Delivery teams are now able to build services faster and easier. In July 2016, DTA had 14 apps in production and 50 apps in development. In October 2016, the numbers increased to 47 apps in production and 225 apps in development. Australian Government Cuts Release Time with Cloud Foundry, Iterates Faster - Cloud Foundry Live

Delivery teams are now able to build services faster and easier. In July 2016, DTA had 14 apps in production and 50 apps in development. In October 2016, the numbers increased to 47 apps in production and 225 apps in development. Australian Government Cuts Release Time with Cloud Foundry, Iterates Faster - Cloud Foundry Live

Delivery teams are now able to build services faster and easier. In July 2016, DTA had 14 apps in production and 50 apps in development. In October 2016, the numbers increased to 47 apps in production and 225 apps in development. Australian Government Cuts Release Time with Cloud Foundry, Iterates Faster - Cloud Foundry Live

Corporate departments outside of the IT department, globally, are forecast to spend $609bn in 2017: A new update to the Worldwide Semiannual IT Spending Guide: Line of Business from the International Data Corporation (IDC) forecasts worldwide corporate IT spending funded by non-IT business units will reach $609 billion in 2017, an increase of 5.9% over 2016. The Spending Guide, which quantifies the purchasing power of line of business (LoB) technology buyers by providing a detailed examination of where the funding for a variety of IT purchases originates, also forecasts LoB spending to achieve a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.

Video: "In 2017 Amazon is expected to spend $4.5bn on television and film content, roughly twice what HBO will spend. But it has a big payoff." Prime momentum: "Mr Nowak reckons the company had 72m Prime members last year, up by 32% from 2015." Cloud: "Last year AWS’s revenue reached $12bn, up by more than 150% since 2014." Anti-trust, in the US: "If competitors fail to halt Amazon’s whirl of activities, antitrust enforcers might yet do so instead.

From 451’s report on Google Next: Google believes that a hybrid architecture will persist in the coming years as enterprises continue to migrate workloads to various clouds. Its hybrid cloud architecture revolves around its virtual private cloud. Google VPC is an instantiation of GCP that can dedicate compute, storage and network resources to an enterprise. It is built upon Google's proprietary private global network designed for high reliability, low latency and hardened security.

If there’s one complaint that I hear consistently in my studies of IT in large organizations, it’s that government IT, as traditionally practiced, is fucked. Compared to the private sector, the amount of paperwork, the role of contractors, and the seeming separation between doing a good job and working software drives all sorts of angst and failure. Mark Schwartz’s book on figuring out “business value” in IT is turning out to be pretty amazing and refreshing, especially on the topic of government IT.

A few weeks back my book review of two “the robots are taking over” came out over on The New Stack. Here’s some responses, and also some highlights from a McKinsey piece on automation. Don’t call it “automation” From John Allspaw: There is much more to this topic. Nick Carr’s book, The Glass Cage, has a different perspective. The ramifications of new technology (don’t call it automation) are notoriously difficult to predict, and what we think are forgone conclusions (unemployment of truck drivers even though the tech for self-driving cars needs to see much more diversity of conditions before it can get to the 99%+ accuracy) are not.

I reviewed two books on automation and digital transforming this month: The Wealth of Humans and Silicon Collar. These two books go well together because the first describes how automation is lowering the need for labor, leading, likely, to less jobs, while the second provides a compendium of examples of such software-driven labor change. Vinnie’s book has the optimism of a technologist, while Avent’s is much more fraught. Both accurately describe how IT is optimizing and replacing “analog” labor and businesses, leaving the core problem of devaluing human labor, perhaps to the point of eliminating millions of jobs, permanently.

The big takeaway is that small increases in IT budgets are the new normal. Unlike previous recoveries, we have not seen a large jump in IT spending over the past five years. So if a CIO is only seeing a two or three percent increase this year, he or she should understand that is pretty much in line with other companies. See more guidance charts on IT priorities, n=190.