Three Videos That Explain Why Your IT Should Look Like Lego Blocks

How to build technology solutions to thrive in the digital era. These three videos offer excellent "plain English" explanations to non-IT people on how today's "apps" can quickly and efficiently be used to ensure your organisation stays relevant.

We spend a lot of time discussing with senior executives how digital technology is changing every industry sector. Change is being driven ultimately by the needs and expectations of customers in each of those sectors. The three videos in this blog provide three great explanations on how to build technology solutions to thrive in the digital era in order to meet those customer expectations.

Effectively explaining the changing digital landscape to non-IT managers is crucial to ensure buy-in and to prepare any organisation for successful digital change. 

These three videos offer excellent "plain English" explanations to non-IT people on how today's "apps" can quickly and efficiently be used to ensure your organisation stays relevant in the ever-changing digital era. Today, systems are made up of digital "Lego blocks" that can easily be put together in a configuration customised to the needs of your organisations' customers.

Symphony3 Digital System Lego Bricks

For Government

The first two videos are short, visual and delivered with great doses of humour and quirkiness by Mark Foden, a UK based change strategy consultant. The first looks broadly at digital government services. The second focuses on local government digital platforms. 

For Business

The third video is a presentation by Tom Quinn the CIO of News Corp at a 2015 API conference in Sydney. It is longer and more detailed but articulates really well the shift in the corporate world from a focus on large implementations and management of single systems (e.g. SAP or Oracle) to an agile world of  APIs and apps. In this new world  corporate solutions are made up of myriad software solutions that can be pieced together like (yes you guessed it!) Lego blocks.

Videos

The Gubbins of Government 

Time: 3 min
Key Takeaways
  • Traditional costly, ineffective bespoke IT solutions are no longer the only choice
  • The cloud will break the stranglehold of big suppliers
  • There are three areas of new technology in each service, levers and dials, gubbins, and machinery
  • Gubbins are all the services in government 
  • There are specific Gubbins and common gubbins
  • We can break services into distinct pieces and re-use them over and over across services, departments and local governments

The Future of Local Government Services

Time: 4 min
Takeaways:
  • Legacy technology under delivers and needs replacing 
  • Cost-cutting and austerity measures are affecting budgets
  • Each local government uses its own distinct proprietary software installation
  • Local governments should group their services
  • Local governments should use cloud technologies to package services together to lower cost
  • Local government can use these services to deliver customised services to residents

 

WARP Speed: The only KPI by Tom Quinn Newscorp Australia

Time: 36 min
To access the video you will need to visit the conference page by clicking the image below or the link.
Takeaways
  • There is a massive change in how consumers look at consumer products
  • Mobile technology is driving change - over 50% of Newscorp's traffic is from mobile devices 
  • Mobile is growing at 76% year on year
  • Every industry is being changed - retail, banking, media, health and many more
  • The winner in the old system era was a marathon runner; the winner in the app era is the sprinter.
  • Composability is the key to speed (Think Lego Blocks!)
  • You need to build APIs to connect old and new systems
  • Re-tool your business as a set of Lego blocks
 
Newscorp video
Have you watched any other videos that we can add to this blog? Send them to us to share or tweet them to @symphony3think.