Development Services blog

Development Services have a new blog. We are using this as a place for members of the section to share information, experience and thoughts relating to our work. Anyone in the section can contribute posts. We expect most of the posts to cover technical material, such as useful coding techniques, experience from particular projects, and so forth.

See http://www.appsdev.is.ed.ac.uk/blog/ .

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Business Model Canvas

A Business Model Canvas is a tool for mapping the core functions and capabilities of an organisation. Compared to the Core Diagrams that I described in an earlier post , the business model canvas attempts to present more aspects of the business, starting with the value proposition – a statement of what the organisation offers to its users (in the business world, to its customers). It shows the activities and resources, as Core Diagrams do, but also shows user relationships & channels, and also benefits and costs. I’m not aware of any universities that have used this tool but you can find examples from elsewhere on the web. We are considering business model canvases as a tool for mapping the strategic capabilities of units at the University of Edinburgh. Phil Taylor, our EA contractor, sketched an outline of what a business model canvas might begin to look like for HR: This is only intended to be suggestive: the real canvas would need to result from in-de...

Webinar: Powering your business with Cloud Computing

On October 14th, I will be hosting a Grid Computing Now! web seminar on the topic of Cloud Computing. We have lined up two very interesting speakers who are using Cloud now to make businesses work. Ross Cooney had a good technological solution to sell but couldn't make it economic until Cloud Computing allowed him to pay for his computation only when he needed it. He will discuss the instant benefits and long term impact of cloud computing to the development, competitiveness and scalability of your application. Alan Williamson created the BlueDragon Java CFML runtime engine that powers MySpace.com. He advises several businesses and will give an overview of the different types of services available and how to avoid being locked-in to a single supplier. You can register for this event here .

Project Leadership

When I look back over recent projects that I've been involved in, it seems that one key to making a project successful is having someone on the team who really drives it forward: someone who is invested in the project as a whole and not just their own part in it. We (by which I mean the University's Applications division) have a well-defined project process, with defined roles, required milestones, deployment standards, and so forth. All these are useful, but if the team doesn't have a leader, it seems a project can lose its way, perhaps not responding to changing circumstances, getting stuck on a technical problem, or not securing a needed resource in time to meet some external constraint. The leader can be any member of the team - it could be a developer, a project manager, or the sponsor, or someone in another role. A team can include several people who are this committed to the project; it doesn't have to be a single person. As an example, one of...

Distributed Thinking

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