Writing on
How technology actually changes organisations and lives — including AI, automation and the gap between what a tool promises and what it delivers.
Organisations have become far more selective about replacing legacy systems, because those systems hold the data and business rules that AI work needs. The platform you were going to retire is now called strategic, and nothing about it has improved.
4 min read by Chris Cooper
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The AI Act's high-risk obligations were deferred by sixteen months, six days before they were due to apply. Rather less moved than the headlines suggest, and an organisation that stopped when the date changed has learned something about its own programme.
4 min read
The Cyber Security and Resilience Bill will require suppliers to tell their customers about incidents likely to affect them. That this needs legislating is the interesting part, and it says something about what most contracts leave out.
4 min read
Every check an organisation applies to software happens at the point of selection. The product then changes continuously, and the control never fires again. Most organisations pay the revised price without reviewing what they now own.
4 min read
Sovereignty gets asked as a location question, and location is the easy part. Where the servers sit and which courts can compel disclosure are two different things, and only one of them appears on a procurement checklist.
4 min read
Entry-level work is disappearing from British organisations, for several reasons at once. Nobody decided to reduce the supply of future senior staff, but the volume work that quietly produced them is going all the same.
4 min read
Somewhere in most organisations is a monthly invoice nobody approved. It is large, it is growing, and every line on it is legitimate. Almost nothing else an organisation buys arrives that way, and the controls were never built for it.
4 min read
For twenty years computing behaved like something you order. It is now limited by a physical input with a lead time measured in years, and most organisations are exposed to that through suppliers rather than directly.
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Software that recommends fits inside every control an organisation already has. Software that acts on its own authority does not, and it arrived quietly inside products that had already been bought and approved years earlier.
4 min read
By the middle of December most large organisations have stopped changing anything. It is a sensible precaution, and it is also the point in the year when the changes that do go through are the least well tested of any.
