The Strategic Developer

Strategic innovation in a local context

nearly the end of the workshop for this year, and you must be a little tired....

content
local innovation in a recession
DevCSI and the developer community
the strategic developer
web-managers and local developers working together

technical innovation

is local IT expertise a sunk cost or an investment ?

cost or investment?
IT often regarded as a sunk cost in HEIs....
...but a capacity for technical innovation is a strategic resource which needs investment
in the institution
in the sector
maintaining the capacity for technical innovation is, itself, an investment
outsourcing IT has a cost
reduced capacity to innovate

what do the following have in common?
Colgate 1806
Lilly 1876 (invented concept of prescription drugs)
General Electric 1892
Hershey’s 1894
Microsoft 1975
3M 1902
Black and Decker 1910

“ successful companies innovate in a down market ”

“ Established companies sometimes perceive disruptive innovation to be risky. But success is possible. In fact, the greater risk comes from assuming that business as usual will allow companies to achieve their strategic aims ....” Scott Anthony, Can Established Companies Disrupt? http://blogs.hbr.org/anthony/2008/12/can_established_companies_disr.html http://blogs.hbr.org/anthony/2008/12/can_established_companies_disr.html

innovation happens in a local context

how established orgs innovate
“Put the customer , and their important, unsatisfied job-to-be-done at the centre of the innovation equation”
local context, customer facing
“Embrace simplicity, convenience , and affordability”
local context, convenience
“Create organisational space for disruptive growth”
invest locally in capacity to innovate
“Consider innovation levers beyond features & functions”
“Become world class at testing, iterating & adjusting ”
local integration, tweaking SaaS, rapid innovation
Scott Anthony, Can Established Companies Disrupt? http://blogs.hbr.org/anthony/2008/12/can_established_companies_disr.html http://blogs.hbr.org/anthony/2008/12/can_established_companies_disr.html

is this possible without a local capacity to do technical innovation? given limited resources, how do we make the most of what local technical expertise we do have?

DevCSI
building capacity among HE developers
cost-effective training
community-based peer support
raising the profile of developers within H/FEIs
showcasing the technical innovation of HE developers
dev8D - like IWMW for developers :-)

stakeholder survey
495 respondents including developers, their managers, IT directors, vendors, funders, users (academics, librarians, researchers)
75%+ agreement that local developers understand the local context and act as a bridge between remote service providers, open source communities, and local end users, and add value by integrating into local contexts
75% agreement that local developers work closely with end users to deliver innovation (more work needed though)
70% agreement that local developers are undervalued as evidenced by short term contracts, lack of professional development or career opportunities and poor management

barn-raising

events! engaging developers with open source software developing for the mobile web dev8D pair programming reading list hackday Open Repositories developer challenges developing phone based applications agile prototyping techniques workflow tools OER hackday eBook/ePub Hackday

building stuff together
building stuff as free-form R&D
doing so in a very open environment
contributing ideas

building capacity

the manager’s view
"They gained a huge amount. They came back very enthusiastic and full of good ideas. It did a great deal for morale and motivation…. It's a very powerful thing when your peers say that you are doing something the best,"
“...decided to use the momentum of Dev8D to move forward with agile working and the List8D project by providing the development team with two very important assets: physical and mental space.”

the power of networks
peer-peer training (£85K at one 2 day event!)
collaborative development
pooling of expertise
knowledge-transfer to non-developers (librarians, web managers , researchers)

value for money!
having local/institutional developer resource available is valuable
that local resource, while limited, can be backed-up by a community of peers
a well connected community of developers is greater than the sum of its parts !
developers can empower users

responsive innovation
agile & embedded
frequent F2F between developers & users - finely tuned & tailored solutions
responsive - perpetual beta
small, responsive incremental changes are possible
“ if you want to keep incrementally improving the user experience then you need to retain a local capacity to do this”
gluing - the day job! (AKA enterprise integration )
from gluing locally installed vendor software to gluing SaaS
bespoke interfaces on common platforms
innovation happens in a local context

strategic developer

case of the missing career path

a strategic role

student as producer?
Lincoln University (Mike Neary, Joss Winn)
Students actively innovating for the University, with official blessing and strategic investment

finally...

web managers and developers, sitting in a tree....?

integration....

...means the Web

devs & web management
URLs have become more important to developers
good management of URLs is going to become very important
there is some convergence between CMS and application platform - e.g. Drupal
tension between the desire to hide complexity from the user (e.g. Google Chrome disguising the ‘location bar’) and good practice on the read/write web - making URLs ‘cool’ and ‘hackable’

“linking you”
Research on how institutions currently arrange their identifiers
URI 101
Recommendations & data model
Space-time
domains and institutional URIs
http://lncn.eu/toolkit

open institutional data
Open Data and the Institutional Web at IWMW 2011
Chris Gutteridge

key information sets
together with the general trend towards open data, KIS is likely to drive better information management practice in HEIs

the mobile campus

your local developer might just be a super-hero - get to know them just in case!

thank you http://devcsi.ukoln.ac.uk/ [email_address] and thanks to Marieke and Brian!

image credits
All images (c) Paul Walk and licensed CC-BY except for:
General Electric: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ooocha/2780071340/sizes/s/in/photostream/
Colgate: http://www.flickr.com/photos/roadsidepictures/3909708551/sizes/s/in/photostream/
Microsoft: http://www.flickr.com/photos/techshownetwork/2961688276/sizes/s/in/photostream/
3M: http://www.flickr.com/photos/roadsidepictures/42905995/sizes/s/in/photostream/
Black & Decker: http://www.flickr.com/photos/toolstop/4514199590/sizes/s/in/photostream/
Cook book: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigcrow/3381550945/

The Strategic Developer

by IWMW on Aug 11, 2011

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The Strategic Developer — Presentation Transcript

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