesty’s pleasure). As a direct ancestor I’ve learned a lot about him. However, he had an elder brother, Andrew, who I’ve never been able to locate. Andrew was in the 1851 census of Scotland aged 14 and then… he disappeared. I assumed he’d emigrated. Within a day of subscribing to the British Library Newspaper Archive, I located the following (and I’m sure they’ll forgive me for reproducing the clip here):

I didn’t intend to end on a poignant note so I won’t. The point is that technology is doing something fabulous here. It is enabling learners (researchers if you will) to access and filter huge volumes of information, vastly increasing the potential to find the points of intersection between the general and the personal. So often it is the relevance of learning to our personal situation that creates engagement. Technology can enable us to do this better.

2012 and beyond (part 2)

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Here’s the second instalment of 2012 predictions from the Techmarketview team, this time from Georgina O’Toole and Tola Sargeant with a focus on the public sector tea leaves. My education-speak translation comments are in blue…

1. Government ICT strategy will languish as new CIO team is put in place: The search is underway for a new UK Government CIO [Chief Information Officer] (to replace Joe Harley by spring 2012) and a new UK Government Deputy CIO (position currently vacant). When in place, the new Cabinet Office team will face an enormous task with a myriad risks threatening to hamper the implementation of the UK Government ICT [Information & Communications Technology] strategy (not least the threat of a hiatus as the new CIO team finds its feet).

If you haven’t read the UK’s Government ICT Strategy then I can summarise it for you in a familiar phrase: “More for less.” The diagram to the left here represents the core themes. It’s the Government’s deep seated belief that technology can and will drive enormous efficiency and that a leaner public sector is one of the foundations of economic recovery. Whether or not you agree, their strategy is built upon this thesis and education leaders would do well to understand the big picture because the “common ICT infrastructure” is something that they will need to factor into their plans. The lack of a CIO at the helm is acting as a brake at the moment but expect the process to accelerate in 2012.

2. A peak in renewals will result in radical contract restructuring: 2012 is the start of two years in which we will see a peak in the number of contracts coming to their natural conclusion. Contracts will be radically restructured on renewal as UK Government moves from a vertically-siloed model to a horizontal model.

In part, this refers to the “common ICT infrastructure” and in part, the procurement strategy. The phrase  “horizontal model” refers to a more joined-up (across sectors) approach to technology procurement that  benefits from increased aggregation and improved competition. The common ICT infrastructure is part of the mechanism by which this can be achieved, i.e. standardisation. Again the key for education is awareness and planning. Cloud technology is an important element of the approach to scaling and standardisation and education leaders would reap rewards from understanding the direction of travel.

3. Megaplayers will retain lion’s share of major contract renewals: Leading suppliers have worked hard to support the UK Government ICT strategy and many have ‘come off the naughty step’. In times of austerity, and a propensity for low-risk options, organisations will stick with ‘the devil they know’ if there is sound reason to do so. Suppliers will likely find their wallet share from existing clients eroded but will have the opportunity to broaden their client base by offering successfully implemented horizontal solutions to a wider range of organisations.

In summary, big players like Capita have allowed the Government to renegotiate contract terms in recognition of the difficult economic climate. In return for playing ball with the Government, they will likely be treated as favoured partners and retain big contracts. I think there is truth in this statement but I’d also point out that “megaplayers” tend to be a little slow on the uptake and that significant shifts in the ICT landscape offer opportunities for more agile players to grab market share. Taken in tandem with the trend for consumerisation of enterprise IT, I think we’ll see the emergence of new names offering great value to education customers. As a general observation, if you’re an education customer taking services under contract from a company, now is a good time to negotiate better terms. It’s a buyers’ market.

4. Shared services will really take off: 2012 and 2013 will be remembered in the UK public sector as the period when shared services really took off. The trend towards ‘tower-based’ procurements will give departments and agencies more flexibility to buy from shared services centres in the future. The competition to be involved in the handful of hosting organisations that will eventually emerge as shared services centres will be intense.

This is all about efficiency. Aggregation drives efficiency and a shared service is a way of creating that aggregation. For example, if all the schools in an Authority choose to procure payroll services in one block, that drives down the cost-base for the service provider and means a keener price for schools. Over time the market for shared services will shake down to a “handful of hosting organisations” because the more aggregation, the lower the cost-base (up to a point). In my opinion, education leaders could save their organisations very large sums of money by collaborating with organisations with similar needs to procure shared services. It still amazes me how many education organisations run themselves as islands, trying to do everything in-house. It is not only expensive but it is a distraction from their core function: learning.

5. SMEs will establish beachhead in government shared services: SMEs  [Small and Medium size Enterprises] will have more opportunities as contracts are broken down, particularly where niche requirements, for example, security, are separated out and procured separately. The most successful suppliers will be those that focus on being best of breed in one or a handful of niche service lines that can be shared horizontally across multiple organisations.

This final point is linking together two of the previous ones, i.e. (4) shared services and (2) contract re-structuring. Successful suppliers are ones that add the most value for the lowest cost. Given that aggregation is one of the keys to efficiency, SMEs that focus in on elements of the technology where they not only add more value, but also leverage scale by offering that value horizontally across a variety of sectors, will find opportunities emerging as contracts come up for renewal and the Government’s “horizontal” strategy bites. If you are an education leader, my advice would be to analyse the way in which your organisation conducts its business (and business of education) functions. Use this analysis to work out whether you’re really better off doing everything in-house. A useful concept in this context is ‘opportunity cost’. This may be defined as “the cost of any activity measured in terms of the value of the best alternative that is not chosen.” For example, you may choose to manage your technology in-house because it is 15% cheaper than a managed service delivered by a 3rd party as measured in pounds/dollars. However the opportunity cost of not choosing a managed service is that you may find you/your staff are 25% more tied up in technology-related issues with a knock-on degradation in learning outcomes. This is just one scenario but one I have come across similar ones on a regular basis. Technology can be a distraction and my advice if you are an organisation in the business of education, is to shed distractions and focus, focus, focus on your core business: learning.

2012 and beyond (part 1)

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Around this time of year I’m always interested to see what the technology pundits predict for the following year. The advantage of being in a sector for a while is that you work out who’s worth listening to. Richard Holway from Techmarketview is a seasoned oracle with a great track record. Education is not his thing but it’s worth reading what he predicts for technology in 2012. Just replace “business” with “school” and “2012” with “2015+”! I jest, but it is true that trends in business often feed into education in time. I’ve added a few lines (in blue) after each item offering my education-speak version of his prediction.

1. “It’s the economy, stupid” – Although what happens in the general economy – UK, Europe, US and globally – has always had some impact on UK SITS [software and information technology scene], it has often been minimal. Indeed, UK SITS has often thrived in downturns – indeed, growth has been spurred by the need to cut costs/change business models etc. But the UK faces the possibility of an unprecedented downturn which is just bound to affect the UK SITS sector and, indeed, consumer tech too. The Governor of the Bank of England was recently asked “What will happen to the economy in 2012?” and replied “I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, let alone next year”. So, the greatest driver for our markets in 2012 will be the economy. The greatest problem facing the executives in the UK SITS sector will be uncertainty. Nobody – not the Governor of the BoE or any TMV [True Market Value] analyst – can accurately predict what will happen.

The impact on the education sector of the economic downturn in the UK is already being felt and the termination of the Building Schools for the Future was an early indication of this. Traditionally education is fairly resistant to economic cycles but I think the situation is sufficiently dire to send waves out across the entire public sector, and indeed the country, with increasing pressure to do more for less.

2. Consumerisation of Enterprise IT – Consumerisation of Enterprise IT is already an established trend but will become mainstream from 2012 providing huge threats and similarly huge opportunities. This will particularly apply to mobile, social and tablets.

Consumerisation of Enterprise IT means users finding and using their own technology tools to meet their day to day requirements in work rather than being enterprise driven. Thus the power-base of enterprise IT companies is being diluted as users create their own ecosystem of technology to meet their needs, e.g. iPhone, FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc. This trend is inevitable and desirable in the education sector too. It promotes a self-personalised experience as well as rapid innovation and diversity while reducing the management overhead for organisations.

3. Bring Your Own Tech – Similarly, BYOT will also go mainstream. Enterprises supplying tech items such as mobiles, laptops etc to employees will become as uncommon as the supply of company cars. BYOT will spur major growth in security systems and in desktop virtualisation. However, supply and support channels will be adversely affected by the BYOT trend in much the same way as manufacturers and suppliers of company cars were affected in the last decade or so.

BYOT is an extension of the consumerisation of enterprise IT. Again it’s about self-service, self-personalised technology solutions that meet the specific needs of the individual and remove the management and control of edge devices away from the organisation. It not only removes the management overhead from organisations but it also increases personal responsibility and utilisation. This is an important step to take in education in order to improve utilisation of, and therefore access to, technology.

4. Social media bubble bursts – Consumer social networks have already peaked. The winners are in place. Valuations were always in bubble territory and that bubble has also burst. However, just like the Internet bubble of 1999/2000, the world has changed. Social networks will have a huge effect on the next 10 years just as the Internet has had on the last decade. The real opportunities are now the adoption of social networks in the Enterprise.

The key point here for education is in the last sentence. There is a huge amount of potential tied up in social learning, both formal and informal, and most education organisations have resisted the integration of these platforms into their cultures. Adoption of social networks in and across education organisations will revolutionise when, where and how learning happens. It may not be 2012 for education organisations but young people are there already – in their tens of millions. We should take notice of them.

5. IT as a utility. “It’s business not IT, stupid” – For as long as I can remember, pundits have suggested that IT will become a utility – like the supply of electricity. They have made the point that nowadays nobody has an “Electricity Supply Director”. So, why do we have IT directors? Or even why do we have CIOs [Chief Information Officers]? The acceptance of BPS means that in many companies that day has already arrived. Much of the previous IT budget is now controlled by user departments. Decisions are taken for business not IT reasons. CIOs are probably a dying race. The same might well apply to some SITS companies. The need to supply a business solution already supersedes the need to supply an IT solution. I remember Paul Pindar has long objected to me ever referring to Capita as an IT company. –I suggest most other companies will object in similar fashion in the future.

This is a key one for schools in particular. Even now, all round the world (and especially in secondary education and above) network managers and technicians have created stand-alone IT empires that are mostly about the technology. They are usually characterised by being non-standard, difficult to support, lacking in scalability and  dreadfully inefficient. Technology paradigms such as the ‘cloud’ are offering great opportunities to deliver IT services from an off-premises location, increasing standardisation, availability, consistency and driving down cost. The consequence? More focus on learning in learning organisations. “It’s education not IT, stupid.”