The Agile Delivery Network – a collaborative network of SMEs determined to change the way the UK government buys IT – will formally launch this week, having already proven that it can deliver what it promises.

The government’s current supplier model for IT simply does not work, the Agile Delivery Network (ADN) contends, and the Network has already shown what can be done with its work on the highly successful e-petitions site.

Andy de Vale, co-founder of the ADN says: “I’m consistently horrified by the money we waste on government IT. IT delivery in the UK government is broken, and the current supplier model just doesn’t work. The ADN has been set up to tackle the gross waste in the way things are done, and to shake off the pervasive view that it’s just how things are.”

The government itself has recognised the problem and was keen to see the ADN work in conjunction with its recently established ‘skunkworks’ team, Government Digital Service, on the e-petitions site and on new ways of working together.

Unlike the majority of government IT projects, the e-petitions site was built quickly (within six weeks), flexibly and at a low cost. Once the team began to see usage figures rise, it was able to scale the site to match. The site can now manage over 1,000 concurrent sessions per minute without problems.

Throughout the development process the Cabinet Office was able to request changes and have them implemented immediately, rather than having to wait until the project was complete and then request costly alterations, as is normally the case with large suppliers.

ADN brings flexibility, quality, cost and short time-to-market to a sector that has become used to slow, complex and expensive development. Agile, highly motivated developers are collaborating to provide a viable alternative to the large Systems Integrators who usually win government contracts.

The team used Agile project delivery to deliver the working site on time, and used an open source toolset to keep costs low and to take advantage of the most up-to-date technologies.

Peter Herlihy of the Government Digital Service adds: “The Agile Delivery Network SMEs delivered beyond all our expectations. The flexibility and the quality of the service delivered by the team at ADN gives us real hope – and evidence of a successful model for delivery of digital services.”

For more information please contact: Lauren Cormack

About Agile Delivery Network

Agile Delivery Network is a not-for-profit organisation set up to improve access for UK SMEs to government contracts. It aims to change the way UK government procures IT, to reduce waste in project delivery and to advocate and improve the use of Agile techniques in government IT. It was founded by six companies: 2d Cargo, EdgeCase, Matt Wynne ltd, Rutherford Software, Think Code Learn and Unboxed Consulting and is recruiting other member companies to collaborate on UK Government projects.

Look no further!

TIN IT OR BIN IT is your weekly social media need-to-know.

Hot off the press we deliver the week’s most ground breaking social media news,
oh-no-you-didn’t stories, tips you can’t afford to miss or simply our opinion on trends in the digital landscape.

Lastly, we’ll tell you whether it’s tin material or bin material!

View them all here on our Facebook page.

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Tin It Or Bin It – 2 September 2011 – Man versus machine

For all the literary lovers out there, there is now a website that can recommend you books using an algorithm. Launched last week by Aaron Stanton, BookLamp is to books what Pandora is to music.

The website analyses a book’s style of writing and assigns numerical values to the ‘Story DNA’, which is described as the breakdown of the settings, themes and characters.

We don’t know about you, but we choose books through human recommendations – from friends, family, colleagues, book reviewers in newspapers and Amazon user reviews.

Obtaining electronic recommendations from an algorithm that has not read and experienced the book just seems a bit dubious. We love technology but sometimes you just need a human touch.

BookLamp can’t distinguish between good prose and sloppy writing styles, so it is lacking the quality control that you usually get from someone you know and trust.

Also, the BookLamp engine can sometimes recommend a ‘zinger’ – which is a book that makes sense from an algorithmic perspective but not from a human view. This seems to be a major problem and something they will need to work on to perfect.

So far there are only 20,000 titles in their database, which means that your choices are fairly limited at this stage until more publishers come on board.

BookLamp is a work in progress. It sounds like a good idea initially, but on closer inspection there are some flaws.

We are not entirely convinced. Think we will just stick to old-fashioned book recommendations from friends and family for now, and come back to this once the BookLamp engine has had time to expand and fine-tune itself.

BIN IT…for now.

Cloud software and services company Flexiant is continuing its push into the US market with a partnership announced today of full-service reseller, DSA Technologies.

Founded in 1991, DSA Technologies provides a complete range of IT services and solutions to clients across the United States. It will introduce Flexiant’s Extility cloud platform these clients, helping them to develop their own private and public clouds.

Robert Karssiens, Flexiant’s Director of Sales & Marketing says: “Resellers like DSA Technologies are essential to our international growth plans. This agreement will help introduce our Extility platform, already used extensively in Europe, to a new and demanding market.”

Flexiant, headquartered in Scotland, developed Europe’s first cloud platform in 2007 and is one of only a handful of independent cloud platform providers world wide.

DSA Technologies’ CEO, Michael Pearson says: “We pride ourselves on finding the right technologies for our clients, to help them in their own businesses. Flexiant’s Extility cloud computing platform will let our clients create exactly the clouds they need.”

The two partners were introduced through Phoenix Fire, a business development agency specialising in partner channel development for the US technology sector. Flexiant entered a partnership agreement with Phoenix Fire at the end of 2010, to help find quality resellers for its products.

Flexiant’s Extility software is a licensed cloud computing platform delivering all the benefits of real-time server estate management to end-users through its unique user interface and API. Central to these end-user benefits is the ability to shape server requirements to meet and exceed the demands of a perpetually shifting market landscape, allowing provisioning and reconfiguration of servers in seconds or minutes rather than hours or days.

Licensees of Extility not only enjoy the competitive edge of providing world class scalable services to existing or new business; the savings springing from Extility’s unified platform mean that they are able to do so at realistic prices in a market projected to comprise of over 20% of corporate IT infrastructure within five years.

Flexiant also offers a public cloud service, FlexiScale, which enables start-ups and SMEs to grow from one server to one thousand servers in seconds – critical for organisations offering streaming video, social networking or SaaS, and ideal for a wealth of other applications.

FlexiScale’s pay-as-you-go virtual dedicated servers can be up and running, or taken down in less than 60 seconds, ensuring businesses can rapidly shape their IT resources in response to dynamic market conditions. With no long-term commitment or capital expenditure required from customers, FlexiScale facilitates clear focus on core business activities by reducing time, energy and effort spent on IT provisioning and investment.

In addition to a range of other deployments, Extility is currently being used as a test bed by the European Commission on three multi-million pound FP7 research and development projects aimed at driving forward the adoption of cloud computing across Europe.

For more information contact: Lauren Cormack.

About DSA Technologies

Founded in 1991, DSA Technologies provides a complete range of IT services and solutions to clients US-wide. DSA has grown from a professional services only firm into a full-service solution provider offering complete technology solutions for: strategic planning, cloud-readiness assessment, project design, product sales, professional services implementation, managed services monitoring, post-implementation support and on-going staff services.