UG Open Day at City University London

I will be presenting the computing undergraduate programme at City's next University Wide Open Day on Sat 26th June 2010. If you are interesting in what we can offer, such as City's sector leading IT placements, the Professional Pathway and excellent employment outcomes, I look forward to seeing you there.

Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action | Video on TED.com

As this blog is to focus on Information Leadership, this TED video caught David Chan's and my attention. How many CxOs in fact really understand why they are there and what their role is about?

Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action | Video on TED.com

CW500 Club Interview on the MIL

This is my CW500 Club interview on the Master of Information Leadership last month. Enjoy.

CW500 Club: David Chan on the Future Information Leader

This is my colleague David Chan's CW500 Interview on the future role of the information leader.

Blog Resumes

It's been a long while since I blogged. A combination of finishing an MBA, being Head of Department and various other demands on my time.

Now is the time to restart. Nine months ago I set up the Centre for Information Leadership, one of City University London's six interdisciplinary centres. I've become passionate about the need to have effective leadership in the IT profession. We need to use IT much more effectively then we have done so far, and we need to be able as a community to debate effectively how information and technology interacts with the legal, social, environmental and economic challenges we face.

As part of the centre's activity, I am the course director for the Master of Information Leadership: a new degree dedicated to educating our future information leaders (the term we use at City to cover roles such as CIO, CTO, Director of Information, etc). More on the MIL and why I think its central to developing the IT profession's role in society will follow in later postings.

This blog will resume the discussion of the links between the IT industry and higher education, albeit as part of a wider remit of the issues that information leaders face. It will reference work from City's Center for Information Leadership and elsewhere.

A-level results: hope all goes well

Tomorrow the A-level results come out in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. I've worked in the admissions tutor role for a number of years so I know how much these grades mean to people who wish to secure a place on the university course of their choice. All I'd like to say is good luck and I hope all goes well!

A great site: jobstats.co.uk

In my professional life I try to make sense of what's going on in the IT industry. There's a lot of data one can use (for example the excellent quarterly e-skills Bulletin and ICT Inquiry), but here's a site from an IT professional doing it himself. Nick Wells runs a website - www.jobstats.co.uk - that analyses the text of published IT job advertisements on the internet and strips out the information about skills, locations and pay rates (though I have to thank my colleague Maggie Cooper for drawing this site to my attention originally).

A key graph from jobstats is below. The effect on IT vacancies of the dot-com boom and bust is clear for this. It also appears that the job market has largely recovered beyond pre-dot-com levels. Of course, this buoyancy begs a question: if the job prospects seem so good, why have applications for computing degrees not recovered in line with the job market?

Advertised IT vacancies as of 31 July 2007 (www.jobstats.co.uk)

I've used this a lot when analysing the IT job market. Though it appears rough and ready, you'd be surprised how similar the process behind some 'official' figures can be (measurement of economic factors such as productivity is quite difficult in practice). I doubt that, qualitatively at least, these figures are too far off from the reality.

Anyway, have a look. You may be surprised what you find...