Beginning right around the time that Heather and I moved to Whitehorse, I noticed that almost all of the ads I saw on Twitter were from the same company. Anecdotally around 19 out of every 20 ads that I saw on Twitter were IBM ads, for more than a year. Below is a series of screenshots of these ads, collected between October 2019 and October 2020.| sboots.ca
A couple weeks ago, I was able to tune in to FWD50, an annual Canadian digital government conference. One of the themes from the first day onwards was this concept, that government institutions are tech companies without realizing it. Just like “every company is a software company”, public sector institutions need to think differently about how they work, and what leadership they have, in order to be successful today.| sboots.ca
A few years back I remember reading about bike infrastructure improvements in Seville, Spain, where the city had built 80 kilometres of protected bicycle lanes in 18 months. The key to Seville’s approach was starting and finishing the infrastructure project within a single mayoral political term. Government IT projects could learn a lot from this. DM and ADM turnover is estimated at 1-3 years in the same department; most major IT projects outlast the executives that are nominally in charge ...| sboots.ca
If you’re working on IT or service delivery projects in public sector organizations, I have one very specific rule for you to follow: avoid vendor lock-in. To do that, you should own your data, own your front-end interfaces, own your software source code, and avoid long-term contracts. This post dives into why vendor lock-in is a problem, and how those strategies can help prevent it.| sboots.ca