The Forbidden Zone - ’Back then, you were a webmaster, doing it all.’

European HVAC - Air conditioners to be big in Europe?

Can Watsonx Rebuild IBM’s AI Relevance? - Analysis of IBM’s AI stuff. Also, a good side point: no one really knows anymore what IBM does.

The Pessimism Problem Continues to Grow - It’s 60% now: ’Back in 2020, I wrote a post titled “The Pessimism Problem.”  We had completed a survey where 54% of respondents agreed with the statement “We regret nearly every purchase we make after the subscription agreement is finalized.”’

A framework for council technology planning – SensibleTech - “We don’t have much – if any – ‘legacy’ code running on old virtualised mainframes like bits of central government do. In fact, a lot of what is called legacy in local government is anything but – it’s regularly updated and kept working and in line with statutory requirements. So it’s not legacy software. It’s just bad software.” // Getting a common language of digital transformation, a shared model of all the capabilities a local government needs, and an understanding of how all the tech works so that non-technical people can manage it and set strategy.

Touchpoints, coalescence and multi-platform engineering — thoughts from Kubecon 2023 - A sum up of the trends and state of the kubernetes/cloud native community, but an even better picture of the setting and tone.

Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Government IT Spending to Grow 8% in 2023 - “Worldwide government IT spending is forecast to total $589.8 billion in 2023, an increase of 7.6% from 2022, according to Gartner, Inc.” And: “57% of government CIOs plan to increase funding for application modernization in 2023, up from 42% in 2022."

Retrospective of 10 years of digital in the UK government - Great overview of the past ten(?) years of digital transformation in the UK government. I must say: this exact analysis probably applies private sector companies worldwide.

Manage process before people - File under “must be nice…"

Majority of Americans have heard of ChatGPT, but few have tried it - “Just 14% of U.S. adults have tried ChatGPT” - until that gets up to 50%, a lot of the freaking (& hype) is like fearing necromancy. Once you use it a lot you’re like “oh, I see. Not a threat. That dumb-ass box can’t even tell me how to get my kids put their shoes on for school.”