I am astounded that when it comes to ICT education, some senior figures in the IT industry still don’t seem to get it (Back to the drawing board for ICT education).

“The biggest challenge is for IT giants to get involved and provide the resources” is not the answer at all. 

You don't want product-specific training, whether it be Visual Studio or Oracle. The students need to learn about programming and computing as a generic subject and there are ample resources for that within the open-source market. Anyway, by the time the students of today reach the workplace, most of the technology base will be open source and any application that they may have learnt will be out of date, redundant or deprecated. 

Specialised applications will be learnt by an IT professional while in the workplace because that is what their employer wants them to use. Education must be about training the student so that they have the ability to learn such applications in the workplace.

Mike Ryder

In some ways working with the big vendors is a bit like doing business with banks; “too big to fail” comes into play, with the sheer cost and difficulty of migration creating a de facto lock-in (CIOs rail against vendor lock-in).

It also doesn’t help that the vendors practically NEVER have comparable pricing arrangements – what’s free from one is chargeable from another. The only way to avoid making a costly mistake is with an absolutely watertight RFP and careful negotiation.

Gavin Burke

Salesmen are very much not dead, at least judging by the volume of sales calls I get (Death of the IT salesman). IT vendors really do need to get rid of the car forecourt sales mentality and stop thinking that all you have to do is tell me about your features and benefits and I'll roll over and get out the cheque book. My pet hate is the opening question “Have you got a project?” and my routine answer is “no” whether it’s true or not.

Lord Gaga

It comes as no real surprise that MPs have heavily criticised the Department of Health (DoH) for the failings of the NHS IT programme (Parliament slams DoH’s handling of NPfIT). Indeed, there have been three fundamental issues from the outset that have contributed to its flaws.

First, there was next to no engagement with the stakeholders or potential end-users as to what goals the DoH was aiming to achieve from the project. Secondly, as a consequence of this, the suppliers had insufficient direction as to precisely what end goal was required and being aimed for. Finally, the project has expanded so much that it has become unmanageable.

The three faults of the NHS programme could have been readily countered were an agile development methodology applied from the start.

Agile intrinsically requires a regular detailed engagement with the end-users, such that progress can be constantly assessed according to the specific need. Because of this process of ongoing assessment and revision, projects where requirements are unclear stand a greater chance of success as the accuracy of the end goal is constantly examined and even changed if deemed appropriate. Provided the end result delivers real business value, it will be rightly deemed a success, even though it may not match the originally intended goal. Sometimes a project may take a little longer to complete, but that is much better than a total and costly failure.

Andrew Wilcox, IPL

As much as we all like to have the latest, fastest and most versatile technology, I truly believe that most schools are not getting the most out of their existing systems (Old technology holding back student development). Many will not be aware of what existing hardware and software can do.

Unfortunately for some schools, however, the technicians and network managers they have are not able (or do not have the time and training) to maintain the systems properly. In these cases, they will be keen to spend on new equipment to get the boost in performance and reliability, albeit as a temporary respite.
Arthur Butterfield