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urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entries-547b823c-348d-4d07-93a3-1ee6e8aae16c Tony Morgan Innovation in Outsourcing 18 2015-11-02T14:31:47-05:00 IBM Connections - Blogs urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entry-079f9278-307d-4ef0-a888-c590d8def857 My Last Blog on This Site Tony Morgan firstname.lastname@example.com 060002586N active Comment Entries application/atom+xml;type=entry Likes 2015-11-02T14:30:38-05:00 2015-11-02T14:31:47-05:00
 My Last Blog on This Site

 Just a very quick one this time to say that after 25 After 25+ years working in the IT industry, including the last 17 years working for IBM, I've been given a fantastic opportunity to take a sabbatical break as part of one of IBM's employee programs. For a number of reasons the timing is perfect and although I will miss a number of things (including the people, our clients and direct access to so many innovation programs and resources) this opportunity is just too good to turn down.

 I've decided to create and maintain a new blog focused on my sabbatical which will of course include lots of content about innovation.

 Anyway I hope you enjoy it - you can find it here... https://tonymorgansite.wordpress.com/

 Cheers and thanks for reading, Tony Morgan.
 My Last Blog on This Site Just a very quick one this time to say that after 25 After 25+ years working in the IT industry, including the last 17 years working for IBM, I've been given a fantastic opportunity to take a sabbatical break as part of... 0 0 96 urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entries-547b823c-348d-4d07-93a3-1ee6e8aae16c Tony Morgan 2015-11-02T14:31:47-05:00 urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entry-917c1106-9246-434c-b220-089199ccae2f Combining Innovation and IBM Design Thinking Tony Morgan email@example.com 060002586N active Comment Entries application/atom+xml;type=entry Likes 2015-07-17T08:25:40-04:00 2015-07-17T08:44:57-04:00
 Combining Innovation and IBM Design Thinking

 I've spent most of this week in the US at a major training and enablement session for 450 IBM client facing technical leaders.

 The two main focus areas were IBM Design Thinking and Innovation Thinking - I co-led the Innovation Thinking stream with Jeremy Caine as guests from the UK - and we must say the hospitality was very good!

 The approach of the event was on learning and doing - practical team exercises - quite a challenge with a huge room filled with 450 people but the fact it really worked which was a tribute to Claudine and the event organisers.

 Karel and Julie, who led the IBM Design Thinking stream, did a great job - introducing the concepts, framework and a number of techniques. They got everybody up on their feet working - so by that end of the Design Thinking day everyone was thinking and enthused about how they could apply what they had learned back in the day job.

 Jeremy and I covered Innovation Thinking and took the same approach. We started with a very brief main stage double act - topped and tailed with a couple of short videos to reinforce the points - and the rest of the day was focused on practical exercises.

 These were all based around real client case study based scenarios - from how to earn the right and then to develop an innovation agenda with a client to how to develop and deliver "innovation" to address key client challenges and/or opportunities. (From my previous blogs I hope it goes without saying that we also covered the basics on finding out what innovation means to the client and where to focus etc etc).

 The difference we made this time was to imbed a number of IBM Design Thinking techniques into the Innovation Thinking practical exercises. The teams were encouraged to create empathy maps, hills and storyboards to help them better understand the client, the challenge and develop a more compelling approach and solution to address the innovation opportunity.

 It's amazing what small, effective, collaborative teams can create in less than an hour. We had teams creating new ideas, feeding back fantastic storyboards, demoing prototype solutions, the list goes on. The results were stunning.

 Feedback was also very very good - with lots of comments on how what was learned really will be applied with clients in the coming days and weeks.

 Moving forward we're increasingly including elements of IBM Design Thinking into our smaller group Client Innovation Master Class education sessions, which run in alignment and alongside IBM's deeper Design Thinking training and bootcamps.

 I consider the combination of Innovation Thinking and IBM Design Thinking to be key. We should use and apply tools, techniques and approaches from each on their own or in combination as most applicable to the situations we find ourselves in. These will increasingly form a great foundation layer for the kit bag of the client facing technical leader of the future in IBM and beyond.
 Combining Innovation and IBM Design Thinking I've spent most of this week in the US at a major training and enablement session for 450 IBM client facing technical leaders. The two main focus areas were IBM Design Thinking and Innovation... 1 1 649 urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entries-547b823c-348d-4d07-93a3-1ee6e8aae16c Tony Morgan 2015-11-02T14:31:47-05:00 urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entry-14d0b892-e174-49c8-a6f0-4e27fef65323 Innovation Ecosystem - and Success Stories Make it Real Tony Morgan email@example.com 060002586N active Comment Entries application/atom+xml;type=entry Likes 2015-05-07T08:01:01-04:00 2015-05-07T08:02:47-04:00
 Shorter blog this time as I will be focusing on a challenging client specific assignment over the coming months but don't want to lose momentum on the innovation activity so here's a quick update. Focus this time is on the growing innovation ecosystem and use of success stories...

 Over the last few months I have been driving a great deal of innovation enabling work for our IBM teams. This has included running Innovation Master Class sessions for global teams across IBM's business units - and running a set of focused Innovation Master Classes for people working with existing IBM services clients across Europe.

 I have been very fortunate to have been able to run Innovation Master Class sessions in 7 different countries in the first part of 2015 - and whilst many of the opportunities and challenges are the same, some of the cultural differences across different countries are fascinating. My colleague, Danny Williams, and I found this out for sure when running a Six Hats Thinking based exercise in Beijing in China in 2014. When we next meet up ask me about this one and I'll tell you the full story...!

 I won't give the game away by going into the detailed content of the Innovation Master Classes but... the focus starts with some of the basics around innovation and then on engaging each client and understanding innovation and priority focus areas from a client centric point of view. We then cover a simple but very repeatable (and successful!) approach to joint innovation with clients - with increasing use of real life client case studies and exercises to make it real.

 One of the sessions focuses on identifying the innovation "resources, assets and capabilities" IBM teams can bring to bear to develop and deliver innovation with their clients - which covers a huge spectrum and breadth and depth of "capabilities". The interesting thing for me is how this has now evolved from a set of IBM capabilities to a true ecosystem - covering great innovation partners like Apple and Twitter to start-ups.

 At the end of the day its about aligning this great wealth of talent to what is important to each client - and bringing it to bear to help select the right ideas and deliver on them quickly - whether its something new to the client or new to the world. And of course confirming the sponsorship and the business case - in addition to proving the capability.

 A second area of focus has been systematically identifying and sharing many of the best innovation examples delivered with our clients where we have created a portal (internal to IBM at the moment) to these for inspiration and reuse. This work has been a lot of fun - and helped me engage many great people who have great stories to tell about the different types of innovation they have delivered with their own clients.

 These innovation success stories really do make it real by showing the innovation in a personal way. They vary from -

 A brilliant story about how one of IBM's service delivery experts applied Watson Analytics in a new way to combat and very quickly resolve a denial of service attack on a client system to...

 A fantastic example of how one IBM client team applied a combination of cloud. mobility and analytics capabilities to address the business challenges and opportunities of their client and worked with the client to transform the organisation - and help them save cost at the same time

 I personally found both of these stories and many others awe inspiring.

 So now to my client assignment - with of course a focus on how we can apply innovation to this!

 As always comments and feedback to the points above and beyond are very welcome...
 Shorter blog this time as I will be focusing on a challenging client specific assignment over the coming months but don't want to lose momentum on the innovation activity so here's a quick update. Focus this time is on the growing innovation ecosystem... 2 0 374 urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entries-547b823c-348d-4d07-93a3-1ee6e8aae16c Tony Morgan 2015-11-02T14:31:47-05:00 urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entry-82dae744-05f5-4e17-aca1-ae1a57dfef05 Innovation - More than Magic - by Design Tony Morgan firstname.lastname@example.com 060002586N active Comment Entries application/atom+xml;type=entry Likes 2015-01-23T12:25:17-05:00 2015-01-25T05:59:12-05:00
 Innovation - More than Magic - by Design

 Its not my usual style (honestly!) to write a blog which shamelessly plugs and promotes a new IBM paper but...

 Having worked with clients, read about, thought about and blogged before on "innovation culture" I was very interested to read the latest IBM Institute for Business Value exec report on innovation - "More than magic - How the most successful organizations innovate" and wanted to share a few thoughts.

 I wasn't involved in creating the report (IBM is quite a big company and all that) but along with a small team of co-collaborators I run a class on client facing collaborative innovation in IBM - and was really pleased to see some of our thinking and own client experiences backed up by the report - especially as the report took input from a survey of 1,000+ execs and direct reports across a wide range of industries.

 The report highlights that the most successful organisations "approach innovation differently" - there's a lot packed in there but I've picked out and paraphrase a few of my personal favourites -

 Innovation is now more open and increasingly occurs within and across ecosystems - more on this below

 Innovation involves teamwork and collaboration - ok this one is pretty obvious but it is the collaboration across organisations I see as key

 Innovation is designed to happen

 One key aspect is understanding what the full potential of new technologies will be - i.e. not just inventing them but seeing the value and exploiting them in an industry context

 Successful organisations align innovation activities with business objectives - and drive efforts in targeted areas - rather than trying "innovation" on everything

 Successful organisations see innovation as a critical business process, an enabler and a cultural imperative - more on this below too

 The ecosystem point pulls together a couple of threads of particular interest to me. The first is that increasingly in recent years as I have worked with clients to develop approaches for ongoing and sustainable joint innovation between the client and IBM, clients have started to ask me to scale the approach and make it replicable across a range of partner organisations. This is of course the right things to do - and well done on those clients for asking!

 The second thread on the ecosystem point is that I recently set up and chaired a debate at the IBM UK & Ireland Technical Consultancy Group (made up of IBM cross line of business technical leaders) on innovation relationships between enterprises and start-ups. In preparation for this debate we identified a number of technical leaders in IBM with strong points of view on the topic.

 To give the session some drama we structured it as a mock pre-election party leaders debate. A very topical approach at this time in the UK. Each point of view presenter was given a rosette and made a party leader. We even had the UK "Question Time" music for the introduction. The "party leaders" were asked to give an extreme view of their position as having a level of exclusivity of the truth - and like most politicians put into this position they didn't necessarily agree with all their points but argued their positions strongly. As chair of the debate and Welsh I styled myself as a slighter version of BBC presenter Huw Edwards (one for UK blog readers there).

 Get on with it, I hear you say, what happened? Well we had three points of view

 Innovation happens best in start-ups and so established enterprises who really want innovation need to partner with start-ups

 Established enterprises can learn from start-ups and create their own internal innovation culture and approach

 A final - more extreme position - that established enterprises have always driven innovation and don't need to partner or learn from start-ups

 We drove the debate, had great audience questions and inputs - developed a fourth point of view around the creation of stand-alone spin-offs focused on innovation - and had a vote. I won't repeat the results here. But we concluded - as you'd expect - that there are no totally right answers here. It depends on the context of your organisation and industry as the IBV study outlines. The reality is that most,and increasingly most successful, organisations will drive innovation in an ecosystem which includes their own organisation, takes input from customers and uses established enterprise partners and sometimes start-ups. Context as well as content is king.

 I work in a business that delivers long term services to clients and the other point I want to highlight is the importance of innovation culture. If ongoing innovation through the lifecycle of the relationship is to be successful, then the "innovation culture" needs to be spread across supplier and client organisations. Both, or all if more than two, must be aligned with key client goals and innovation activities need to be focused on client priorities and value. (Assuming of course that the drive for continuous service improvement and innovation at an incremental level is relentlessly continuing in parallel).

 Back to the IBM paper - and a key finding from the financial analysis is that innovative organisations outperform their competitors and that the most successful innovators create new types of business value in sustainable ways. I like this finding a lot...!

 The paper recommends organisations focus on three areas - with more detailed recommendations in each - they can be summarised as Organisation, Culture and Process.

 I'll finish on the innovation happens by design point.

 I've just moved from a role driving innovation with IBM's IT sourcing clients in the UK & Ireland to a similar role across Europe. I'm pleased to say that in my UK & Ireland role we have driven innovation for and with our clients by design and created a way of focusing on what was most important to each client.

 Of course there have sometimes been challenges on the IBM side and not every client is receptive to such an approach but I am pleased to say that we have seen a significant increase in our formal client satisfaction numbers and in innovation in particular. This result has been achieved by the hard work of many of my colleagues and also by many clients and its been a great experience. My abiding feeling is that this has been achieved by "more than magic" and so the report really resonates with me - and I hope it does with you. And if this blog helps the report reach and be useful to a few people in my own ecosystem I'll be even happier.

 Access the report online here! - http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/gbs/thoughtleadership/morethanmagic/
 Innovation - More than Magic - by Design Its not my usual style (honestly!) to write a blog which shamelessly plugs and promotes a new IBM paper but... Having worked with clients, read about, thought about and blogged before on "innovation... 0 0 458 urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entries-547b823c-348d-4d07-93a3-1ee6e8aae16c Tony Morgan 2015-11-02T14:31:47-05:00 urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entry-3c7cb402-ee81-45eb-a469-3494e9c063d2 Small Steps to Start an Innovation Culture Tony Morgan firstname.lastname@example.com 060002586N active Comment Entries application/atom+xml;type=entry Likes 2014-09-28T06:25:58-04:00 2014-09-29T03:42:01-04:00
 Small Steps to Start an Innovation Culture

 Let's start with a little context… I started thinking about this blog a little while ago sitting in the foyer of a training building waiting to enter a large auditorium type room to present on innovation to a large cross function client team.

 The topic I'd been asked to speak on was slightly different than normal, in that it wasn't a point of view on the latest technology trends or a specific innovation focus area like cloud, mobile or analytics. Neither was it on one of the other topics I frequently lead talks on – for example how to drive successful joint innovation together (although there was an element of that included).

 Instead I'd been invited to give a point of view on what innovation is, why it is so important and make some personal recommendations on the actions needed to create, drive and sustain an "innovation culture".

 As I sat there waiting for the call to go in, I reflected that all this was perhaps a bit removed from my background experience of being a technical leader in IBM. For example I was formerly the IBM Chief Architect on a number of client accounts but now have the somewhat grand title of Client Chief Innovation Officer.

 Not that I've lost my technical skills in this role. They have become broader. I still apply them all the time, particularly when developing and delivering specific client innovation projects. But I have taken on and (hopefully!) learned how to apply a lot of other skills at the same time. Often these are the softer skills – people, relationship, negotiation and communications. Personally I think these are all absolutely critical but I'd better get back to the point of the blog – innovation culture.

 On that day I considered I had a few things in my favour. I'd been doing a lot of reading and thinking around the topic over the last twelve months and I did have a point of view to discuss. Equally importantly I was speaking to what I consider to be a very progressive client team who I considered to be up for the discussion.

 What is innovation anyway - with a focus on delivery and value...

 The door opened and I was beckoned in. After a quick introduction I started on familiar ground – the old chestnut of what innovation means (for more detail see just about any other article I have written on innovation…). I shared my view that innovation can legitimately mean different things to different organisations and to different people and functions within the same organisation. Each organisation and team needs to think through what innovation really means to them in their own context.

 Then I gave a flavour of my own personal definition – "innovation is using ideas to do new things, or change the way we do existing things, to drive value for our businesses, customers and colleagues" and about "selecting the right ideas and delivering them." You can have great ideas but without the delivery there is no innovation.

 After asking the audience for their own favourite innovations I shared a couple of my own, including a modern one and an ancient one. The modern one was the iPhone (ok not that original but mine means a lot to me and I admire the way Apple bring a lot of technology together and then focus on the customer experience) and the historical one was not the invention of the first wheel but the innovation around use of a second wheel and particularly the axle between them. The delivery of which has driven an incalcuable amount of value over the years.

 What makes an innovative enterprise?

 It was then onto thoughts on what makes an innovative enterprise – amalgamated from various studies, papers and reports - and elements of a class that I give to client facing teams on innovation along with a small team of other IBMers. Without repeating en masse – innovation messages from the top, ideas from all, extensive external collaboration, integration of business and technology, balanced risk taking, management trust and an active flow of ideas into, out of and also outside of a managed innovation process - with metrics, rewards and positive communications. Ok I've repeat most of the points I made but for space I won't embellish them here. We also highlight that different models exist from incremental to disruptive and that often different organisations focus on and excel (or don't) in different types of innovation – business model, operations, service innovation and so on.

 Making innovation real with relevant stories

 At this stage I highlighted some of the innovations already happening in the client's own organisation – from significant examples taken from the corporate website to incremental and service innovations that I knew were already being driven by the client's team and an example of a joint service innovation between IBM and the client.

 I won't repeat these here as they are client specific but I will say that stories are important. People relate to them and they make this stuff real. I talked about these because many people in the room were directly involved with them. In a number of ways they were already innovators.

 The tagline of the last point was important – "innovation is something we can all do." It's not something that just the research or the innovation or the product people do. It comes in many guises – and it's always the delivery of value that is important.

 Starting steps...

 My short time slot was running out. How should the client develop an innovation culture? One of the starting points was already in place – innovation is definitely seen as and communicated as a priority from the CxO team. But how do they better make use of the great pool of untapped ideas in their people (and their partners like IBM)?

 Like the majority of organisations the client was not in a position to give a large part of the workforce half a day every couple of weeks to sit back and come up with new ideas. But I argued people still needed to make time to reflect – to think about what could be done better, what could be done differently and what shouldn't be done at all.

 My recommendations included taking some small starter steps. One of these was creating a low / no cost platform for highlighting and collaboratively developing ideas by using existing collaboration tools and re-purposing their use for a mini "Idea Jam" style online event.

 I stressed that this should be focused on a small number of questions or challenges around existing strategic priorities. Like many organisations, the client already has a to-do list as long as your arm so my recommendation was to use innovation, initially at least, to focus on these rather than create something totally new. How could things already planned be done faster, more efficiently, more cost effectively?

 I argued that the team should not try to do much at first but get this first focused ideas event right. Sponsor and drive the preparation and execution – engage as many as possible employees (and the IBM team too which in effect makes up a large part of the client's team) to join in, share and collaborate around their ideas – and then focus on taking a small number of the best ideas forward. Ensure they are acted upon, championed and delivered. Measure the benefits, reward the originators, use positive communications to tell the success stories.

 Don't try to change everything over night. Cultural change takes time but do these first steps quickly to gain momentum. Make a success of them and then repeat - and use the success to move on to take some of the bigger steps needed.

 And that was pretty much what I finished on. It seemed to go down well and at least I was asked back later that day to repeat the talk again, as the sessions were being run in two halves. Of course the proof now is in the pudding and I hope to talk more on that some time in the future…

 P.S. There's one other thing I'd add which I see happening in many places at the moment with very positive results. Create a platform where people can innovate - quickly compose and try out new apps etc and/or run a hackathon for example - by using capabilities that many people can use some without coding etc skills. There is so much to say around this that's it probably worthy of a topic on its own...
 Small Steps to Start an Innovation Culture Let's start with a little context… I started thinking about this blog a little while ago sitting in the foyer of a training building waiting to enter a large auditorium type room to present on... 2 3 835 urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entries-547b823c-348d-4d07-93a3-1ee6e8aae16c Tony Morgan 2015-11-02T14:31:47-05:00 urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entry-991f1f75-411b-4366-aaed-7e130c04dd8a Having an Innovation Exchange - and Culture - with Our Clients Tony Morgan firstname.lastname@example.com 060002586N active Comment Entries application/atom+xml;type=entry Likes 2014-06-13T12:52:25-04:00 2014-06-13T13:03:15-04:00
 Innovation Exchange

 This week we ran our 9th Technology Innovation Exchange event for IBM's IT outsourcing clients in the UK and Ireland this week. As always we had a very positive day with and response from our clients.

 The objective of these events is to engage, and have an exchange, with our clients on key topics that are important to them - and to give them a forum to network with each other across industries as well with IBM and wider industry subject matter experts.

 We kicked off with a great presentation from an old friend, Dr Ton Engbersen, from IBM Research. Ton spoke passionately about the collaboration between ASTRON and IBM on the DOME project - addressing the storage and compute challenges of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the world's largest radio telescope. The numbers discussed in exabytes wowed IBMers and clients alike - but Ton made it real by really addressing the "so what" question in terms of implications for most real world enterprises. In summary what the radio astronomers look at now - at least in terms of data - many organisations will be looking at tomorrow. Read more on the background to the project here http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/37361.wss

 We then had two great sessions on Security and Mobility - both back by client demand - followed by a session from Sam Seddon on the technology partnership between IBM and Wimbledon http://www.ibm.com/wimbledon which is a fantastic story but very well covered elsewhere.

 The key then was to get everybody up and out of their seats for the speed dating technology demos - one of my favourite parts of the day - four quick fire real world technology demos. This time the theme was about applying data and analytrics to real world IT and business challenges. The specific sessions all led by practitioners not sellers - covered using analytics in IBM service delivery to reduce incidents and improve service, how to use QRadar Security Intelligence to address compliance and security requirements and practical applications of Watson cognitive computing in real world industries like retail. The last demo was a little different - and had a bit of everything - using PureApp patterns to deploy mobile apps (as an example) onto the SoftLayer Cloud. I could see from the reactions that the clients really valued all four.

 Finally at the end of the day we held an industry experts panel - with support from Professor Ilan Oshri, John Willmott CEO of NelsonHall and Rick Simmonds from Alsbridge - hosted by my Innovation Team colleague, Danny Williams. The focus was on practical advice on "making innovation in IT sourcing work". Some key themes emerged - both parties need to work at it and there are many fantastic examples out there.

 Never enough time for innovation?

 One of the interesting things to me was that the innovation culture topic came out yet again - along with the challenge of many clients just being too busy for innovation...

 Having very recently re-researched the innovation culture area to meet a client request it was a very relevant discussion. At the moment I am working with one of our clients to set up a pragmatic and very practical approach to developing an innovation culture across our joint organisations. This will run in parallel to a set of larger joint innovation themes and activities.

 Like most organisations, this client can't realistically free up 10% of their employees time to think about new ideas - and they can't give over Friday afternoons to free thinking and experimentation. If only...!

 But there are lots of things that can be done. The idea is really to ensure that whilst the innovation message comes through from the top (in this case the client CIO and IBM account leadership team) each person in the client and IBM team also see innovation as something tangible they should be involved in and can practically do to drive a benefit for the client's business and their customers.

 We plan to make this real by getting the teams to tell practical stories of the innovations they have delivered - and then follow this up with use of existing collaboration tools to engage our joint teams on a set of topics aligned to the client's business priorities. There is a lot more to it that that of course but you can only put so much in a blog.

 The success or failure will depend on how this is planned, delivered and followed through - like anything else.

 And we will measure, celebrate and reward the success.

 This is becoming a common thread across many clients so we need to get this right - and if all goes well I hope the outcome will be the subject of a future blog.

 Celebrating successful innovation

 Back to the Technology Innovation Exchange - at the end of the day Rick Simmonds from Alsbridge presented me with an award from Alsbridge for the Very On Trend Extreme Blue project which we ran with Shop Direct, who are in a very nice habit of winning awards at the moment!

 I'm the one on the left with the cheesy grin...

 I've blogged on why I love Extreme Blue before so I won't go into detail on that one this time. Suffice to say the award is as much for the client as IBM - and two days later at a client meeting I presented the award in turn to the client CIO - and reluctantly handed it on... but for the two days I had the award in my possession I was very happy.

 The key now of course is to earn another one...

 The Technology Innovation Exchanges are great but take a lot of hard work behind the scenes - so many thanks to all the speakers, demo teams and industry experts on the panel - plus our IBM teams and clients. And a very big thank you to my colleagues Trevor Clifton and Simon Hadley. (And if you are reading this Neil Pratley - you too!).

 Anyway date for the diaries... our next Technology Innovation Exchange event will be in London on October 9th - with another great keynote speaker and some very different parts of the day.
 Innovation Exchange This week we ran our 9th Technology Innovation Exchange event for IBM's IT outsourcing clients in the UK and Ireland this week. As always we had a very positive day with and response from our clients. The objective of... 0 0 1193 urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entries-547b823c-348d-4d07-93a3-1ee6e8aae16c Tony Morgan 2015-11-02T14:31:47-05:00 urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entry-8ee7b7f6-97bc-4257-8bb0-f10caa4430b8 There are 3 "N's" in "INNOVATION" Tony Morgan firstname.lastname@example.com 060002586N active Comment Entries application/atom+xml;type=entry Likes 2014-01-02T12:12:05-05:00 2014-02-02T04:43:06-05:00
 Welcome to my first blog of 2014...

 Whilst the second half of this blog looks forward to the year ahead - the first half has been inspired by the fact that the letter "N" no longer shows up on the keyboard of my laptop. The key is still there but I must have the used the "N" so much that the white lettering has just worn away leaving a blank black key between the "B" and the "M".

 Obviously no such issues on mobile devices but in terms of the laptop I wondered why this was and it dawned on me that probably the most frequent word I write these days is "Innovation". Please believe me when I say that I do appreciate the merits of delivering it and not just talking and writing about it - but it made me wonder whether the letter "N" has any additional significance?

 This came to a head in December when I was collaborating with a colleague from academia, Professor Ilan Oshri (http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/sbe/staff/profiles/oshriilan/oshri-ilan.html) over a couple of articles we were writing as potential contributions for the UK National Outsourcing Association Yearbook for 2014. Both articles touch upon linked areas in overcoming some of the challenges around delivering real value adding innovation in the context of a long term services agreement.

 Whilst Ilan was tapping into some great thoughts on ensuring that making innovation work is really thought through by all parties when developing a sourcing contract, my focus leaned more heavily on making collaborative innovation work post contract.

 It was when writing my article that I started to think about the blank "N" on the keyboard - and it struck me quite firmly that a lot of what I was writing about could be summarised in the form of the three "N's" in innovation...

 NATURE – The supplier needs to imbed an innovation culture into its client facing teams - including use of an entrepreneurial spirit at times – so that they understand that in addition to absolute focus on delivering the core service, they need to be continually looking for ways to deliver service improvement FOR the client and pro-actively looking for for opportunities beyond the core service to drive wider value through innovation WITH the client. This is equally true for the client's team and unsurprisingly I am seeing a growing number of forward thinking clients wanting to focus part of their energies on developing an innovation culture in their own teams - and ensuring this extends into their suppliers.

 NURTURE – Once the opportunity is identified, the supplier needs to be able to call upon a range of mechanisms, capabilities and resources to develop and deliver the innovation for and/or with the client. One size does not fit all. There needs to be a level of agility to do things quickly and a level of empowerment to move forward or equally to be able agree with the client to stop before too much energy and resource is expended. (I am a big believer in not spreading innovation too thinly - agree key areas and deliver on these rather than try to do everything.)

 NOURISHMENT - Both supplier and client teams need to know that if they spot a real opportunity and can develop a real business case and sponsorship, they will be supported in the delivery of it by their wider organizations. Joint innovation needs investment and funding models – and successful joint innovation needs joint rewards in terms of real business outcomes for the client and - lets be honest and not forget it - real incentives for the supplier

 Perhaps not untypically my article for the NOA was a little too long and so I had to go through it with the proverbial red pen. In the end I removed the section covering the three "N's" - but I didn't want to lose the thinking behind it hence this blog.

 I hope the NOA (http://www.noa.co.uk/) use our wider inputs as I think we both repeated some home truths about what makes innovation work - jointly agreeing what it is and having a joint delivery and governance mechanisms for example. I also think we had some very interesting new points - borne out by experience over the last few years of what has not worked and what has worked very well indeed.

 The previous sentence leads me to the second half of this blog. Like many of you I am now planning for 2014. In my role of leading pro-active innovation activities and technical innovation agendas with IBM's IT sourcing clients I am reviewing what worked and what didn't, what we need to start doing, what we need to stop doing and what we need to do differently. Obviously I can't repeat it all here but here are a few insights I can share...

 We will definitely be continuing with our cross client Technology Innovation Exchange events. These focus on pro-actively engaging the maximum number of clients on emerging technologies most relevant to them and engaging them in a way that gives them direct access to a range of top subject matter experts and an opportunity to network with their peers in the same and other industries. For those of you who have attended these events you'll know how focused we are on client feedback - and the main short term evolution for 2014 will be more client led sessions. This has often been a challenge as clients are sometimes a little reticent about doing this... But the great news is that the events have been so collaborative and we have so many individual client innovation agendas being developed that we now have a pipeline of clients wanting to come and present to their peers on joint innovation projects.... Many thanks to you all - result!

 The next event is scheduled for 25th February 2014 in London - invites to clients come through the IBM account teams but up until registration closes you can see the agenda from the link on the left hand menu here: http://www.ibm.com/events/TechnologyInnovationExchange

 The cross client activity is great but the biggest impact we can deliver is by developing an innovation agenda with the maximum number of individual clients. Regular readers to this blog will know that the general outlook is positive but also realistic. Yes, we have a (small and shrinking!) number of sourcing clients who do not consider that we have got innovation right with them. As with all clients, we are reviewing plans at an individual level for each of these. Sometimes like any supplier IBM needs to earn the right to have the innovation conversation and sometimes the client also needs to consider perhaps how they will provide their share of Nature, Nurture and Nourishment to really make joint innovation work. Whatever the cause we are focused on shrinking this group of clients even further.

 As I write I have the 2013 full year client satisfaction reports for the clients I work with in front of me. As always this is a great source for identifying actions to address challenges - at a cross client and client specific level. The reports are driven by a third party and the clients say what they are thinking good and bad - and so its a great input into forward planning.

 The hugely positive aspect (for me in particular) is the significant year on year increase we have seen in client satisfaction for innovation. No, this does not hold true for every client - see above - but overall the impact of the systematic and pro-active approach we have taken is making a big difference which is great. This leads me to think that 2014 planning must include building on what we were already doing and making the impact even more pervasive and where there are issues ensuring these are addressed early.

 To come full circle, we need to focus on the three "N's" of NATURE, NURTURE and NOURISHMENT in innovation. And, to address another of my key learning points from the last few years, we need to ensure that we also positively communicate the great successes we do have - within the client and the supplier - so that value is not only delivered but also clearly understood and recognised. We'll be placing even more emphasis on this both with individual clients and in the 2014 versions of the Client Innovation & Delivery Updates which will also be available online here http://www-935.ibm.com/services/uk/en/it-services/outsourcing-and-innovation.html

 Let me know what you think by emailing me on firstname.lastname@example.com and I wish you all the best for 2014...
 Welcome to my first blog of 2014... Whilst the second half of this blog looks forward to the year ahead - the first half has been inspired by the fact that the letter "N" no longer shows up on the keyboard of my laptop. The key is still there... 3 0 833 urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entries-547b823c-348d-4d07-93a3-1ee6e8aae16c Tony Morgan 2015-11-02T14:31:47-05:00 urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entry-406be1e3-1bd9-457c-8e3e-228ab4602a1f Why I Love Working on Extreme Blue Innovation Projects Tony Morgan email@example.com 060002586N active Comment Entries application/atom+xml;type=entry Likes 2013-09-13T07:58:52-04:00 2013-09-13T09:03:02-04:00
 In this blog I focus on one of my most positive experiences of my year - and in terms of the Expo Day detailed below one of my favourite days working for IBM. It really was one of the days when you realise you are in the right job at the right time in the right place...

 Extreme Blue...
 Regular followers of IBM Strategic Outsourcing innovation activities with clients in the UK and Ireland will know that we are huge supporters of the IBM Extreme Blue programme. In this industry leading initiative IBM assigns top talent student interns to deliver innovative new solutions to address IBM and client challenges (rather than do the admin and make the tea).

 Each year we partner with one of our outsourcing clients and submit an entry into the local arm of this fantastic global programme.

 In 2013 we partnered with an online retail client. (I won't mention the name here - as although the client is very happy to talk about the project its not an official reference and we all need to follow process sometimes - if you would like to follow up and find out more please do get in touch...).

 Why did we chose this client to partner with for Extreme Blue? Three reasons...

 The client has an ambitious business strategy - to become a world class digital retailer - providing fantastic personalised experience to their customers

 Technology is fundamentally at the core of their business strategy - mobile, social, big data and analytics - all key areas for IBM

 We were looking for a client who would commit to really sponsor and support the project - and this client did exactly that

 Throughout the 12 week project run over the summer of 2013 the support from the client team has been exemplary - led by the e-Commerce and IT teams at the heart of their business. The client supported kickoff workshops at their head office site and at the IBM Labs in Hursley, assigned subject matter experts to support the intern team and hosted a fantastic IBM Innovation Extreme Blue Expo event at their head office on September 5th to showcase the solution and a wider set of innovative technologies to as many of their employees as possible.

 What support did IBM provide? A great deal...

 A team of mentors and supporting subject matter experts who provided technical and business mentoring and support for the interns throughout the life of the project - led by myself and hugely impressive subject matter experts in Emerging Technology and Software areas

 Commitment and support from the whole IBM account team

 Support from IBM's service delivery teams to enable a version of the prototype solution to be hosted on the client's network for the client's employees to try out the solution

 Support from IBM's Interactive Labs team to create a smartphone version of the solution for customer demos

 And last but not least the funding and support of the Extreme Blue programme itself - led by a great team in IBM's Hursley labs

 But at the heart of the project were the four fantastic Extreme Blue student interns - real stars of the IT industry of the future - who I won't name here so you don't try and poach them...

 What was the project about?

 The focus of the project was on enhancing the personalised experience of the client's online customers

 The IBM and client teams were careful not to bound the scope too tightly as we wanted to give the students an opportunity to innovate

 After considering a number of ideas and reviewing these in collaborative sessions with the client, the team focused on creating a solution which would really engage customers on the client's websites in a new and different way

 No spoiler alerts here as I'm not going to give details of the exact solution at this stage but I will add links when it becomes public - suffice to say the project created a new and unique way of combining existing ideas for gamification and applied them in new ways to drive real value for online retail shoppers

 This idea very much appealed to the client team who were already considering how they could do more in this area

 It was agreed that the project would focus on one of the client's key brand websites

 There is a level of detail that would bring this article and the solution alive which unfortunately I won't go into but I can tell you that the solution developed and used social data in new ways - combining social media sentiment (using similar techniques and solutions used by IBM with Wimbledon) with sales, marketing and product related data

 The key is that customers are rewarded for their actions and interactions with the website in a very personalised way which drives tangible benefits for each customer

 Although the initial solution focuses on fashion, the team documented how it could be widely extended for use with home and leisure and electrical product ranges and categories etc - and documented a whole set of potential extensions just not possible to be delivered in a time boxed 12 week project

 Is IBM Hursley really the best place to trial a fashion oriented solution?

 Within weeks the project team created a working prototype of the solution and trialled it on the IBM network - with most of the people using the solution located in IBM Hursley, home of IBM's largest software lab in Europe. In addition to driving a potential revolution in the fashion awareness of this corner of Hampshire, there were a number of unexpected benefits to this approach. Many technical people embraced the solution - some just taking part but others finding bugs and/or ways to manipulate the way the website worked - enabling the Extreme Blue team to greatly enhance the prototype system.

 Although not part of the planned project, the client was keen to get a version of the game onto their own network to trial. That's where the IBM service delivery team came in. The team quickly made the game available for the day of the client Extreme Blue Expo event, In parallel our Interactive Labs team created a smartphone version of the game for customer demos. Both activities greatly helped enhance the key Expo event that followed.

 Expo Event

 This was held in the client's head office with the objective of showcasing IBM's collaborative innovations with the client to as many client employees as possible. Placing the Extreme Blue project centre stage, the Expo event also highlighted a range of additional IBM capabilities most relevant to the client's ambitious business plan and strategy to become a world class online digital retailer.

 The first part of the Expo was the "On the Street" event which ran from 12:00 - 14:00 - open to all client and partner employees, hundreds stopped to talk, see demonstrations of IBM technologies in action and find out about the innovative projects and capabilities. Attendees included CxO level executives and many other senior executives and managers - with hugely positive feedback.

 This was followed up at 14:00 by a presentation and demo to senior IT and e-Commerce management team members. The four Extreme Blue interns presented and demonstrated their solution - confidently answering all questions and outlining a clear vision of how the prototype solution could be taken forward and extended. Both client and IBM teams were amazed by the quality of the prototype solution and the presentation given. The interns were given a very big thank you and a rousing round of applause by this senior audience.

 Finally at 15:00 the Extreme Blue interns gave a second presentation and demo to a combined client and IBM IT team audience as part of the lunch and learn programme (late lunch on this occasion) set up with the client as part of our focus on creating a joint innovation culture. Once again the audience was very impressed with the project and the Extreme Blue team.

 What has all this got to do with IBM Strategic Outsourcing and our clients?

 One of the key differentiators for IBM is that we don't just provide our outsourcing and services clients with innovation and improvement in the core services we provide. We also partner with them to deliver wider scope innovation - due to the additional value that this delivers for IBM and our clients. And we use the full depth and breadth of IBM's capabilities to do this.

 IBM and the client are now following up on the core deliverable of the Extreme Blue project to verify if / how the solution can be taken to market but beyond this is the hugely positive experience of the project for client and IBM teams alike. This enhances our relationship, drives customer satisfaction and positions us both firmly as partners for a whole range of innovation activities aimed at driving additional value for the client's business.

 And of course some closing words on Extreme Blue. The practical knowledge the interns have gained for their future prospects can not be under-estimated, as the impact they have have made on the client and IBM has been stunning. Oh and yes we also hope that this experience will very positively influence their selection of a future employer in a year's time - as it has for many others before them.

 And now I'm looking forward to finding the right client to partner with on Extreme Blue next year.
 In this blog I focus on one of my most positive experiences of my year - and in terms of the Expo Day detailed below one of my favourite days working for IBM. It really was one of the days when you realise you are in the right job at the right time in the... 0 0 1682 urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entries-547b823c-348d-4d07-93a3-1ee6e8aae16c Tony Morgan 2015-11-02T14:31:47-05:00 urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entry-a3631e6e-b4b6-4e1c-b206-309e8f5d09b3 Joint Innovation - its all about partnership, pro-activity and process Tony Morgan firstname.lastname@example.com 060002586N active Comment Entries application/atom+xml;type=entry Likes 2013-06-25T13:03:55-04:00 2013-07-01T10:31:55-04:00
 Joint Innovation - its all about partnership, pro-activity and process

 As usual I've been engaged in a number of activities over the last few weeks at a number of different levels - including:

 Driving innovation and related activities with specific IBM outsourcing clients - the main part of the day job for myself and my team

 Cross client activities - including running the sixth (and so far highest rated) Technology Innovation Exchange event with our clients

 "External" activities - including chairing the UK National Outsourcing Association group on Innovation and taking part in a video debate for Outsource Magazine (which was interesting to say the least...)

 In each of these the same three themes seem to recur... I mentioned these briefly in my previous blog about engaging clients on innovation but think its worth discussing them in a little more detail here.

 1. The Power of Partnership

 I firmly believe that innovation with a partner, and perhaps particularly in an outsourcing relationship, isn't something that gets done to you - its something that you need to do together. Both partners need to be committed to make it work and when they are the results can be fantastic.

 IBM (as it does) has just carried out a large scale survey around sourcing motivations. Its no surprise that cost and efficiency remain the most important client driver but an interesting pattern emerged in the analysis. A significant number of organisations also focus on getting wider business value and innovation out of their sourcing relationships - and those who do this have significantly better financial business results than those who focus purely on cost alone.

 You can read more yourself here: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/centerforappliedinsights/article/sourcing.html

 The key findings of this report - plus some of the disruptive changes to the industry caused by cloud and other key technology trends such as mobile and consumerisation within the enterprise also formed the basis of much of the video debate with Outsource Magazine - I'll post a link to this once available online. There was also a lot more discussed including moving to business outcome type arrangements but that's for a future blog perhaps.

 All this change though drives - or at least should drive - innovation which leads us nicely onto the next point...

 2. Pro-activity, Pro-activity, Pro-activity (and Procurement)

 At the UK National Outsourcing Association Innovation group meeting I chaired recently, I facilitated a debate between a group of outsourcing suppliers, end users and third party advisers on challenges to innovation in outsourcing. The key item of both parties being pro-active - the supplier finding out what is important to the client and the client being pro-active in helping them do this - came up as expected.

 What I did not expect was the almost unanimous feedback that for many organisations there also needs to be a change to Procurement functions to focus on wider business value and enable innovation rather than purely cost. The strength of feeling on this - especially from client attendees surprised me - and the key take away for the NOA was that the next session needs to focus on making Procurement an enabler to innovation in outsourcing.

 Of course this resonates well with the Partnership message and the results of the IBM survey above.

 3. Process (to Fast Track from Discussion to Delivery)

 Innovation process? Isn't that an oxymoron like... (as this is an open forum I won't use the examples I use in person)...

 But no I don't mean the process to come up with ideas - and in my experience there is usually no shortage of ideas and challenges and opportunities to focus on - but the process to take an idea and turn it into something tangible that delivers value.

 Specifically in the context of my job and this blog I mean the joint innovation management process between a supplier and client to move from a nice innovation discussion, workshop or demo to something that adds real value to the client (and yes in the long run lets be honest business for the supplier). That something could be an improvement to the existing core service or a wider innovation for the client's organisation.

 Technology Innovation Exchange Events...

 The above themes also resonated at our latest cross client Technology Innovation Exchange day These events are also about engaging our clients on key areas and encouraging them to network with IBM subject matter experts (the development and delivery experts not the sales teams) and their peers.

 As usual at the latest event we presented, demoed, debated and discussed a series of key technology and innovation trends with our clients. These included discussion on practical experience of migrating to cloud, what organisations across a range of industries are doing to adopt mobile for B2C and B2E, a series of speed dating style technology demos and finally a great debate on the IBM sourcing paper and the Power of Partnership. Many thanks to clients and IBMers who attended - and rated it our best event yet.

 These events work by focusing on the themes above - driving partnership behaviours, being pro-active and focusing on what is important to our clients and driving the first stages of the process to move from discussion to delivery... so a nice way to end.

 And yes - planning has already started for the next event - October 10th in London South Bank - mark the date now.

 I'm keen to hear what you think - email me - firstname.lastname@example.com or contact me via Twitter @tadmorgans or on LinkedIn uk.linkedin.com/in/tonymorganuk/
 Joint Innovation - its all about partnership, pro-activity and process As usual I've been engaged in a number of activities over the last few weeks at a number of different levels - including: Driving innovation and related activities... 2 3 2487 urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entries-547b823c-348d-4d07-93a3-1ee6e8aae16c Tony Morgan 2015-11-02T14:31:47-05:00 urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entry-5f7d1c4a-63b7-4374-a55f-5bf3076f5aaa Using a simple five step approach for successful joint innovation Tony Morgan email@example.com 060002586N active Comment Entries application/atom+xml;type=entry Likes 2013-05-03T10:03:14-04:00 2013-05-03T10:08:38-04:00
 I highlighted in my previous blog entries the changing role I am seeing in IBM's clients' IT departments and this included the drive to increasingly deliver innovation into the business. But we all know that its not necessarily that easy to do in practice. Innovation is also one of those words that can mean many different things to different people so where do you start - particularly if you are looking to drive innovation collaboratively between multiple parties?

 My role is focused on driving innovation partnerships, projects and related activities with IBM's IT outsourcing clients. Whilst it is true that the outsourcing industry in general has had a few challenges in the area of innovation historically I see a lot of positives at the moment when working with our clients. Sometimes we are working with clients on innovation to improve the service we provide but increasingly a key part of this is working with our clients' IT teams as they deliver innovation into their businesses.

 When I first talk to clients I say there are three key enablers to joint innovation:

 Partnership - an understanding that you need to drive a win-win - and sometimes this involves the supplier earning the right to have the innovation conversation

 Pro-activity - the supplier partner needs to be pro-active to find out what is important to the client's business and focus on this / the customer partner has to be pro-active too to help the supplier do this which sometimes includes getting access to the right people in the business

 Process - to drive innovation through from ideas and discussion to real delivery of value and benefits realisation

 To make this work you then need to start from agreeing what innovation is in the context of your relationship - as if you haven't agreed what innovation is how can either party really know if its being delivered or not?

 In recent times we have been systematically rolling out a simple five step approach for innovation with our clients. My experience is that the vast majority of clients get this and are hugely supportive. (Whilst I agree that there will likely be a number of clients who don't want this but instead want to focus purely on driving a traditional transaction based customer-supplier relationship I'm focused more on the rest here).

 This is the basis of the five step approach:

 Agree a joint definition of innovation - in the context of your partnership (e.g. innovation is the use of new ideas or current thinking in a different context that results in change that deliver value to the client)

 Agree the scope for innovation - in the services contract only, in wider, in the business (and hopefully all three!)

 Agree the key innovation themes - important to the client and where the supplier can add value

 Agree an action plan for each theme - assign owners in both parties accountable for developing and ensuring delivery of value, agree sponsorship and funding model(s) etc etc - this item is all about fast tracking from idea to delivery

 Agree an ongoing governance model - which reviews progress, sets direction, measures impact and critically also communicates success

 When there is buy-in from both parties this approach really works.

 I have seen great examples and in addition to the specific around the specific innovation themes and projects this drives a much stronger wider relationship with the client and helps to give them easier and more direct access to the rest of the resources in IBM including some of the key deep industry specific capabilities developed in IBM Research etc.

 At the end of the day this partnership is about driving real tangible additional value for the client from their relationship with IBM - and improved customer satisfaction - and lets be honest additional business for IBM that the client wants to give us as they see the value. I've also seen the wider indirect benefits such as clients now approaching us directly for input and advice on topics that they would never have done previously - and lets face it delivering innovation can be very interesting too.

 We've just been working with two university business schools in the UK on a study of our approach on innovation with our outsourcing clients. The academic slant the researchers put on this has given me new insights. In addition to the generic approach they have studies a series of joint innovation projects delivered with clients in different industries and countries - including a couple I was directly involved in myself.

 They have talked about how the approach has "legitimised" the use of innovation within our outsourcing account and delivery teams in a way they had not see before and about use of a combination of organisation (e.g. innovation role like my own and on accounts), assets and multiple approaches to drive innovation along with a level of entrepreneurship to align with the client context. Interesting stuff and probably the subject of my next blog linking to the published findings of the team...!
 I highlighted in my previous blog entries the changing role I am seeing in IBM's clients' IT departments and this included the drive to increasingly deliver innovation into the business. But we all know that its not necessarily that easy to do in... 0 0 1138 urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entries-547b823c-348d-4d07-93a3-1ee6e8aae16c Tony Morgan 2015-11-02T14:31:47-05:00 urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entry-c2e5d3a7-f4eb-4080-b412-11d523072a4b What is the future of the enterprise IT function? Part Two... Tony Morgan email@example.com 060002586N active Comment Entries application/atom+xml;type=entry Likes 2012-11-26T08:44:07-05:00 2012-11-26T08:44:07-05:00
The future of the enterprise IT function? Continued...!

In my previous blog entry I outlined the background to a paper that I have created with my colleague and fellow IBM innovation in outsourcing leader, Charlotte Newton.

I finished that entry by agreeing that there were lots of challenges for the enterprise IT function but huge opportunities also...

From cloud, mobility and big data, to analytics and collaboration, there is major potential for the IT enterprise function to drive both incremental and step change improvements, and to become a value-adding partner to the businesses they support.

For most organisations, the trick will be to identify - and then focus on - what matters most to their own organisation. I covered the impact of legacy in the previous blog. Anybody who has worked for, or with, an established organisation will understand why this was highlighted. The key for an IT department in the future will be increasingly how they balance the investments needed driven by the huge pace of change, technical possibilities and business expectations with the need to maintain and where possible modernise the legacy.

And... given the fact that much of the IT function is often provided by partners and service providers, how they best work with these organisations to optimise the value from the relationships will be a key success factor

Of course today's innovation will become tomorrow's legacy... We should not forget this either - its an important design point for new systems whether run in-house or supported by out-tasked, outsourced or cloud based service providers.

In the paper we make four recommendations for the CIO and the enterprise IT function - adding a lot more detail than I summarise here...

Create (or more likely adapt) a strategic roadmap to address the change agenda – covering the impact on existing IT and legacy systems, as well as new capabilities

Clearly define who is responsible for identifying and acting upon the innovation and value-adding opportunities most relevant to the enterprise - this is a key one for me - if you don't make somebody responsible for developing and more importantly delivering innovation should you be surprised if it doesn't happen

Engage the help of key service providers – integrating them into the change roadmap and selectively partnering with them on the delivery of joint innovation projects - ok I would say that wouldn't I as I work for a service provider but if as for many organisations your service providers deliver much of your IT doesn't it make sense to engage them earlier rather than later and tap into their capabilities?

Create a communications plan that reaches into the business – highlighting plans for the future and celebrating success. The IBMers and clients I work with will have heard this before - I think we as an IT industry often miss a huge opportunity due to poor communications - sometimes we don't communicate at all or when we do we do it badly - but do it right and see the impact... A comprehensive communications plan makes a huge difference to the real and perceived impact of the IT enterprise function on the wider business.

The conclusion of our study and many and varied client conversations was that most businesses will require an enterprise IT function for the foreseeable future. Yes the shape, size and certainly the mandate will continue to change. It may become more of an orchestrator and closer to the business but it will still be there. In fact for some organisations, the IT function may no longer remain a discrete entity but it will still exist.

And the consensus view form ourselves and many clients is that it will be those IT functions that proactively plan for, embrace and champion changes in technology and business expectation that ultimately see the most success.

If you are interested here is a link to the paper which we've included with our latest cross client innovation briefing - http://www-935.ibm.com/services/uk/en/it-services/outsourcing-and-innovation.html

It includes a lot more detail and most importantly the thoughts from many of our clients on this topic. I hope it stimulates thought, debate and ultimately actions. We'll be debating this client again with clients in 2013 I am sure.

If you'd like to know more please contact me and I'd be happy to follow up (email address: firstname.lastname@example.com).

Thanks for reading! Tony.

 The future of the enterprise IT function? Continued...! In my previous blog entry I outlined the background to a paper that I have created with my colleague and fellow IBM innovation in outsourcing leader, Charlotte Newton. I finished that entry... 1 0 1216 urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entries-547b823c-348d-4d07-93a3-1ee6e8aae16c Tony Morgan 2015-11-02T14:31:47-05:00 urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entry-bd74f2f5-e590-4699-b810-76985b329645 What is the future of the enterprise IT function? Part One of Two... Tony Morgan firstname.lastname@example.com 060002586N active Comment Entries application/atom+xml;type=entry Likes 2012-11-02T12:54:09-04:00 2012-11-21T09:41:18-05:00
The future of the enterprise IT function?

This is a fascinating topic which the IBM Strategic Outsourcing Innovation Team discussed with many of our clients in a debate at one of our Technology Innovation Exchange events in 2012.

A number of clients there said they were particularly interested in this topic so we held a number of follow on discussions. There was so much great content and thinking from our clients and in the IBM team that my colleague, Charlotte Newton, and myself decided to create a point of view paper on the topic, which will be released very shortly (if you want me to send a copy directly please let me know via email - firstname.lastname@example.com).

We started by looking at existing thinking on the topic - as you may expect opinions varied widely... Some articles and papers spoke about the death of the IT function as we know it, whilst one article suggested there will only be three types of IT jobs in future - consultants, project managers and developers.

As most of the people (clients and IBMers) in the room at the Technology Innovation Exchange were IT professionals and not many of them consultants, PMs or developers this did get people thinking!

Many other articles saw a more evolutionary level of change.

When we started writing the paper we also had our own views. We considered that there was already a changing emphasis in the IT function in many organisations - from being primarily a delivery function to a more of a co-ordination function for external suppliers and increasingly a much more pro-active innovation engine for the business but we wanted to test this out with our clients to get a feel for the reality.

Its pretty obvious that organisations who still do all of these things in-house are now in the minority:

Develop the majority of their apps in-house

Supplement in-house apps with off-the-shelf software packages

Run their apps and supporting middleware on directly procured and owned IT hardware

Host and manage their IT hardware using on-premise, in-house owned data centres and/or server rooms

Directly procure, run and manage end user devices, IT support, service desk and service management functions

Deliver all IT related change programmes using in-house resources.

So most organisations already use levels of external sourcing and cloud is extending this. We used the IBM Component Business for IT to highlight IT functions that are often provided by external providers today. We also highlighted the fact that the level of external provision ranges greatly across different organisations.

 What was also clear was the fact that the pace of change in general is continuing to accelerate – and we identified two key drivers behind this:

Business demand and, crucially, business expectation

Technological innovation

To our minds these business and technology trends are unquestionably linked. We believe that the increase in business expectation can be seen as a direct result of the changes in technology and we go into much more detail on this in the paper.

Our clients' IT departments are definitely seeing major changes, including what many see as the consumerisation of IT, with a major – and in many ways disruptive – impact on the enterprise IT function.

CEO's and "the business" now see technology as even more critical for their short and long term success. This was evident in the IBM CEO Study earlier this year which for the first time had CEO's (from a survey of 1700) saying that they saw technology now as the most important external factor on their business.

But this should not be a surprise. Technology is everywhere - we access the internet, social networks and other applications from smartphones and tablets, anytime, anywhere. We use cloud-based services to access email, entertainment and other media and we expect a nice and rich user interface and real-time results. (We also looked at other factors such as big data and analytics etc).

So why can't we have the same capabilities at work? Businesses have always wanted faster, easier to use and a lower cost application of IT for their businesses - but now (at last...!) they believe / expect that they can start to get it...

And yet – businesses also need to balance the benefits and the risks of all this. Security, regulation, customer, employees, brand, etc are all important and somebody has to manage a legacy of existing systems and complexity. This drives a significant cost. Even with new capabilities the legacy is important - as usually there needs to be some level of interfacing and integration between old and new. If you use a mixture of cloud and non-cloud based services how do you synchronise and integrate the data, the network, the applications and the overall IT service?

Even a totally new start-up organisation, without a legacy IT environment to manage, and probably not needing a full scale traditional IT department will need some things - an architecture, a strategy, a way to ensure security and control compliance, a way to manage and integrate suppliers and at a basic level to turn to when something goes wrong - someone to work out which component is not working and then do something about it.

So lots of challenges but the combination of new technology innovations (cloud and mobility and big data and analytics and so on) and the focus on use of technology for business benefit all the way downwards from the CEO create huge opportunity for the CIO and enterprise IT functions that can adapt to the changing world and mandate to deliver real value for their enterprises.

We looked in detail at all this and also how our clients saw their own organisations changing before we developed a number of conclusions on the likely future of the enterprise IT department and recommendations for CIO's and their teams... more on those next time in the second part of this blog entry soon - and by then I should be able to include a link to the full point of view paper.

Tony Morgan

 The future of the enterprise IT function? This is a fascinating topic which the IBM Strategic Outsourcing Innovation Team discussed with many of our clients in a debate at one of our Technology Innovation Exchange events in 2012. A number of clients... 1 3 1792 urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entries-547b823c-348d-4d07-93a3-1ee6e8aae16c Tony Morgan 2015-11-02T14:31:47-05:00 urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entry-2e8758f0-31e5-4fb7-bf59-9158b33e2635 Innovation in Outsourcing - 2012 - a very busy year so far... Tony Morgan email@example.com 060002586N active Comment Entries application/atom+xml;type=entry Likes 2012-09-23T07:09:03-04:00 2012-09-23T07:12:21-04:00
Such a busy year that I haven't kept my blog up to date.

What's been keeping me busy? There's an ever increasing focus on innovation from IBM and our clients - which means its a very good if busy place to be at the moment.

Here's a few highlights -

An ever growing series of innovation projects, workshops and innovation days with specific clients in the UK and Ireland - no surprise that cloud, mobility, cost saving, managing data and analytics have all been big themes this year

Increased focus on our cross client Technology Innovation Exchange days - read about the February and June events - next one up in London in October

Supporting the growing global innovation in outsourcing community in IBM - this has been a great experience

Maintaining our client facing innovation briefing newsletter - next one is published and will be on the website shortly

Analyst inputs into reviews, papers and interviews

A project with two business schools on the IBM approach to innovation for and with our outsourcing clients - output expected for the end of the year

Continued work with the UK NOA - some great work going on but I'd like to get some focus back more on the innovation side

A guest lecture last week to 80 MBA students at Warwick Business School - huge interest and questions kept us going right through to the last second of the 90 minute slot

Yet again one of the stand outs has been my business mentoring role on another IBM Extreme Blue project. All I can say is well done to the Frictionless ID&V team in creating some industry breakthroughs. All four student interns are star names for the future I am sure. This is so exciting I can't write too much as the IP submission reviews are pending and we're reviewing right across IBM how we can move the solution forward. And I shouldn't forget the client we worked with - again I can't name them - but what a great team inviting all four UK Extreme Blue project teams to their head office and arranging a fantastic event around them to demonstrate the power of innovation in action. You know who you are - many thanks! Read about and watch a BBC video of some of the other great projects this year (our project was so good they couldn't mention details of it).

Outside of work some huge highlights too - Wales won the Grand Slam - and I was there! Also lucky enough to get to the Olympics for an evening athletics event and to day a of tennis followed by track and field at the Paralympics with my family, which was a fantastic day even if we did get home about 3am. As a family we did our first holiday to New York which even to somebody lucky enough to live so close to old York was fantastic. And congratulations to my nephew who's got the university place that he wanted and to both him and his younger brother for their cricketing and rugby successes back in Wales.

Mixed success in the vegetable garden - onions, potatoes and beans have all done well and our first ever plums were delicious. Not so good though for the sun lovers - courgettes, tomates, squashes, pepper and chillies - some crops of some and none or not yet ripe of others. But as always in the garden there is next year to look forward to.

 Such a busy year that I haven't kept my blog up to date. What's been keeping me busy? There's an ever increasing focus on innovation from IBM and our clients - which means its a very good if busy place to be at the moment. Here's a few highlights... 0 0 977 urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entries-547b823c-348d-4d07-93a3-1ee6e8aae16c Tony Morgan 2015-11-02T14:31:47-05:00 urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entry-c942517e-d6be-42af-82e5-b5d5fc475c97 Innovation in Outsourcing Update Tony Morgan email@example.com 060002586N active Comment Entries application/atom+xml;type=entry Likes 2011-10-24T14:40:27-04:00 2011-10-24T14:45:16-04:00
Its hard to believe we're now well into the final quarter of the year. There's been so much going on.

Last week was a classic busy week. A client Innovation Day in Hursley which included me covering cloud and a fantastic set of demos from the Emerging Technology Services team. Well done guys this was the best demo I've seen yet. Then up the A34/M40 to Warwick to present on innovation to a group of IBM execs, the cross client Technology Innovation Exchange event (see next paragraph) the day after - and then over to Manchester to speak at the Human Side of Outsourcing event. And of course a lot of other things in the gaps.

And it was the first time we'd run the Technology Innovation Exchange event for IBM's IT outsourcing clients in the UK and the feedback was fantastic. We had great speakers from across IBM covering technology trends, analytics, mobility and cloud and all the sessions were very interactive. There was great support for the clients for running another event and lots of ideas of follow on topics and offers for client presentations so lots to work on there. Thanks to Trevor Clifton and a great team for putting the event together.

Its been a while since my last entry so I need to make space to praise the Extreme Blue team and students for a great project this summer which has really captured the imagination. With a great supporting client like we had and a strong team of IBM mentors the students thrived. We wish them all the very best for the summer as they return to Oxford and Durham etc for their final year's study. Here's just a few of the links from the web articles on the project Computer Weekly, BBC and ZDNet.

Its also almost time for my first UK National Outsourcing Summit and Awards event as a member of the board, so I'm looking forward to that now. Good to see IBM and Jaguar Land Rover get shortlisted in the innovation category. Of course I have no say in that one to ensure no conflict of interests - and as a new NOA board member I must say I've been impressed by the rigorous process being followed around the awards.

There's been a lot of travel around the UK recently but at least last weekend I managed to get a lie in for the first time for weeks as the rugby world cup final started at a decent hour. It was a great tournament and well done to the All Blacks but it did leave me wondering what if, what if, what if Wales had been in the final. The team needs to build upon the impact they've had and make it count in the Six Nations. I've got tickets for the final game of Wales v France so it could be a grand slam decider too...

Tidied the garden last weekend. The store of Kind Edward potatoes and onions is great and the flow of Jerusalem artichokes in now flowing through as are the last of the autumn raspberries. Now planning starts for 2012 - more rotation, rotation, rotation than innovation...

  Its hard to believe we're now well into the final quarter of the year. There's been so much going on. Last week was a classic busy week. A client Innovation Day in Hursley which included me covering cloud and a fantastic set of demos from the... 0 2 1798 urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entries-547b823c-348d-4d07-93a3-1ee6e8aae16c Tony Morgan 2015-11-02T14:31:47-05:00 urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entry-88139319-83df-4455-bac8-5e6b5ec29770 More Innovation Updates - from Extreme Blue to Services Innovation Lab and Potatoes Tony Morgan email@example.com 060002586N active Comment Entries application/atom+xml;type=entry Likes 2011-08-04T15:01:25-04:00 2011-08-04T15:01:25-04:00
This year is passing so quickly by. Over the last month I've been involved in a number of really interesting pieces of work.

Most exciting all at this moment is the Extreme Blue project we're running with one of our major outsourcing clients - well when I say "we" I mean of course the students. I'm just one of the mentors for the project team. On this project we have a great team of students and best of all fantastic sponsorship from the client's own research team. Add into the mix the technical input and mentoring from the IBM Emerging Technology Services team and the fact that the project focus is on a real instrumented - interconnected - intelligent Smarter Planet type topic and you could tell it would be a winner. And this is the way its turning out. To provide support for the four students - one business and three technology - with such great ability and attitude is a real pleasure and whatever they go onto after they successfully deliver this project I know it will be onwards and upwards... (I'm not usually this enthusiastic so it must be good!)

Back to the day job I've had a couple of in depth meetings and discussions with clients on IBM's wider approach to innovation over the last few weeks which I haven't done for a while so its been good to get back into that. I've also had meetings with a couple of clients and people I hadn't seen for some time which is always good to so - especially when they have positive things to say about projects delivered a while back. Its always nice to be remembered for good things.

I'm also doing background planning for a couple of major cross client innovation events at the moment and we're building a really strong agenda. I've mentioned previously in the blog the huge interest in cloud and analytics which we'll obviously be covering - but I'm seeing a huge increase also in discussions and actions on mobility and workplace too (in IBM we term it workplace of the future but its here now!) which we're also going to cover. I'll probably be presenting a tailored version of the IBM Global Technology Outlook which is always good to do. In past years I've veered from using lots (too many) slides to none at all and just drawing up the topics on a whiteboard - I'll think I'll go for somewhere in between this time.

One of the greatest lessons I've learned at IBM is the importance of collaboration and I've recently started having discussions with a couple of key people in major universities in the UK on some of the collaborative things we can do together - with one area of focus around the different roles needed to make innovation work. It sounds a bit theoretical but its absolutely crucial and too few people including many of our clients don't yet understand how to get the best results from understanding this - so its an area I'd like to follow up more on in the future.

I've also been finding a lot more about the new IBM Services Innovation Lab and have more calls with the SIL team this week - the key to me now is to start using it.

Finally back into the garden the mixture of warm weather and rain is seeing the beans and tomatoes progress quickly. My onions are drying and the main current edible crops are potatoes and courgettes. The artichokes are now towering up the fence and the autumn raspberries starting to form which is great as the strawberries are finished for this year. A bit of weeding needed but its mainly watching and eating at the moment which is a nice way to spend the time.

That's it for this time, Tony.

 This year is passing so quickly by. Over the last month I've been involved in a number of really interesting pieces of work. Most exciting all at this moment is the Extreme Blue project we're running with one of our major outsourcing clients - well when I say... 1 5 1800 urn:lsid:ibm.com:blogs:entries-547b823c-348d-4d07-93a3-1ee6e8aae16c Tony Morgan 2015-11-02T14:31:47-05:00


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WoW Mountain Dew Game Fuel Commercial
This is a television advertisement for Mountain Dew Game Fuel: World Of Warcraft. I don't want to spoil it for you, but I'm going to: two chicks turn into World of Warcraft characters and start battling right there at the grocery store checkout. Obviously, I would do them both. AFTER transformation ;)
Thanks to naas, who once Chaos Bolted an old lady in the face for cutting in line at the checkout.

subset: commoncrawl


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Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams is a new adaptation of the 1980s classic. Created by the German development studio Black Forest Games, which is Spellbound's successor company, the game will be released in spring 2013 for Xbox Live Arcade. During its Kickstarter days, the game was titled Project Giana and its campaign raised $186,158, over $36,000 beyond the initial goal. The final title was also voted upon by the community, with Twisted Dreams receiving 76 percent of the vote.
In Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams, the player accompanies the two very dissimilar sisters on a journey to a fantastic world in which the sisters' different abilities are the key to solving puzzles and defeating terrible monsters. Giana transforms herself with lightning speed to solve puzzles or make use of special abilities. With each transformation, her environment changes and only players who skillfully apply the right strategy can complete tricky levels and defeat nasty end-bosses.


text:
Key things you need to know aboutDr. Antilus:
Dr. Antilus' Experience
Research training, expertise and qualifications
Dr. Antilus' Specialties
- Obstetrics & Gynecology
Procedures Dr. Antilus Performs
- Birth Control
- Colposcopy
- See all 14 procedures
More About Dr. Antilus' Background
Hospital Quality
The right hospital is as important as the right doctor
- Maimonides Medical Center
- 4802 10th Ave
- Brooklyn, NY 11219
9 Facts About Hospital Quality
Patients' risk of dying during a hospital stay for heart bypass surgery could be 87.4% lower, on average, at a hospital rated 5 stars compared to a hospital rated 1 star for that procedure. Choosing the right hospital is critical to your health. View Slideshow
Patient Satisfaction
Patients' feedback on their experience with Dr. Antilus
Likelihood of recommending Dr. Antilus to family and friends is 4.1 out of 5 5 1 8
See More Survey Results
8 Facts About Patient Satisfaction Surveys
Patient satisfaction surveys provide a standardized way of reporting about healthcare experiences. But there can be more than meets the eye when reviewing scores. Here's what you should know
Appointments & Offices
Check insurance plans, locations and make an appointment
- Newkirk Family Health Center
- Newkirk Family Health Center
- 1401 Newkirk Ave
- Brooklyn, NY 11226
- (718) 951-1043
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- Rose Antilus MD
- 2306 Nostrand Ave
- Brooklyn, NY 11210
- (718) 951-0236
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The key to a successful appointment is communication. To get the most out of your visit, prepare ahead of time so you can lead the conversation with your doctor. These 7 tips will get you ready
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text:
(Meejin Hong, 2012, 6 min)
Desire as seen through a melting crayon reveals a tapestry of temptations. "Sugarcoat" is the experience of something both terrifying and beautiful having the most effect on one's psyche, walking and falling at the same time. The deeper the venture, the greater the hunger becomes.
Filmmaker in Attendance, Video
Directed by Meejin Hong
Friday, March 22 9:45pm
Animated Films in Competition
Recent animated films and videos by Emily Hubley, Maureen Selwood, Maya Erdelyi, Meejin Hong, Shin Hashimoto and Kevin Eskew among others.


text:
The American Film Institute has announced early details of its AFI FEST 2013 program. The North American Premiere Gala of Disney's "Saving Mr. Banks," starring Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson, will open the festival on Thursday, November 7. The Coen Brothers' "Inside Llewyn Davis" will close the festival on November 14.
On Friday November 8, AFI FEST will premiere "Moneyball" director Bennett Miller's new film "Foxcatcher," starring Steve Carrell. The festival has also announced that French auteur Agnes Varda will serve as Guest Artistic Director.
More details will unspool in the coming weeks. AFI FEST runs November 7-14 in Hollywood.


text:
Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
The Essential Lincoln: Speeches and Correspondence
by Orville Vernon Burton
No current Talk conversations about this book.
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Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0809043076, Hardcover)
Eloquent, humble, and shrewd, Abraham Lincoln was one of America's greatest presidents, and The Essential Lincoln brings together his most defining speeches, public and private correspondence, and personal notations in one slim, handsome volume. Lincoln historian Orville Vernon Burton has culled the thousands of pages of the complete works of Lincoln for the most compelling and revealing pieces. Many are presented unabridged, including Lincoln's speech at Cooper Union in February 1860; his August 1862 letter to Horace Greeley; the Gettysburg Address; and his second inaugural address. Others have been skillfully edited down to reveal the essence of Lincoln's beliefs and aspirations, including two of his decisive debates with Stephen A. Douglas, the Emancipation Proclamation, and his first inaugural address. From his earliest writings as a loquacious twenty-three-year-old in New Salem to his last public address from the White House balcony, these original documents give life to Lincoln's deeply rooted beliefs: his unflagging dedication to a united America, his reverence for the rule of law, his feelings on slavery and each human being's inalienable natural rights, his boundless commitment to mankind's innate intelligence and morality. What emerges is a portrait of a stunning American and a compelling historical icon, one who represents the highest ideals we have for our country and for ourselves. This collection is quite simply The Essential Lincoln.
(retrieved from Amazon Thu, 12 Mar 2015 18:14:21 -0400)
Presents selections of speeches, public and private correspondence, and personal notations by Abraham Lincoln.
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It looks like the follow-up to the Zombie-themed action-RPG Dead Island won't be coming to Germany. In a recent interview with PCGamesN, Dead Island: Riptide creative producer Sebastian Reichert said this was due to the country's strict guidelines on the sale of violent media.
"We have no censored version of the game," he said, "so we cannot release it in Germany. It feels fucking awkward to have one of the most successful games in years and nobody in your country knows it." German rules on violent media say that it cannot contain violence against human-like characters and mutilation of corpses. Games often have to be altered to be acceptable for release in the country. Reichert also expressed confusion as to why a game like Gears of War 3 was successfully published in Germany while a game that is being developed within the borders of Germany gets censored.
"Because where's the difference?" he reasoned. "I mean, [the enemies in Gears of War] are human-like, and the things you do to them… ah, they really have nice finishers! That flamethrower finisher, he rams the flamethrower into the body, pulls the trigger and the flames come out of every body part. That's in stores."
Dead Island: Riptide will be released in North America and Europe in April 2013.
Source: Polygon


text:
Ralphie's Kids Roundup (RKR), funded in part by the generosity of donors, provides an opportunity for Colorado kids, 8th grade and under, to experience college sports at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Schools, sports teams and other official organizations with a focus on youth.�Children who are in 9th grade and above are unable to participate in RKR due to NCAA rules.
This fall, Ralphie's Kids Roundup will invite kids, 8th grade and under, to four CU Football home games at Folsom Field. Click on the link below for more information and for details on how to sign up.
Information for the 2015-16 women's basketball season is coming soon.
Ralphie's Kids Roundup depends heavily on the continued generous support of our donors.� Make a $100 donation today to Ralphie's Kids Roundup and you can send 10 kids to a CU football game!� Your donation to the Ralphie's Kids Roundup Fund is a charitable contribution to the CU Foundation and is 100 percent tax deductible.
For more information on Ralphie's Kids Roundup please contact Rachel Ripken at firstname.lastname@example.com or 303-492-1976.


text:
Artisanal Lard Is a Real Thing and You Probably Need Some
Food News
Lard's popularity is on the on the rise, thanks in no small part to meat CSAs! It definitely makes sense — the meat from these pasture-raised animals is delicious, so why not the lard? Modern Farmer reports that farmers were just throwing their lard away (gasp!) before finally being convinced to try it in the market.
→ Read More: Artisanal Lard: Fat Gets Fancy by Laurie Woolever at Modern Farmer
(Image credits: via Modern Farmer)


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Oklahoma vs. TCU: Pressing questions
on the potential for a letdown and Blake Bell
NORMAN — Oklahoma will look to remain unbeaten Saturday night, when the Sooners host TCU on Owen Field.
This is the first of three pregame blogs from Ryan Aber and I. Here, we each ask a pressing question that we hope to see answered in Saturday's game.
ABER: Will the Sooners get through without a letdown?
Before the season, this looked like the middle game of a brutal stretch that included a road game against Notre Dame, a home game against a TCU team that was supposed to have the conference's best defense and a Red River Rivalry game against a Texas team that was supposed to be back. Well, TCU's offense has been out of whack, their two best defensive players have been banged up and Texas is most certainly not back. Notre Dame was a great win for the program and this team and Texas is still big just because it's Texas. So this seems a place where a letdown could happen. OU hasn't had much problem with that during the Stoops era but it's something to keep an eye on.
KERSEY: Can Blake Bell continue to avoid big mistakes against a good TCU defense?
Blake Bell certainly hasn't been perfect throughout his two starts, but he's avoided the occasional critical, ugly mistakes that you might expect from a new starting quarterback. I can't recall even one near Bell interception in the Tulsa or Notre Dame wins. TCU's secondary poses a tougher challenge, though, than either of those teams, so if he can take care of the football in this game, it would be really impressive.


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On Memorial Day, American Legion Remembers Fallen VetsMay 29, 2016 at 4:50 pm
Memorial Day ceremonies include an open house at the American Legion post.
May 25, 2016: Memorial DayMay 25, 2016 at 6:11 pm
Memorial Day is coming up, the library's Summer Reading Challenge is approaching, and Aaron may or may not be drinking on the job.
May 25, 2016: For A Sustainable CommunityMay 25, 2016 at 6:10 pm
Kristen discusses the efforts of the Chamber's Partnership for a Sustainable Community.
Arts Friday: "Freight Train Blues," "Audio Under The Stars"May 24, 2016 at 11:54 pm
More than a million North Carolinians are expected to hit the roads this Memorial Day weekend (thanks largely to low gas prices, according to AAA Carolinas), but there are quite a few exciting local events to check out if you're staying close to home. On Friday, "Audio Under the Stars" returns to Duke's Center for […]
May 23, 2016: Just Like Tobacco ExecsMay 24, 2016 at 11:26 pm
We celebrate UNC lacrosse and discuss the NBA playoffs, but things really get going when we turn to the NFL-concussion research scandal.
Week of May 23, 2016May 24, 2016 at 11:15 pm
Hillsborough recovers from the Bellevue Mill fire; Morinaga comes to Orange County.
May 24, 2016: New JobMay 24, 2016 at 10:33 pm
Jeff's new job takes him into the wild world of wastewater. (Also, somewhere in here we dance like Beyonce.)
Debut Novel For Chapel Hill AuthorMay 19, 2016 at 10:23 pm
Adam Jones' novel "Fate Ball" is getting rave reviews.
Live Online Auction, Through Saturday, Will Benefit KidzuMay 18, 2016 at 11:42 pm
"Spark: Ignite the Night" is Kidzu's first-ever online live auction.
May 18, 2016: Occupational HazardMay 18, 2016 at 8:55 pm
After the BEAs, the party continues.