Blog – Page 4 – Agile Elephant making sense of digital transformation

March 12, 2018 By David Terrar

We love the smell of Blockchain in the morning

Like napalm, blockchain is a portmanteau word, and you just have to sniff to sense how pervasive it is becoming in emerging technology conversations across the business landscape. It’s a technology that’s on the lips of VCs, strategists and industry watchers talking about their next big idea and often framed as the next stage of evolution of the Internet. A word that appears in the first sentence of the elevator pitch of many new technological ideas or solutions. Does it need to be there or is it some pivot to hook on to the latest trend? A Techcrunch piece last month started with:

“Demand is off the charts for blockchain talent, and the capital is waiting to back it up. More than $3.7 billion has been raised through ICOs in the United States alone.”

Here we are less than 3 months in to 2018 and several days in to the the usual hype and excitement that surrounds the eclectic SXSW “technology meets entertainment” event currently going on in Austin, Texas, and I’m wondering whether this is an emerging technology that can be a force for good, or something that will take us to the heart of darkness.

We’ve been here before
This period in the blockchain hype cycle feels a lot like when we started talking Software as a Service in the mid 2000s and then Cloud Computing back in 2007. Those of us there at the start of solutions based on SaaS (along with infrastructure and platforms as a service) worried about every provider with a hosted solution of some kind slapping on ‘aaS’ initially and then the ‘Cloud’ label to their offerings to ride the wave, and we had endless discussion and argument around what was “pure cloud” and what was “same old software as a service”. We came up with definitions and tried to apply standards and it got messy. In moving beyond the regular misuse and misunderstanding of the term, though, cloud computing became a useful catch all for the paradigm shift that was happening around us – the consumerization and commoditisation of IT services as part of the “Big Shift” and a core component of what Agile Elephant calls the Digital Enterprise Wave. Blockchain’s following a similar course in much choppier waters.

Last week Adrianne Jeffries’ piece on The Verge worries that the blockchain term has become so widespread and misused that it’s quickly losing meaning, quoting David Gerard, author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts, saying in an email:

“What is a ‘blockchain’? The word is a buzzword that is increasingly ill-defined,”

He has a point. Some people know what they are talking about, but when others say blockchain do the really just mean a secure, distributed database of some kind? There is both bad and good information on this, with bad and good definitions out there. For example, when I was researching this article I found a Fortune/Bloomberg piece from last December titled Blockchain Is Pumping New Life Into Old-School Companies Like IBM and Visa, that contains the sentence: “The blockchain can also hold many more documents and data than traditional database storage, allowing for more nuanced insights and analysis.” Now that’s rubbish on many levels, and dangerous too.

We need some clarity
That’s exactly why I’ll try to explain what blockchain is by answering the question “what’s the difference between a blockchain and a traditional database?”. As well as following my explanation, I want to refer you to three sources. Please read CEO of Integra Ledger, David Fisher’s excellent guest post on Artificial Lawyer – What Really Is Blockchain and Why Does It Matter to Lawyers? Also read Shaan Ray’s Blockchains versus Traditional Databases, and finally here on the AE blog, Alan Patrick’s Blockchain Economics – the Reality. Can your application afford the transaction costs?

What is blockchain?
A blockchain is a distributed (or decentralised) ledger, implemented across many networked servers, consisting of a continuously growing list of records, called blocks, which are linked across the whole network and secured using cryptography. This technology allows several parties or competitors to share a digital ledger across the network of computers without the need for a central authority. The combination of cryptography and the fact that each block addition is “witnessed” across many servers means that, in practice, no single party has the power or resources to tamper with the records. The problem we are solving here is trust. Blockchain’s key advantage is that the parties or competitors can trust the digital ledger without the need for any intermediary like a bank or broker or lawyer or government being involved. How disruptive is that!

What’s the difference between a blockchain and a traditional database?
Traditional databases are based on CRUD. No, not rubbish, but the concept that somebody has the ability to write a program that creates, reads, updates or deletes individual records in a database sitting on storage connected to a central server somewhere. Somebody has the administration rights for that database. Depending on the particular database technology and the way the software accessing it is designed, any changes might be tracked by who made the change, date and time stamped, and then duplicated somewhere else for backup and recovery purposes. You can use all sorts of security measures and cryptography to protect the integrity of the data, but two things remain true. First, some one person or central authority has administration rights to keep the data secure and control access on everyone’s behalf. Second, the individual records in the database can be changed. If a malicious agent wants to beat the cyber security measures put in place so that they can hack the data, they have one place to work and do their dirty work.

Blockchain databases consist of several, distributed compute server and storage nodes, all of which participate in the administration and verification of the data all of the time. Instead of CRUD, blockchain technology can only create and read. Somebody writing the program to use this kind of database can only read existing blocks and add or append additional blocks. The blockchain technology performs only two functions – the validation of existing transactions and the addition of new ones. All of the nodes in the network are capable of adding new blocks. All of the nodes of the network verify every existing and new block. That means that the malicious agent who wants to beat the cryptographic encryption needs to do that simultaneously on all the nodes of the network, making it so difficult and expensive in compute power (with current technology) as to be impossible in practice. That’s why this form of distributed ledger technology can be considered immutable. That’s why you can trust a blockchain ledger.

What works, what doesn’t, what’s next?
As Alan’s post here on the Agile Elephant blog highlighted there are places where this technology is appropriate and works well. What is worrying is that not everyone is understanding or considering the compute power required by the distributed blockchain model where every add must be verified across all of the nodes of the network, and that has an effect on the rate of transactions you can put through this type of database compared to a traditional centralised one. There are a lot of applications currently being suggested for blockchain that won’t be able to cope with that operational and economic overhead. Alan puts it succinctly when he suggests:

“Somewhere between the hype, hope and heuristics is a major disconnect”

So what happens next and can blockchain be a force for good? To answer that question I asked our good friend, author, fintech expert and entrepreneur Dinis Guarda. Dinis and I both lecture on Groupe INSEEC’s digital marketing MBA programme. Back in September 2016 he spoke on IoT and Blockchain at one of Agile Elephant’s regular meetup sessions, explaining his belief that blockchain in the IoT will not be implemented without significant platform development by companies with deep pockets. Then at the Enterprise Digital Summit Paris in 2017 he keynoted on “Blockchain and the Decentralisation of Business”. He’s considered one of the top blockchain and cryptography influencers in the world, and most recently his company Ztudium sold their blockchain and cryptocurrency with rewards tokenization platform called Blockimpact to Canadian firm Glance Technologies. Glance owns and operates Glance Pay, a streamlined mobile payment system, and Dinis is now on their advisory board. Talking to him around blockchain he recognises that, like any tool, it can be used for good and bad, but it needs to be understood and a lot of work needs to be done on the scalability of the technology.

Actually, Dinis is just about to publish his next book titled “Blockchain, AI and Crypto Economics – The Next Tsunami?”. We’ll be reporting from the book launch next month. If you want to get a flavour for what Dinis will be saying, go to this Slideshare from one of his recent presentations. Dinis argues that these emerging technologies are turning the wave in to a veritable tsunami. He suggests that we are just in the early stages of the digitalisation and disruption of the financial industry. These new digital models of decentralised and distributed finance and economics can impact society in both positive and negative ways. Dinis explains:”

“Governments, regulators and financial institutions need to consider these decentralised models to enhance industry resilience, integrity and work in governance structures while using data driven technologies to leverage this. Crypto economics models need to to be at the centre of any government, financial organisation or regulator, and by chain effect, any business.”

Dinis’s next venture has very positive intentions around life sciences and healthcare and will pull all of this technology together with artificial intelligence and data analysis using a proprietary peer to peer network. It’s called Lifesci. He couldn’t tell me much about it yet, but we’ll be watching closely and reporting when we can. Expect more when the new book comes out in a few weeks, and we’ll be finding and writing about good use cases over the coming months. Please contact us if you’ve got any good suggestions or want to find out more.

(Header image frame grab from the excellent Apocalypse Now, copyright Omni Zoetrope United Artists)

March 6, 2018 By David Terrar

London was part of the largest Legal Hackathon ever

It’s been just over a week since the London stream of the Global Legal Hackathon, and those of us who were involved are still feeling the buzz. Here’s a full report of what went on. This was round one of a process which found a London winner to go forward with 39 other city winners from 20 countries, and 1 winner from a remote Hackathon stream too. The aim was to be as open and inclusive as possible, to make this the largest legal hackathon ever!

Globally more than 5000 people participated over the weekend of 23-25 February, generating more than 1000 new legal tech ideas. The 41 winners can improve their entries within agreed guidelines up to the deadline for round two which takes place on March 11th & 12th. Then 10 finalists will be chosen for round three, and funded to attend and the gala final, taking place in New York on April 21st.

Why run a Legal Hackthon?
It’s all about experimentation and innovation. We introduced what #GLH2018 #London was all about in our earlier posts. The goal was to apply innovative ideas and emerging (or any) technologies to progress the business of law or facilitate access to justice for the public. We knew that getting lawyers, coders, designers, marketers, analysts and other business people together over a weekend with beer and pizza was going to make things happen.

So what did happen that weekend?
Something special. On 23rd February, the Friday evening in London we had around 60 people (from 102 registered participants including helpers, mentors and judges) – some were partially formed teams, and many participants were coming along with an idea or some skills, energy and enthusiasm to add in to the pot. Of our participants who stayed the course till Sunday evening, what we didn’t realise until I asked the question in the final presentation session, was that around 2/3 had never participated in a Hackathon before! In Pinsent Masons‘ excellent auditorium, after setting the scene, explaining the timing, the rules, and the Judging Rubric, people started pitching ideas. Actually we started with just 3 good ideas. Then after a worryingly long pause and some discussion the ideas really began to flow. We ended up with 13 really interesting possibilities. We stopped for Dominos Pizza (who weren’t a sponsor, but maybe next year?). Pizza is the life blood of any Hackathon. Straight afterwards we got back in to the auditorium to try to facilitate some version of team speed dating. Actually, following a little encouragement, some of the ideas joined together or were dropped and we coalesced in to 6 teams, each with a strong proposition and a balanced set of skills. Pretty much everybody stayed until 21:00 when we closed the building.

A surprisingly large numbers of team members rejoined us for 8:00 the next morning when we moved to Pinsent Masons luxurious client centre on the 14th floor. More team members arrived during the day – we actually had capacity for 13 teams in 13 separate rooms, thanks to our gracious hosts! 5 teams each grabbed a room for home base, and our 6th team met somewhere else with their developers in the morning, but joined us in the client centre mid afternoon.

Of the 6 lifts you can take to get up and down the Pinsent Masons building, lift D is by far the best choice if you can get it. It’s all glass, running on the outside of the building, and they call it the James Bond lift because it briefly appears in a scene in Skyfall! Fantastic views over London. With that lift, those views and the client centre, this was very definitely “not your average Hackathon”!

Rob Millard and I raided a local Marks & Spencer for sandwiches, nibbles, beer, wine and soft drinks. Actually we totally cleared them out of every variety of bottled beer they had in their fridge – not many regular customers expected in the City of London on a weekend. Sandwiches for lunch. More Dominos Pizza for our evening meal, made even more tasty with the addition of beer and wine (and soft drinks). However, it was notable that our teams were careful with their alcohol intake. We saw people refusing a second beer and heading back to their team rooms – there’s dedication! Yet again they all worked until 21:00 when we had to finally kick them out.

We had the same early start of 8:00 for Sunday with the same early arrivals, a different sandwich selection from Sainsburys and Tescos for lunch, and plenty of drinks and nibbles left for the early evening session. There was a lot of mentor interaction during the day, with teams getting input, asking questions, getting guidance on the approach for their presentations. Soon after lunch you could see some teams rehearsing their story as other teams madly tried to get everything finished by the 16:00 “down tools” deadline.

The Teams
Here are the 6 London teams:

LiP-Sync	Toks Hussain
	Keith Hardie
	Yee Mun Ooi
	Ian Broom
	James Kingston
	Julie Gottlieb
	Alex Goff
	Mariela Petsova
LightningWarriors	George Norfolk
	James Turner
	Elma Gakenyi
	Ben Babbik
	Thomas Pauls
	Jon Wilks
Team Pinsent Masons	Orlando Conetta
	Michael Bell
	Ben Cooper
	Michael Bell
	Alisha Kouser
	Olivia Irrgang
smartcomms.ai	Rosemary Martin
	Philip Fumey
	Martin Kath
	Lyle Ellis
	Steven Jebb
	Olaseni Odebiyi
	Christopher Rawlings
RegChain	Alkesh Acharya
	Fraser Matcham
	plus 2
Legalytics	Murtaza Amirali
	Dr. Mehmood Hassan
	Ashok Panchabakesan
	Mohamed Sajeed Hameed

Our Judges and Mentors
Our judges were Christina Blacklaws, Deputy Vice President of the Law Society, Frank Jennings the “Cloud Lawyer”, Joanna Goodman, writer/editor and columnist for the Law Society Gazette, and Dr Richard Sykes chair of the Cloud Industry Forum.

Our mentors, to advise and keep the teams on track were Sophia Adams-Bhati, Richard Tromans, Andy Unger, Kim Silver, Silvia Cambie, Jelena Madir, Robert Marcus, Dennis Howlett, Maeve Lavelle, Alan Patrick, Janet Parkinson, Rob Millard and me. Amy Braunz of Integra Ledger joined us for Sunday too.

A very big thank you to all of our judges and mentors who gave up valuable time over a weekend to join the fun. This whole exercise was not-for-profit, only made possible by these people volunteering, our host providing the space free, and our sponsors paying to feed us.

Who was supporting this?
Here are those vital London Sponsors and Supporters we need to thank for making all of this possible! Cambridge Strategy Group, the Agile Elephant Team, and Pinsent Masons were co-hosts (and by the way, the venue was fantastic!). We mustn’t forget IBM and Microsoft who provided developers some free access to their cloud platforms. LexisNexis, JG Consulting, Sales Filter, Durham Law School and The Law Society, were our local sponsors. The Society for Computers and Law, and Disruptive.Live were supporting us too.

I must also thank Indi Shinji, Pinsent Masons events coordinator. She did a fantastic job all weekend keeping us happy, keeping an unruly bunch of hackers compliant with PM health and safety, and keeping her cool as she accommodated our various and unusual demands. She was brilliant.

The Global sponsors across all three rounds are Integra, IBM Watson Legal, the Global Legal Blockchain Consortium, Cadence, LawDroid and ONE400

The Presentations
As soon as everyone managed to get down from the 14th floor, a little before 16:15 on Sunday we assembled back in the auditorium for our 6 presentations. The sequence had been chosen fairly by drawing lots. Each team had a strict 10 minutes and no more, plus 5 minutes of Q&A from our 4 judges, sitting on stage at the top table. Even with the handovers and usual audio visual problems of hooking up a variety of different laptops for presenting demos, prototypes and slides (that suddenly freeze, or won’t connect) we got through all 6 sessions well inside the allotted 2 hours. I must thank Nathan the Pinsent Masons AV guy who made it happen, recorded and live streamed it all for us (we’ll publish video soon). diginomica live streamed the sessions on Facebook Live too. It’s important to note that this wasn’t a “PowerPoint off”, as prototypes and real code were on show, as well as the slides to tell their stories.

Frank Jennings’ post summarises the ideas from our 4 “third” placed teams more succinctly than I could:

“One team proposed the use of machine learning to help users to prioritise and process their emails. There was a GDPR toolkit for small-medium sized organisations. Another was a dashboard collating billing info, time, indexing and work location data. And there was a blockchain application to help with conveyancing.”

Managing to finish the show and tell before 18:00 gave our judges a little extra time to come up with a winner and a runner-up, which head judge Christina Blacklaws duly announced.

It’s notable that none of our 6 teams were reinventing the wheel. Even the team who were tackling the common problem of email and information overload for lawyers had innovative ideas using machine learning to address the problem.

The Winners!
You might have seen the announcements already, but our London winners were:

The runner-up was LiP-Sync:
An app with chat interface using IBM’s natural language processing, sentiment analysis and Watson to help those going through a divorce without legal representation.

The London winner was Team Pinsent Masons:
A blockchain enabled tool to manage workflow in developing ideas for new innovations to fully formed business propositions and for partners to vote on which ideas should receive investment. The tool could also be used for partners to quickly and easily vote on other issues too, making it easier to engage them as business owners and enhance governance.

The Blockchain issue
Agile Elephant’s position on blockchain technology is well known. We worry about the hype and fashion element associated with many of the startups and ideas out there. We worry about a lack of understanding of where blockchain is and isn’t an appropriate solution and the real cost of a transaction using this technology. However, there are a growing number of real use cases and sensible applications, like many that we’ve seen across this Hackathon. We’ll be writing another post specifically on this issue, and I recommend you read CEO of Integra Ledger, David Fisher’s excellent guest post on the Artificial Lawyer making the case for Blockchain and the Law.

Other posts about #GLH2018 #GlobalLegalHack
Here is a selection of posts we could find about the Hackathon.

Here’s a great piece from Dennis Howlett, founder of diginomica, on the event and his experience as a mentor (and I particularly like his takedown of the “armchair quarterback”):

Lawyers and code – who’da thunk? Yet Global Legal Hackathon hailed as success

Frank’s view as a judge:

Hacking legal tech in London

From the Law Society Gazette:

Host team Pinsent triumphs in global legal hackathon

Richard Sykes column on Horizon Business Innovation:

Global Legal Hackathon is Practical and Relevant

Orlando Connetta of the winning team explains their solution:

The Power of Play – Our experience at the Global Legal Hackathon

A great post from Britton Guerrina of PwC on….

Why lawyers should do hackathons

Thomson Reuters on the IP issue with this and other hackathons:

Observations from the Global Legal Hackathon 2018: The Communal Dimension of Intellectual Property

Artificial Lawyer announces the winner, and then broadens it out, listing all of the 40 City winners:

Pinsent Masons Team Wins London Leg of Global Legal Hackathon 2018

And the Worldwide GLH 2018 Winners Are….

I’m expecting a column on #GLH2018 from Joanna Goodman, and other posts too. As those get published or we find more, I’ll update this post and add them here.

Conclusion
We all had a blast! Some really great ideas have started on a journey that we hope they complete to become products in the wild. Our friends running the Global event tell us they are delighted with all the feedback they got from London, and we know that it was the trending topic in legal tech last weekend. We’ll carry out a survey of our own with all actual participants, as well as registered attendees who downloaded the app but didn’t make it to the venue. We hope to find out what worked, what didn’t and what we should do next year. And yes, there will be a next year! The GLH organisers want to make this an annual event, as well as running other activities for the legal tech community too. We’ll certainly be doing that and in 2019 with our co-hosts for the UK too. Watch this space!

If you attended, were watching on social media, or just want to give us some feedback, please add a comment below or contact us.

Update

Keith Hardie quite rightly pointed out I’d missed some of the members of the LiP-Sync team. Apologies, but they’ve been added back. Also I’ve added more post links (on IP at hackathons, a column by one of our judges, one on why lawyers should do hackathons) – more of those soon as I see them.

February 22, 2018 By Alan Patrick

Artificial Intelligence in Professional Services

People may recall in 2014 we set up our Digital Wave model (see picture above). At the time we identified Mobile, Social and Cloud as trends that would shape the next few years of Digital Transformation. That is playing out now much as predicted, so one of the things we have started to bring more sharply into focus for enterprioses looking at Digital Transformation is how to think about using the next “wave” using our “What Works, What Doesnt, What’s Next” approach.

Our current focus is Professional Service businesses and our support of the Global Legal Hackathon so this post is focussed on that arena – interestingly enough, McKinsey recently put this sector (and themselves, by extension?) as laggards in AI adoption (See chart below and this report) – this despite news of AI taking over low level legal roles, introduction into marketing and customer service roles etc.

This post is an initial analysis of opportunities and managing reviews in Artificial Intelligence (AI) as early systems start to come into range of being useful to enterprises other than the big data analytics based businesses like Google and Facebook. To say the sector is overhyped is putting it mildly, but there are some babies among the frothy bathwater, but hopefully we can sort the wheat from the crap.

What Works

Maybe a better term for AI is “Automated Intelligence” – essentially it is just another wave of (digital) automation, chipping away at “white collar” knowledge work, just at the next level up compared to the previous waves. And as with all automation, it is initially being used to automate work that is simple and has:

Bounded Solutions – Most useable AI is today is what is better termed “machine learning” or “deep learning”. To be honest, when I was at Uni few decades ago these weren’t considered “AI” at all – there has been hype creep. But in essence “Machine Learning” systems are very bounded closed loop systems – machines – that have a limited ability to adjust their processes and outputs to react to new inputs. “Deep Learning” is reall better termed “Pattern Recognition” – it’s the ability of IT systems to just crunch far more data and find relationships in the data that humans don’t have the time to do. “General purpose” AI – AI that can learn on it’s own – is still a long way from being usable in most situations.
Easy to Automate – rote tasks, with simple workflows and minimal variation, that are easy to write rules for and replicate in software. AI is the took that hadles that bit more variation and workflow complexity
Worth Automating – this is important – the economics of replication have to be considered, If it can be done for less by people it will be as a human still has a higher functioning AI computer than anything yet built, Where AI comes into it’s own is that it can work 24x7x365, and makes fewer errors with repetitive tasks.

In a way, AI is more useful compared to past “AI revolutions” that failed since today, because there is more digital real estate in most enterprises, it is easier to find work for AIs to work on – so we expect a lot of the first “AI” systems to be used to automate existing digital workflows in enterprises.

What Doesn’t Work

Many of the pronouncements about AI capabilities today won’t be around for years, if not decades. There are a number of major barriers today:

Vertical Variability – Modern AI is still very simple, they can only really work in very tightly defined verticals where variability in conditions is low or else the environment becomes too complex (This is what has killed all previous AI “hot tech” cycles, not computer power). This why all the “gee whiz” comes from AI in games like Go and Chess, which have very constrained variability and a bounded solution space. The question for large scale deployment is always “is this vertical big enough/valuable enough per workpiece to make it worth throwing expensive automation at it.”
GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) – the same problem that besets Analytics besets AI – today’s systems have no judgement of context outside the narrow area they are aimed at, so data has to be very carefully scrubbed, structured and tagged for them to use it without making gross errors. Also, the data has to be more than just clean, it has to be correct to train an AI.
Volumes – most AI systems need a lot of data to do tjeir thing, many enterprises bven in teh days of Big Data don’t have enough in all the necessary areas in a workflow for AT to be useful.
Developing and training AI’s is hard and expensive – very time consuming and needs high levels of expertise. Parenting a living infant is hard and a near full time job, for a long time. Ditto an AI system. As with live infants, the simpler the organism the less the time and work needed – but the less it is capable of. Some types of AIs can self learn very well against datasets (genetic algorithms, neural networks for example) but having used these in the past I know one quickly hits the Vertical Variability and GIGO problems

What’s Next

No doubt the technology will continue to improve, but when we look at what will be adopted in teh near future, a few clear rules emerge:

It will have to be in high value verticals – we expect a lot of early uses will be to automate existing digital systems and workflows in high value industries.
But these verticals will also have to be very predictable with small solution spaces – so think mass production, rote tasks rather than replacing creative roles.
Many work roles will need to be re-engineered to use AI effectively – many work roles today have a mix of the rote and complex, the predictable and the variable, and it typically is only the “rote and predictable” that can be AI’d away. It’s not worth automating tiny bits of a person’s role, so all previous automation from Winslow Taylor (and before) seeks to split up and redefine the worflow to aggregate the automatable parts.
It has to be a good deal better than “good enoughs” – this includes human part time effort (Mechanical Turks, Gig Workers, Offfshoring etc) or simply that the AI-able tasks in a role being easily done in the workflow by the existing workers don’t add enough value.
In addition, we are picking up real concerns about “blind” and biassed” algorithms – so algorithm testing and transparency are going to big issues for deployment, especially into consumer areas. We’d expect to see a lot of AI technologies deployed inter-enterprise first.

It’s no accident therefore that the McKinsey analysis of the industries most advanced in AI (see McKinsey chart below) are IT & Comms (automating existing systems) and Finance (highly valuable benefits of automation). and the next ones are high value Manufacturing, Logistics and Energy which have been the main recipients of previous automation waves.- these are all very rules based industries, with fairly bounded processes and relatively well defined workflows. Note for example Aerospace isn’t in there in the vanguard – it’s a lot harder to automate, we can tell you!

So what of professional services and AI? Note that they are a laggard in the chart above. That’s no real surprise to us, professional services have proven very difficult to automate in the past as the work – although often very valuable – is highly variable, and the solution space is highly unbounded. If previous lessons from automation in these industries are anything to go by it’s largely the support services and rote work that are automated, so we would expact AI to come into areas that have already seen IT inroads such as:

Knowledge management – everything from document capture, document checking, tagging/labelling, storage, sampling etc.
Data assembly – searching for data, reports etc and assembling it against requests
Aids in building presentations, contracts etc – and checking them intelligently for errors
Load balancing – scheduling people, resources, work packages etc. You can check out McLeod Brock to maintain the perfect schedule to handle things.
Workflow processes with simple rules – e.g, changing a report or contract for one client to another, one day maybe even expenses (one can dream)
Recruitment and retention, HR policies, IT support systems, possibly financial support
Risk analysis (of major risks) – probably financial, contractual and regulatory initially
Decision support – this is where we predict AI will enter the more creative, “one off” project type work areas, design support – supporting the human experts in the space. Look for very high value tasks to make it worthwhile

But that is more than enough to be getting on with for now…….

February 21, 2018 By David Terrar

Global Legal Hackathon in London this weekend – an update

What happens when you get a bunch of lawyers, coders, designers, consultants and marketing types with their laptops and cloud platforms together over a weekend? Well, we think it will turn in to something special!

Just over 3 weeks ago Agile Elephant volunteered, along with Cambridge Strategy Group and Pinsent Masons to host the London stream the Global Legal Hackathon (GLH). We mean this weekend, 2 days time on February 23-25 at Pinsent Masons’ london office in the City. A winner will be declared for London on Sunday and that team will go through to a global competition with all the other cities, culminating with a winner announced at a banquet in New York on April 21. This will be the world’s largest legal hackathon happening simultaneously in over 40 cities and 20 countries.

All of the details and how to register are at: LegalHackathon.London

It’s been a mad 3 weeks getting our act together, using social media to connect and get the message out. Our friends at diginomica have written about it this way:

Law firm Pinsent Masons hosts upcoming Global Legal Hackathon London

Over on CompareTheCloud I did this guest post:

Join the World’s Largest Legal Hackathon this weekend

The Law Sites blog has thrown down a worthy gauntlet and challenged us to change the world for the better with:

With ‘Hadfield Challenges,’ Global Legal Hackathon Urges Participants to Address ‘Problems Worth Solving’

But just in case you haven’t seen the details, here is what it’s all about and where we are at with 2 days to go.

What is the goal of a team entering the GLH?
The goal is to apply innovative ideas and emerging technologies to progress the business of law or facilitate access to justice for the public. Teams of 3 to 6 will come up with a prototype or proposal at the end of the hackathon to present in front of a panel of judges. We expect ideas using technologies like AI, Machine Learning, Chatbots, Blockchain, or the Internet of Things.

Where and when?
At Pinsent Masons office at 30 Crown Place, Earl Street, London EC2A 4ES, (including their client centre on the 15th floor with stunning views over London) over the weekend of February 23-25. 18:00 start on Friday, working all day Saturday and most of Sunday, judging takes place from 16:00-18:00 on Sunday and a winner will be announced before 19:00.

Who are the Judges and Mentors?

Our judges are Christina Blacklaws, Deputy Vice President of the Law Society, Frank Jennings the “Cloud Lawyer”, and Dr Richard Sykes chair of the Cloud Industry Forum and Joanna Goodman, Author and IT columnist for the Law Society Gazette.

Our mentors, to help advise and keep the teams on track include Sophia Adams-Bhati, Julie Gottlieb, Richard Tromans, Silvia Cambie, Dennis Howlett, Alan Patrick, Janet Parkinson, Rob Millard and me.

Who is supporting this?

There are a lot of people to thank! IBM and Microsoft are providing developers some free access to their cloud platforms. LexisNexis & JG Consulting are our local sponsors. The Law Society, the Society for Computers and Law and Disruptive.Live are supporting us too. The Global sponsors are Integra, IBM Watson Legal, the Global Legal Blockchain Consortium, Cadence, LawDroid and ONE400

Who will be Hacking?

We’ve got teams entered from LexisNexis, Pinsent Masons, Vodafone, and Hult International Business School. Other participants are coming from IBM, Fliplet, Jurit LLP, Hook Tangaza, Sumitomo Electric Finance UK, Said Business School, Legalytics, Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyr Inc, The Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for England and Wales, European Banking Authority, The Founder, Legal Utopia, The Law Society, Bryan Cave, Queen Mary University, Thomson Reuters, Kitmobs, Look, YADA Events, Teal Legal, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, City University, Oxford University, and Westminster University. We’ve got capacity for 110 and 12 teams, but we still need more participants to sign up.

How can you get involved in the GLH?

Hacker teams and team members – Anyone involved in the law, interested in the law, involved in technology for the law, or coders and technologists who want to join the fun. We know some firms will submit teams, and other teams will form around a great idea at the GLH.
Helpers – We need volunteers over the weekend to make it happen and keep everyone happy.
Mentors – We need subject matter experts and technologists who can mentor the teams over the weekend to help crystallise their ideas, challenge them, or keep them on track.
Judges – We’ve got 3 great judges, but may add 1 or 2 more.
Sponsors – As well as the venue we will be providing food and drinks, name tags and supplies. We may even add a main prize and additional prizes. We need sponsors interested in helping us fund all of this – modest amounts in the range £250-500. This is a ‘not for profit’ exercise for the hosts, but we need to cover our costs (mostly pizza and drinks).

Follow us on Social Media
We will use social media hashtags #GlobalLegalHack & #GLH2018. Follow the GLH on Twitter at @WorldHackathon and the London organisers @robmillard & @DT. GLH have also partnered with legal media sources ArtificialLawyer.com and Legal Talk Network. Our friends at Disruptive.Live will be generating video and live content and diginomica and the Law Society Gazette will be reporting on the event.

We want to have fun, and really make a difference for the legal profession. Will we? Please come and join us and find out!

February 18, 2018 By David Terrar

What is Design Thinking?

Is Design Thinking important? We think it is – it’s one of our 8 building blocks for digital transformation. But what is it, and why? In the run up to the Global Legal Hackathon, we thought we’d distil our workshop slides and ideas on the topic in to this blog post to explain it.

Let’s set the scene with five quotes from experts and artists you will recognise explaining what design really is:

“The ultimate defense against complexity” – David Gelernter, Professor of Computer Science, Yale

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” – Leonardo da Vinci

“Design is a way of changing life and influencing the future” – Sir Ernest Hall. Pianist, Entrepreneur, and Philanthropist

“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” – Steve Jobs

“Design-thinking firms stand apart in their willingness to engage in the task of continuously redesigning their business… to create advances in both innovation and efficiency – the combination that produces the most powerful competitive edge.” – Roger Martin, author of the Design of Business

In that last quote Roger Martin equates Design Thinking with being able to continuously redesign your business, and “continuous reinvention” is another of our building blocks for digital transformation. In fact we think it’s the most important ingredient. So the approach has goodness, but does it have any real value?

The Design Value Index

When design principles are applied to strategy and innovation the success rate for innovation dramatically improves. DMI and MotivStrategies, funded by Microsoft, began analyzing the performance of US companies committed to design as an integral part of their business strategy. The Index tracked the value of 15 publicly held companies – Apple, Coca Cola, Ford, Herman-Miller, IBM, Intuit, Newell-Rubbermaid, Nike, Procter & Gamble, Starbucks, Starwood, Steelcase, Target, Walt Disney and Whirlpool. According to their 2014 study, they have outperformed the S&P 500 over the past 10 years by an extraordinary 219%.

What is Design Thinking?

The topic has a history right back to the 60s and a lot of thinkers and contributors have been involved. In 1987 Peter Rowe of Harvard published Design Thinking; his book provided a systematic account of the process of designing in architecture and urban planning. In 1991 the design company IDEO was formed and showcased their design process, which drew heavily on the Stanford curriculum. They are widely accepted as one of the companies that brought Design Thinking to the mainstream. Then in 2005 Stanford’s d.school began teaching design thinking as a formal method. Take a look at IDEO’s Sir David Kelley in his excellent 2007 TED talk (see below) explaining that product design has become much less about the hardware and more about the user experience.

It is a user-centred approach to problem solving with these ingredients:

Human centred
Mindful of process
Show don’t tell
Bias towards action
Radical collaboration
Culture of prototyping

Nigel Cross (2007), in his book Designerly Ways of Knowing, says, “Everything we have around us has been designed. Design ability is, in fact, one of the three fundamental dimensions of human intelligence. Design, science, and art form an ‘AND’ not an ‘OR’ relationship to create the incredible human cognitive ability.”

Science — finding similarities among things that are different
Art — finding differences among things that are similar
Design — creating feasible ‘wholes’ from infeasible ‘parts’

The classic flow of Design Thinking is to:

Empathise (search for rich stories and find some love)
Define (user need and insights – their POV)
Ideate (ideas, ideas, ideas)
Prototype (build to learn)
Test (show, don’t tell)
Start all over and iterate the flow as much as possible

Empathise – Empathy is the foundation of a human-centered design process where you observe and engage with users and immerse yourself to uncover their needs. Look for issues they may or may not be aware of. Think in terms of guiding innovation efforts and identify the right users to design for. Look to discover the emotions that guide their behaviours.

Define – The define mode is when you unpack and synthesize your empathy findings into compelling needs and insights, and scope a specific and meaningful challenge. It’s critical to the design process because it explicitly expresses the problem you are striving to address through your efforts. Often, in order to be truly generative, you must first reframe the challenge based on new insights you have gained through your design work.

Ideate – Ideate is the mode of your design process in which you aim to generate radical design alternatives. Mentally it represents a process of “going wide” in terms of concepts and outcomes – it is a mode of “flaring” rather than “focus”. Step beyond obvious solutions and try and harness collective perspectives. Uncover unexpected areas of exploration. Create fluency (volume) and flexibility (variety) in your innovation options. Get the obvious solutions out of your heads and think differently. This is where you can explore wild ideas, while trying to stay on topic.

Prototype – Prototyping is getting ideas and explorations out of your head and into the physical world. A prototype can be anything that takes a physical form – be it a wall of post-it notes, a role-playing activity, a space, an object, a model, an interface, or even a storyboard. You need to learn. Solve disagreements. Start a conversation. Fail quickly and cheaply. But still manage the solution-building process.

Test – Testing is the chance to get feedback on your solutions, refine solutions to make them better, and continue to learn about your users. Prototype as if you know you’re right, but test as if you
know you’re wrong. You test to refine your prototypes and solutions, to learn more about your user, with the goal of testing and refining your POV.

Back to the beginning – Start again. Iterate as much as time allows.

Ideas and techniques to help the flow

Now we’ve got you thinking design process, here are some ideas and techniques you can use in the flow to make it more effective:

Assume a beginner’s mindset – Don’t judge, just observe, engage, and don’t influence. Question everything. Be truly curious. Find patterns. Listen. Really listen.

Story Share-and-Capture – Use post-it notes and a white board. Storytelling is key to getting everyone up to speed. Listen and probe for more information. Look for the nuance and the meaning. Start synthesising. Capture every single, interesting detail.

What? | How? | Why? – Divide a sheet or the whiteboard into three sections: What?, How?, and Why? Start with concrete observations (What). What is the person you’re observing doing? Notice and it write down. Try to be objective and don’t make assumptions in this first part. Move to understanding (How). How are they doing what they are doing? Does it require effort? Do they appear rushed? Use descriptive phrases packed with adjectives. Step out on a limb of interpretation (Why). Why are they doing what they’re doing? What are their motivations and emotions. Understand the meaning and assumptions of the situation.

Interview for Empathy – Ask why. Encourage stories. Look for inconsistencies. Pay attention to nonverbal cues. Don’t be afraid of silence. Don’t suggest answers to your questions. Ask questions neutrally. Don’t ask binary questions. Make sure you’re prepared to capture everything.

Journey Map – Sketch out the lifecycle of the whole journey from start to finish, and go beyond the normal start and finish.

I Like, I Wish, What If – Meet as a group and any person can express a “Like,” a “Wish,” or a “What if” succinctly as a headline. As a group, share dozens of thoughts in a session. It is useful to have one person capture the feedback (type or write each headline).

Check out other techniques such as Camera Study, Extreme Users, Analogous Empathy, Composite Character Profile, Powers of Ten, 2×2 Matrix (we Elephants love that one), Why-How Laddering, Point-of-View Analogy, “How Might We” Questions. They are all in the d.school materials.

I want to know more

All of the techniques mentioned above have detailed explanations in the d.school resources. Check out the following links and resources:

https://dschool.stanford.edu/groups/designresources/

http://dschool.stanford.edu/use-our-methods/

http://dschool.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/METHODCARDS-v3-slim.pdf

10 talks about the beauty — and difficulty — of being creative

Or contact us!

In conclusion

You don’t have to be a designer to think like one. While learning to be a good designer takes years, you can think like a designer and design the way you lead, manage, create and innovate.

Design Thinking seeks to build ideas up, unlike critical thinking which breaks them down. Design Thinking draws upon logic, imagination, intuition, and systemic reasoning, to explore possibilities of what could be, and to create desired outcomes that benefit the end user (the customer).

Please, start a Design Thinking conversation with us.

February 11, 2018 By David Terrar

Get involved in the Global Legal Hackathon in London

You will have heard that Cambridge Strategy Group, Agile Elephant and Pinsent Masons are the joint team hosting the London event for the world’s largest legal hackathon – the Global Legal Hackathon (GLH) on February 23-25. A winner will be declared for London and that team will go through to a global competition, culminating with a winner announced at a banquet in New York on April 21.

Here is an update of where we are at so far.

First, two of the founders of the GLH, David Fisher, the CEO of Integra Ledger, and Aileen Schultz, their Director of Network Intelligence, introduce the Hackathon in this video:

Next, we’ve created a new site with all of the London specific details at LegalHackathon.London where you can register for the event, and find out the ways you can enter a team, become a helper, a mentor or one of our sponsors:

Lastly, we can report that the word is spreading, and we have a steady flow of registered participants. We’ve got teams from Pinsent Masons, and LexisNexis (who are also our first local sponsor), as well as sign ups from Vodafone Group, Hook Tangaza, Legal Utopia, Bryan Cave, JG Consultants, City University, Thomson Reuters, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, YADA Events, FromCounsel, Jurit, Mills & Reeve, Fliplet, and Westminster University. On top of those there are a number of organisations who’ve committed to be involved but haven’t registered yet. Microsoft are supporting us with free access to the Azure platform for developers, and IBM will be giving us access to their technology too. More technology partners will be announced soon.

Our friends at diginomica and the Artificial Lawyer will be coming along to report from the event, and we have teamed up with Disruptive.Live to produce video content and live streams.

Watch out for more news and announcements in the coming week.

Find out about London

The Global Event

February 2, 2018 By David Terrar

We want you for the Global Legal Hackathon in London!

Agile Elephant are proud to be joining Cambridge Strategy Group and Pinsent Masons as the joint team hosting the London event for the world’s largest legal hackathon – the Global Legal Hackathon on February 23-25. It’s only 3 weeks away, and we need your help! We need hacker teams and team members, helpers for the weekend to make it happen, mentors to advise the teams and keep them on track, and sponsors to help cover the costs – this is a not for profit initiative for the 3 host companies involved, and we are delighted to be supported by the Law Society too.

So what is this thing all about? Let me explain….

What is the Global Legal Hackathon?
The Global Legal Hackathon (GLH) is happening simultaneously over the weekend of February 23-25 in more than 40 cities, across 6 continents. The purpose is the rapid development of solutions to improve the legal industry using innovative ideas and emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, or the Internet of Things. The GLH will engage law schools, law firms and in-house departments, legal technology companies, governments, and service providers to the legal industry across the globe.

What is a Hackathon?
A hackathon is a competition where multi-disciplinary teams come together to collaborate, build and launch mobile or web apps aimed at solving a particular problem. They usually work in small groups over a couple of days. People can come individually or as a team, with an existing idea to pitch, or to listen and join one of the teams that will be formed at the start of the event. The goal is to come up with a prototype or proposal at the end of the hackathon to present in front of a panel of judges.

In our case teams will be a minimum of 3 and a suggested maximum of 6. Anyone has the chance to pitch an idea at the start of the event on Friday evening, teams will be formed, they’ll work over the weekend, and then present to the judges at the end of the weekend. A winner will be declared for London and that team will go through to a global competition, culminating with a winner announced at a banquet in New York on April 21.

It is a competition, but we aim to be inclusive. All teams must be willing to accept individual participants on the first day of the event.

What is the goal of a team entering the GLH?
The goal is to apply innovative ideas and emerging technologies to progress the business of law or facilitate access to justice for the public.

Who is organising the London GLH?
The London event is being organised by Cambridge Strategy Group, Agile Elephant, and Pinsent Masons who are kindly providing the venue at 30 Crown Place, Earl Street, London EC2A 4ES.

Who is behind the GLH?
The GLH is being organised globally by Integra, IBM Watson Legal, the Global Legal Blockchain Consortium, Cadence and ONE400.

Who are the judges for the London GLH?
We are assembling a balanced team of 5 judges, which we hope to announce soon.

How do I get involved in the GLH?
It’s free to get involved – go to GlobalLegalHackathon.com and register. Then download the Cadence event app to your phone and complete your profile. To find the app on the app store, it is best to search for Cadence and events. We will use a mix of email, the Cadence app, social media and our various websites to make announcements and keep you posted on our progress.

In what ways can I get involved in the GLH?
We need:

Hacker teams and team members – Anyone involved in the law, interested in the law, involved in technology for the law, or coders and technologists who want to join the fun. We know some firms will submit teams, and other teams will form around a great idea at the GLH.
Helpers – We need volunteers over the weekend of February 23-25 to make it happen and keep everyone happy.
Mentors – We need subject matter experts and technologists who can mentor the teams over the weekend to help crystallise their ideas, challenge them, or keep them on track.
Judges – We are assembling a balanced team of 5 (don’t call us, we’ll call you).
Sponsors – As well as the venue we will be providing food and drinks, name tags and supplies. We may even add a main prize and additional prizes. We need sponsors interested in helping us fund all of this. This is a ‘not for profit’ exercise for the hosts, but we need to cover our costs.

Who do I contact if I want to participate or help?
Get in touch with Rob Millard or David Terrar, but please register, download Cadence to your phone and then you will be able to message us directly through the app.

How do I make a noise about this?
We will be broadcasting on social media channels using the hashtags #GlobalLegalHack & #GLH2018. Follow the GLH on Twitter at @WorldHackathon and follow the London organisers at @robmillard & @DT. GLH have also partnered with legal media sources ArtificialLawyer.com and Legal Talk Network.

Where do I find out more?
All of the detail about the event including the judging rubric, event schedule, the other cities and companies involved and more can be found at GlobalLegalHackathon.com, where you will find guidance for attendees, guidance for hosts, or just ask.

We’re really looking forward to it!

UPDATE:

The London stream of the GLH now has its own website at LegalHackathon.London

January 25, 2018 By Alan Patrick

Blockchain Economics – the Reality. Can your application afford the transaction costs?

The last time we looked at Blockchain economics was in late 2016 in one of our meetups when Dinis Guarda presented a paper on its likely evolution in the IoT space (see summary over here). Since then we were asked to look at how blockchain may be used in specific industries, in this case professional services.

I won’t go into the specifics of how blockchain works (it’s in the article about Dinis I linked to above) but it is worth summarising the plusses and minuses of blockchain here:

Good News:

Highly Distributed – uses a highly meshed network which increases system resilience
High degree of inbuilt security – chained blocks of transactions and the logic of nodes agreeing transactions before being confirmed can survive many hacks to a system
The very high level of cryptography used (the “Hashing” calculations) puts a high load on anyone wishing to hack the system by brute force. You can click here to get various security solutions for protecting your confidential data.
This Distributed architecture means you don’t need a centralised Hub to run it, or to have a trusted central party.

Bad News

However, as with all engineering, everything is a trade-off – cost vs. capability, security vs. speed, network resilience vs. network operation load, etc. And blockchain cannot avoid this, its benefits bring problems:

Highly Distributed hits system scalability – a fully meshed system increases the amount of network communication required by the square of the number of nodes.
Inbuilt security and cryptography takes a very long time to process, so the system is not capable of agreeing transactions speedily – it can only process a handful of transactions a second, and can take hours if not days to confirm a Bitcoin transaction for example
In addition this adds costs – the hashing calculations are extremely energy intensive, calculations at the moment are that it costs in the order of $1000 to process a Bitcoin, and there are 12.5 per block, so it’s c $12,500 per block. So a “block” of about 2,500 transactions (that’s the Bitcoin size) means about $0.50 (50 cents) per transaction. Compare that to fractions of a cent for a typical financial transaction today.
Bitcoin transactions are very simple and have a low data requirement. However, the more data required per transaction (say a smart contract) the fewer transactions possible per block (a Bitcoin block for example has a 1 Mb limit) and up goes the price per transaction. In addition if data has to changed up goes the processing load.
It’s still not fully secure – Cryptocurrency Blockchains can be (and have been) hacked by exploitable flaws in the data stored in transactions, and by rogue actors on the inside.

In summary

So in essence blockchain technology (as designed today) is great if you want:

highly secure,
highly resilient technology
no trusted 3rd party.

But, for blockchain to work it also needs transactions to be:

relatively low volume (c 6 a second)
not particularly time sensitive (hours, or even days to complete)
relatively high transaction value to mitigate the blockchain operating costs.

In addition you have to value the distributed/low trust required feature of the system, as if you don’t need it then it’s a very high overhead, with transaction costs several order of magnitude higher vs. other existing approaches.

Worryingly, we see a lot of mooted applications in the press where it is clear there is not a hope in hell that Blockchains (in their current form), will be fast enough or cheap enough to work (see Dinis’s talk on IoT – linked to above – for a typical example). Somewhere between the hype, hope and heuristics is a major disconnect. In our view a lot of applications currently being suggested for blockhain at the moment won’t be able to cope with its operational and economic overheads.

Now as it happens (and fortunately for our client), some key Professional Services applications do fit the requirements of this profile, so it is worth them looking at blockchain technologies for applications in their businesses. So good news then.

But, even so, one should always compare the blockchain options to the existing, cheaper “Good Enoughs” around today. Also, keep in mind Dinis’s thesis for the evolution of IoT blockchains, which may also occur in Professional Services, i.e. there will also be a huge temptation to employ more scalable/lower cost/faster performance blockchain system designs with:

Less distributed architecture to scale it for speed and cost
Less complex security in the blockchain to reduce the processing load time and cost

But this, in Dinis’ view, will probably be partly done by implementing them as “private and less distributed” systems behind IT datacentre security walls.

Note that in this case the owner of such a “Walled Garden” blockchain will very probably put themselves in the position of the “Trusted 3rd Party” supplier and, as Dinis noted for IoT blockchains:

…there will be a “race” in each industry segment (and maybe across them) as major players vie to be the Industry champion in their segment, and let network effects drive them to dominance. This will of course give these players major control, information asymmetry, and the ability to price as they see fit.

This is not unlike most network businesses’ evolution – telecoms, electronic payments processing, internet, social networks etc. where initially players try to build “walled garden” services to maximise their revenues, and only after a long time does it commoditise, eventually, into a regulated utility.

October 27, 2017 By Alan Patrick

Digital Summit 2017 Workshop – Driving Digital Transformation in the Enterprise

This year’s London Enterprise Digital Summit 2017 Summit Workshop is on Driving Digital Transformation in the Enterprise

We plan to cover 4 main topics, with our latest experience from helping large enterprise clients in the UK and Germany expand their transformation programs over the last year, plus all our previous research and work, of course. These topics are:

1. Understanding the impact of a Collaborative Working Environment (a.k.a. the impact of Enterprise Social Networks, Social Intranets and the Digital Workplace), looking at:

Models & Frameworks for Understanding Collaborative Technologies – we look at these technologies, how they work, where they are valuable – and where not so useful. We will wrap it into our 4C model – Collaboration, Cooperation, Coordination and Communication.
Interdependencies of Technology, Corporate Behavior & Organisational Design – in this section we bring our own experience and UK research, plus our reviews of the many case studies from others who have spoken at our Digital Summits in Germany, France and the UK over the last few. In short, the technology is merely the start, it’s all about the people, and especially how the organisation is structured and needs to be adapted to use these technologies properly.
Strategic Consequences & Implications – These technologies have real impact across the organisation, and will drive shifts in how the organisation operates. This will create opportunities for some, and threats to others. Social Technology amplifies an organisation;s strengths but can also amplify it’s weaknesses. Any major Transformation needs to take these issues into account

2. Strategic Approaches to managing Transformational Change

Measurement Parameters & Key Indicators for the evaluation of the “Change in Progress” – i.e. how to measure and monitor what is happening. “What gets measured, gets done” they say – but also “You only get what you measure”. We look at metrics people are using with the tried and tested Agile Elephant approach – “What Works, What Doesn’t…and What’s Next”

3, Recommendations for Being Your Own Consultant

Our ever popular section on how to do all this without buying our services (what could go wrong with that….) especially looking at:

Begin, Improve or Expand your ESN/Social Intranet/Digital Workplace – We have learned a lot over the last year about what steps are required to Improve/Expand an initial implementation, and will add this to our review of how to approach the process of implementing these systems. Main areas examined are:
- Diagnosing the Organisational Requirements & Maturity Level – thsi is a key part of starting an implementation or improvement/expansion process.
- Finding the High Impact Opportunities – our experience is that unless these systems solve business requirements, all the energy and excitement when starting off slowly deflates as there is diminishing takeup. We look at how to work out where these system can give great “bang for the bucks” and get people behind them.
- Engagement – Making it Human – without people engaging, these systems whither on the vine. We look at “what works, what doesn’t” in getting people to use these systems with enthusiasm.

4. Building a business case and Defining the ROI

In other words, getting the money and movement to make it happen. We look at how to build a “rough cut” ROI that works for an initial business case in order to secure resources in an enterprise environment.

There Will Be Cake….and Booze

As per usual, the event features the best teas and cakes in London, supplied by the British Academy. it’s worth attending for these alone, plus of course the opportunity to hear the stories of the other people’s experience in a “Chatham House” rules environment for the day, to give you support and inspiration.

And after the event join us for a drink at the ICA (Instutute of Contemporary Arts) downstairs….

Go here for more information about the conference, and to book your ticket.

Or contact us

June 7, 2017 By David Terrar

#transformCIO – a new live streamed interview series of leading CIOs & CTOs

In collaboration with my good friends at Compare the Cloud we’ve started an interview series on CTC’s Disruptive Tech TV platform. We’ve called the programme #transformCIO and plan for it to be a weekly series, broadcast live at 14:30 UK time every Tuesday, and available on demand on Periscope, Vimeo, and elsewhere too. My first victim yesterday was Finbarr Joy, who has been CTO of Willam Hill, then Group CTO for Lebara, and as of today is CTO of a new start-up called SuperBet (literally, today is his first day!). I’ll be interviewing CIOs and CTOs who are at the leading edge of changing the way technology is deployed and viewed in their organisations. I want to get to the heart of the way that the CIO/CTO’s role is changing, how the leaders in the profession are handling the changes and dealing with (or leading) the digital disruption that is happening around us.

In the interview series we will talk around the key themes of:

IT leading Digital Transformation
Doing everything faster
Attracting and keeping talent
The changing role of the CIO
Emerging tech – what’s next?

I first met Finbarr several years back when he was talking at a techUK event about how he transformed William Hill, an 80 year old UK brand, from an 18-24 month time to market for new products to 3 weeks! We talk about that “fail fast” story, along with his attitude to Cloud Computing, data centres, agile, DevOps, shadow IT, holding on to talent, low-code solutions, emerging tech and more. I also asked for his thoughts around the recent British Airways system outage. Every #transformCIO victim gets to make a business book recommendation – I let Finbarr get away with two. Please take a look – Finbarr’s got some “spot on” observations about how the profession should be viewed, dealing with disruption and the right way to approach the head of technology role within today’s fast moving digital landscape.

#TransformCIO Episode 1- Interview with SuperBet’s CTO, Finbarr Joy from Compare The Cloud on Vimeo.

Episode 2 will be next Tuesday at 14:30 with Stephen Deakin. Amongst other things Steve was CTO for the Metropolitan Police, so we might just talk a little around security, along with our normal themes. If you are interested in taking the hot seat as a CIO or CTO facing these challenges, then please contact us and book a slot in the schedule.

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We love the smell of Blockchain in the morning

London was part of the largest Legal Hackathon ever

Artificial Intelligence in Professional Services

Global Legal Hackathon in London this weekend – an update