Blog – Agile Elephant making sense of digital transformation

December 12, 2022 By David Terrar

The Metaverse doesn’t exist yet, but…

The metaverse is not a thing. It’s not even recognised by my iPhone’s spell check and autocorrect, so it can’t be real. However, we can see what it might be through a glass, darkly. Even so, Mark Zuckerberg has rebranded his universe to suit it. He has said:

“Metaverse isn’t a thing a company builds. It’s the next chapter of the internet overall.”

That sounds exciting, but is it the next chapter? Haven’t we heard this before? What about all those people talking about it as if it actually does exist now, rather than a chapter yet to be written? What are they talking about? Ed Greig, Chief Disruptor at Deloitte says:

“In simplest terms, the metaverse is the internet, but in 3D.”

Satya Nadella of Microsoft, who is probably the smartest person I’ve ever been in a meeting with, says:

“The metaverse is here, and it’s not only transforming how we see the world but how we participate in it – from the factory floor to the meeting room.”

He’s talking in the present. What’s going on? Matthew Ball who was Head of Strategy for Amazon Studios, writes books, and is now CEO at Epyllion Companies says:

“It is a massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time, rendered, 3D virtual worlds that can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users, each with an individual sense of presence.”

Matthew is also saying “it is” – present tense.

But we have heard of something like this before, back when we “technology types” were all talking about web 2.0. Way back in 2003 a San Francisco based outfit called Linden Labs created an online multimedia platform that allowed people to create an avatar for themselves and then interact with other users and user created content within a multi player online virtual world. It was called Second Life. I can remember first hearing about it, then investigating and writing about it and other virtual worlds in 2006 and 2007. Back then I remember seeing a Sky News item on the music business using something called Habbo Hotel to promote new acts. Then I saw the size of the communities using Gaia Online, an anime-themed social networking and forums-based website, or a Massive multiplayer online role-playing game called World of Warcraft. There was a point in 2007 when it felt like the Second Life platform was going to take over the world. All the social media savvy people I knew created an avatar and started experimenting or doing business there. Inside the platform there was a virtual property boom, even leading to the platform’s first virtual real estate millionaire (having started with only a $9.95 investment). Major brands like Amazon, American Apparel, and Disney set up shop. IBM joined in and held meetings there. Dell sold PCs there. BBC Radio 1 held a One Big Weekend event on a 64 acre virtual island. Endomol created a version of Big Brother there. Big Banks joined in. Consulting firms opened offices. The interest probably peaked at some point in 2007, continued through to 2009, and then it didn’t take over the world… so most people lost interest and moved on.

So what’s real about the metaverse today. Let me point you to an excellent University of Cambridge policy document by Sam Gilbert. In his primer on it he says:

“The term metaverse refers to the open, persistent, real-time, interoperable, virtual world that could be built using web3 technologies. NFTs, blockchain, smart contracts, and cryptocurrencies are said to provide the payments and legal infrastructure needed to complement virtual reality (VR) capabilities, meaning that the vision presented in Snow Crash – or more optimistically, Ready Player One – can be realised. “

That’s the vision, but we aren’t there yet. An open, persistent, real-time, interoperable, virtual world won’t be science fact for while. A lot of global definitions, protocols, and standards will need to be agreed first. So what are people talking about when they use metaverse in the present tense? Gaming platforms. And there’s nothing wrong with that as long as they are clear about what they mean, and don’t try to pull the wool over your eyes.

If you google search for metaverse platforms, you’ll come up with a list that includes Roblox (which has 43.2 million daily active users), Epic Games, Decentraland (DappRadar says it has 650 Daily Active Users, but DCL metrics say they have 8,500 active a day), Sandbox, and Efinity. By the way, Second Life is still going and by comparison, pretty active with over 70 million registered accounts, and on average 200,000 active users a day.

Just like in the hypeday of Second Life, brands are successfully engaging and doing business with customers on gaming platforms. 21 million people have visited Nike’s virtual store on Roblox. Gucci, JPMorgan Chase, Selfridges, Benneton and ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company) are all investing in particular VR and gaming platforms. My particular favourite story I’ve heard recently is the Burberry x Minecraft collaboration. Their Capsule Collection is available for digital download in the Minecraft marketplace, or you can buy physical Minecraft scarfs to wear yourself from the online dot com store.

There is definitely an audience that many brands can spend their marketing budgets on finding and starting conversations with on particular gaming platforms where they hang out. There are particular tools, techniques and approaches for exploiting these AR and VR experiences more successfully that technology companies, consultants and agencies can help with. But let’s tell it like it is and not confuse that with the metaverse.

A version of this post was published on the Bloor Research website. If you are interested in finding out more about our thoughts on the metaverse, blockchain, web3, and other new technologies, then please contact us so we can start a conversation.

February 10, 2021 By David Terrar

Impossible Things get Disruptive

We’ve been working with Disruptive Live since they started. If you don’t know them you should! They have been live streaming stories and interviews from major technology shows for years, and they’ve now grown to three full time studios just off the South Bank in London. They’ve worked with and created content for some of the largest companies including Google, IBM, Lenovo, LinkedIn, and Microsoft, but also IKEA and Deliveroo, as well as supporting events like Pride in London. Their angle on creating video content comes from, and starts with, live streaming, rather than traditional video production and the approach that conventional film crews take. Their disruptive approach has come in to its own in this last 12 months when physical events have been off the agenda and when virtual, live and quality have been the watchwords.

Since April the team have been producing a regular, weeklyish, half an hour, live streamed show for me called Impossible Things with David Terrar. That title is inspired by the Arthur C Clarke third law that says “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” along with the Queen in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There when she says “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast”. I cover a whole range of emerging tech and business transformation topics, with a special emphasis on collaboration and the future of work, and with some leadership and creativity mixed in.

Today is Episode 25 live at 15:00 UK time is with Lucinda Carney, CEO & Founder Actus Software. We’ll be talking about her product, her expertise in organisational psychology, HR challenges and strategy, podcasting (she’s on 99 episodes!), on being a change superhero, and her viewpoint on the future of work.

Next week on 17 February, Episode 26 will be R. Michael Anderson. He’s a (very tall!) Californian Software Entrepreneur, Professional Leadership Mentor, Author, Researcher transplanted to the UK. We’ll be talking about the 3 companies he founded with a big emphasis on leadership, and about his new book.

In two weeks on 24 February, Episode 27 will be Vlatka Hlupic. I first met her when she was lecturing at Westminster university, but then she published one of my favourite books The Management Shift. We’ll be talking about that, her subsequent book, her consulting organisation and the coaching she does.

The shows are live streamed on Disruptive Live’s mobile app, available at your favourite app store, and then they are subsequently published on demand on Twitter, Facebook Live, LinkedIn Live, YouTube and the disruptive.live website. If you want to catch all of the shows then download the app, hit the “on demand” button and scroll down to find the Impossible Things Show. On Disruptive’s website scroll down on the home page to series, and you’ll find the show along to the right.

I really do appreciate the great job that the Disruptive team does in supporting this for me. Please check out what they do. They have a whole range content giving a very complete coverage of the tech space, with some top-tier business leader, CEOs, CTOs and CIOs. Why not sample what they do with Lucinda and I today at 15:00 – see you there!

April 16, 2020 By David Terrar

Clarity, Cloud, and Culture Change at IBM

As we all know “business as usual” just changed for every person, team and organisation on the planet. In this “new normal” there are plenty of lessons to learn, unlearn and relearn. Essentially, we need to keep calm and carry on, at the same time as recognising the significant new opportunities this throws up alongside the common problems we are all facing. With that backdrop IBM just made a very significant change, the timing of which was prescribed before these new events overtook us. A new CEO, Arvind Krishna, took the reins on Monday 6 April. I’d like to comment on the new direction this signals, as well as the implications of the other management changes and strategic points that are described in the open letter he wrote to all employees on his first day in the job. I must disclose that I have a soft spot for the IBM company as I worked there and first learned about business for nine years straight out of University. I lived through a good CEO and a bad CEO, but that’s a story for another time. For me the changes that are already happening in the new guy’s first week trigger a realignment, the continuation of a significant culture change, and the clear consolidation of the company’s strategy.

Arvind’s predecessor, Ginny Rometty, has been helping IBM shift gears over the last couple of years, handing off collaboration and other software products to HCL, repositioning their approach to the Cloud after some early missteps, mentioning the Watson brand a bit less and AI and cognitive a bit more, and then making the most significant acquisition in their history – $34Bn for Red Hat, which finalised last year. A move that massively positions IBM at the heart of the open source world. Insiders tell me her last internal video briefing got a bit emotional as she passed on the baton. Combined with Arvind’s open letter what does it all mean?

In the letter Arvind references the mainframe and other successful platforms in their history, and he says:

“I believe now is the time to build a fourth platform in hybrid cloud. An essential, ubiquitous hybrid cloud platform our clients will rely on to do their most critical work in this century. A platform that can last even longer than the others.”

Putting aside what he talks about as platforms two and three, he is quite rightly referencing that IBM “owned” and still owns the mainframe market and has been strong with other products, platforms and services too, but what he is really making clear is their intention to occupy the mission critical, hybrid multi-cloud applications space. He goes on to spell out the strategy in three clear steps:

“First, we have to deepen our understanding of IBM’s two strategic battles: the journey to hybrid cloud and AI. We all need to understand and leverage IBM’s sources of competitive advantage. Namely, our open source and security leadership, our deep expertise and trust, and the fact that we enable clients to build mission-critical applications once and run them anywhere.
Second, we have to win the architectural battle in cloud. There’s a unique window of opportunity for IBM and Red Hat to establish Linux, containers and Kubernetes as the new standard. We can make Red Hat OpenShift the default choice for hybrid cloud in the same way that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the default choice for the operating system.
Third, we all must be obsessed with continually delighting our clients. At every interaction, we must strive to offer them the best experience and value. The only way to lead in today’s ever-changing marketplace is to constantly innovate according to what our clients want and need.”

I particularly like the continuous innovation message made explicit that underpins the third strand of the strategy. I understand from IBM insiders he has doubled down on the hybrid story and his intent with further internal videos. Importantly, Krishna comes from a technical rather than sales or operations background, ran IBM’s cloud and cognitive software unit and was the architect of the Red Hat purchase. This isn’t any sort of pivot or change from the recent direction of travel, it’s just laying it out with refined clarity. IBM have been saying for a while that the easy 20% of workloads have moved to the cloud, but the next 80% are the complex, legacy style applications, often mainframe based, that have been running banking, credit card transactions, big business and big retail for decades. IBM’s track record with those customers and that style of secure, mission-critical application marries up with the strategy to make Red Hat OpenShift and containers as the standard choice for an enterprise customer’s hybrid “develop once, deploy anywhere” multi-cloud strategy, making IBM an attractive proposition compared to the typical choice of public cloud providers. IBM can see a big revenue opportunity for the next generation of cloud applications beyond the straightforward public cloud infrastructure market, maybe even bigger and longer lasting than the mainframe market.

Microsoft with Azure are obvious competition in the hybrid multi-cloud space, along with some of the other players, but maybe the closest to IBM’s platform strategy are VMware, now part of Dell EMC. Thereby hangs an interesting proposition and internal coopetition challenge for IBM. They have a significant amount of revenue in customers using VMware – they will have to balance those revenues with Red Hat OpenShift inside the cloud and cognitive software business and make it work.

And that leads me to the next key point, which is the significance of two of the leadership changes Arvind just announced. Jim Whitehurst, who was the CEO of Red Hat, in his new role as President, will head IBM Strategy as well as the Cloud and Cognitive Software unit which Arvind used to run. This is effectively splitting Ginny’s role between Arvind and Jim, and importantly bringing the Cloud and Cognitive Software unit both under Jim’s wing and direct into the CEO. Intriguingly it means Jim is directly managing that coopetition between VMware and Red Hat OpenShift. It also means Jim will have a huge and direct influence on the culture of IBM right now rather than at some point in the future as the next potential “CEO in waiting” for the company. The other leadership surprise was bringing in Howard Boville from Bank of America to become Senior Vice President in charge of the IBM Cloud Platform. An outsider from both IBM and Red Hat. A customer. A CTO. A fresh set of eyes.

How will Jim influence the IBM culture? To try and understand that question I’ve just started reading his book The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance. The foreword by Gary Hamel is very much my cup of tea and sets the scene beautifully. Here are the first two sentences:

“Here’s a conundrum. The human capabilities that are most critical to success – the ones that can help your organization become more resilient, more creative, and more, well, awesome – are precisely the ones that can’t be managed.”

The foreword, obviously written before the acquisition like the rest of the book, goes on to explain how Red Hat is one of the small but growing number of companies that have transcended the old trade-offs between scale and agility, efficiency and innovation, and discipline and empowerment. I’m only a few chapters in, and Jim’s whole message of why opening up your organisation matters is coming across loud and clear. And he’s bringing that to IBM.

One of the IBM insiders was telling me earlier today about an open “Ask Me Anything” internal Slack session that Arvind had just set up for that day. They went on to tell me how everyone is aligned to and excited by the new strategy.

IBM’s been around for 109 years. It’s been through ups and downs and the elephant has learned to dance. This might be one of the most significant weeks in its history as it sets foot on the path to “opening up”, with a refined and defined market differentiation, and a clear and transparently explained strategy.

This post was first published at Bloor Research. Agile Elephant is a strategic partner of Bloor Research. To find out more, please contact us.

April 2, 2020 By David Terrar

We need to shift from Linear Thinking to Mutable Thinking

Only a few weeks ago many of us at the forefront of analysing, influencing and telling the story of the amazing technological changes that make up the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” would be explaining that we are living in one of the most exhilarating times in human history. We might even have joked using the Chinese proverb, or is it a curse, “May you live in interesting times”. In the course of those few weeks things got very interesting. The dramatic spread of COVID-19 has disrupted lives, livelihoods, communities and businesses worldwide. Even with all of the knowledge most of us had at the start of March, did many of us imagine we would be where we are today, as I write this “locked down” in my home on the last day of March 2020? The most significant part of the problem is that we humans have 200,000 years of evolutionary circumstances and thinking that happened in a linear way. Our minds have been conditioned to changes in speed, growth, the climate and our environment in easily digestible steps. We think in terms of steps, not step change, but to survive in this new world we need to think differently.

Technological change has always been a numbers game, and the numbers are big. If we talk about a minute on the Internet BC (before COVID-19) then across the world 4,497,200 Google searches were conducted, 18,100,000 texts were sent, 55,100 photos were shared on Instagram, 188,000,000 emails were sent, 231,800 Skype calls were made, and for that minute 4,500,000 people were watching videos on YouTube. That only covers a few of the world’s social media and technology platforms, and those numbers will all have changed significantly in the last Month as so many of us have shifted from face to face meetings and working, to working from home or in isolation at home wanting to connect with family. Some of us are using online collaboration tools, communication mechanisms and certain social networks for the first time. As hunter gatherers or farmers as well as feeling ourselves age, or watching a single animal or tree grow, we’ve been used to looking at a massive herd, or a deep forest, or the size of an ocean – we can deal with big numbers too.

Where our conditioning gets in the way is grappling with exponential change. I’ve heard this explained with lilies growing to fill a pond, or with the fable of the origins of chess and grains of rice on the board. I’ll use a passage lifted out of the book Abundance, The Future Is Better Than You Think by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler:

To give you a sense of the difference, if I take thirty linear steps (calling one step a meter) from the front door of my Santa Monica home, I end up thirty meters away. However, if I take thirty exponential steps (one, two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty- two, and so on), I end up a billion meters away, or, effectively lapping the globe twenty-six times.”

Let me just amplify the magnitude of difficulty here. After seven exponential “steps”, that’s a quarter of the “steps”, you’d only be 127 meters away, but when you get to that last exponential “step” it would take you 13 times around the globe. The problem with exponential versus linear is that nothing much happens for a while, then you reach a cusp, and then the rate of change is massive. Easy to visualise as a graph, but much more difficult to get your head around in human terms. A virus that first infected someone aged 55 in Hubei province, China on 17 November 2019, that can generally infect two or three people once you’ve got it, is now teaching us all about the power of exponential change. As long ago as 2015 the likes of Bill Gates warned us of the danger of such a pandemic. What should we have done?

My answer is that we need to learn and think differently. We need to shift from a linear perspective to thinking exponentially. We call it Mutable Thinking.

Those of us in the “digital transformation” business have been learning from the military and talking VUCA for a while. Nobody will argue against the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity that we all face now. Let’s explore some of those ingredients. As we’ve advanced through the industrial revolutions to this fourth one, our business world has steadily moved through levels of complicated, but now it’s complex. What’s the difference? Complicated can be controlled. Complicated might be difficult, but there are a set of rules to be to be understood – instructions, recipes, and algorithms all ripe for the application of machine learning and AI. There are linear pathways that allow us to identify individual causes for observed effects. Complicated can be controlled with a mindset of efficiency. We can reduce the problem to steps, and with enough computing power and the right data we can make solid predictions, improve the process or even solve the problem completely. Complex is different. Complex problems involve too many unknowns, and too many variables and interrelated factors to be reduced to a set of rules and processes. Complex means patterns that don’t repeat themselves regularly. Complex defies forecasting and brings in the unexpected with radical uncertainty. Complex needs to be managed in a different way. Complex needs a different mindset.

In today’s VUCA landscape we believe that successful organisations need to be a Mutable Business ™, meaning that they can successfully transform in a continuous way. You can find out more about the business, people and technology ingredients that make up our recommended approach, but let’s discuss the need for a different mindset to support it. You need exponential thinking in place of linear thinking, a different kind of leadership, and a different kind of culture – we call it Mutable Thinking. We see today’s successful leaders have a different set of characteristics and values that they encourage at all levels of their organisation:

Unlimited mindset
Strong team cohesion
Unbounded culture
Inspirational leadership
Strong sense of purpose
Passion in what they are doing

With complicated shifting to complex, the planning horizon is dramatically reduced and predicting the future is impossible. If it’s uncharted, that means you can only map it when you get there. As a Mutable Thinker you embrace the fact you can’t plan for an unknown future, but you know that you can be prepared for it. We can beat 200,000 years of evolutionary conditioning on linear thinking because of the other key factor that Darwin taught us. The species that survives is the one that’s most adaptable to the new conditions. In this uncharted future, what are the characteristics that will help us? We need to:

Expect the unexpected and prepare for many possibilities
Think in a “team of teams” way, forming partnerships, building coalitions, looking for ecosystems that can help, both inside and outside the organisation
Use our imagination – it is combining new ideas, fostering innovation and finding the right new things to do that are much more important than efficiency and doing the old things right
Allow experimentation, allow our people to fail and learn from the process
Be brave and stand for something

Over the last week we’ve heard some amazing and positive news stories to set against the bad news of the global pandemic and the readjustment of the world economy that will come. In the UK 700,000 people volunteering to help the NHS in a matter of a few days. Acts of community encouraging the nation to collectively thank the NHS front line staff a few days ago or helping the most at risk get deliveries of the food and medicine they need. The development of a Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) breathing aid that can help keep COVID-19 patients avoid intensive care, adapted by mechanical engineers at UCL, clinicians at UCLH working with Mercedes-AMG F1 engineers to create a state-of-the-art version suited to mass production and approved by NHS in less than two weeks. Kings College London launching a new app on 24 March which maps and tracks symptoms related to COVID-19, allowing anyone to self-report daily, that already has one 1.5 million users and counting, giving us fresh data and insights to help combat the disease. All of this thinking signposts the different mindset that all of us should be considering in making our businesses more successful going forwards. We need to shift from Linear Thinking to Mutable Thinking.

This post was first published at Bloor Research. Agile Elephant is a strategic partner of Bloor Research. To find out more, please contact us.

March 9, 2020 By David Terrar

GLH2020 London – and the winner is…

Last night we completed the third London edition of The Global Legal Hackathon. As you may know, this is annual event that happens in over 40 cities simultaneously every year, on the same weekend in either February or March. It’s organised by Rob Millard of Cambridge Strategy Group, me (David Terrar) of Agile Elephant, and Fraser Matcham of the University of Westminster. The goal is to bring lawyers, coders, designers and marketers together to improve the practice and business of law, and better access to law for the public. This year the weekend coincided with International Women’s Day, so we added the GLH Inclusivity Challenge, an additional stream to reward ideas that improve equity, inclusion and diversity in the legal profession.

Like so many recent and planned public events, we were affected by the Coronavirus. In the previous two years around half of our signups for the event came in the last week, and almost everyone who registered actually attended. This year we only had 2 signups in the final week (when we were expecting to add over 100), and in the end only half of our registered attendees actually came. However, the 50 that came on Friday evening were the right 50! Full of commitment and enthusiasm. It was notable that everyone was shaking hands, keeping calm and carrying on, as well as following NHS guidance on hand washing, sneezing, face touching and the like. We had a great atmosphere at the start on Friday night and all weekend in our new venue, the Marylebone Campus of the University of Westminster – a big shout out to them for providing us their premises and doing such a great job of hosting us!

On Friday we had 12 really great ideas, some real innovation and great use of technology pitched to the group, which quickly combined and coalesced in to 7 teams. The teams occupied 7 classrooms up on the second floor, and we had a big space for food, drink, networking and the ideation stage on the ground floor, as well as the Hogg Auditorium for Sunday’s presentations and judging.

Sponsors and Supporters

We must thank law firm sponsors BCLP and White & Case, and our technology sponsor BRYTER for paying for the food, drink, prizes, trophies and other logistics for the event. Nothing fancy – lunches were meal deals from local supermarkets, and evening meals were from Dominos. You can’t have a hackathon without beer and pizza (although wine and soft drinks were provided too). We would also like to thank our supporters – The Law Society, SRA, disruptive.liveand Techcelerate.

Judges

We must thank our fantastic team of highly respected judges, who had such a difficult job this year:

Jenifer Swallow (Director, LawTech Delivery Panel)
Mo Zain Ajaz (Global Head of Legal Operational Excellence National Grid)
Elizabeth Duff (Dean of Westminster Law School)
Rosemary Martin (GC, Vodafone)
Priya Lele (Legal Operations Lead, Client Solutions, UK, US & EMEA, Herbert Smith Freehills)
Nicola Tulk (Programme Manager, Better Markets, Nesta Challenges)

Teams

In no particular order here are the teams who participated, with their ideas explained in one sentence:

Team Name	Team Rep	Members	Product/Service
Wayfarer	Kiran Dhoot	Kiran Dhoot Dan Simpkin Elizabeth Zang Kallun Willock Theofili Elenoglou Steven Rajavinothan Emily Pica Rajdilair Rai	Virtual legal guide aimed at startups who don’t know what they don’t know.
Sharmant	Trevor Oakley	Trevor Oakley Atis Gailis Antonio Di Angelo Dipal Thakker	A framework for provenance and safeguards in Import and Export trade
Homiie	Tatiana Botskina	Tatiana Botskina Musleh Kahn Alice Abiola Hugo Cheyne	Homiie is a platform that makes the complicated business of buying and selling a house faster, more collaborative and more transparent.
The Magic Box	Liz Wong	Liz Wong Giulia Carloni Simon Cheung James SylvesterGuy Stern Merve Ugurlu	An autonomous work allocation platform that ensures efficiency and inclusivity.
Team CD	Adam Ford	Adam Ford Geraint John Alec Alston	Empowering small business to solve their debt problems without the need for lawyers.
Virtuo	Michael Fatungase	Michael Fatungase Omar Salem Waverly Chmura Joe Reeve Klaudija Brami Danae Balcells Greg Fylaktou	THE virtual office.
Easy Rail Rights	Raphaël Bastian	Raphaël Bastian Théo Bernier Laetitia Jacquier-Stefanou Ioannis Stefanou	It is an online platform for claiming refunds for passengers experiencing train cancellations and delays in Europe.

And the winner is

Inclusivity Challenge winner:

The Magic Box – with their innovative, use of a “blind” mapping algorithm to take gender, ethnic and other biases out of a law firm’s work allocation, aiming to help utilisation and efficiency too.

The main event:

Third: Team CD – with their Cockroach Debt solution helping small businesses with automation to improve their cash flow around bad debts, reducing the need for lawyers in many circumstances.

Second: Sharmant – helping international trade with blockchain and other technologies in their solution connecting buyers and sellers to address the labour intensive Letters of Credit process.

First – the overall Winner: Homiie – with a solution combining chatbots, AI and blockchain to address the nightmare of the conveyancing process for buying and selling houses.

We have a worthy winner, and speaking as someone who is in the thick of buying and selling, just a few weeks before exchange of contracts stage – I want their product right now please!

Homiie and The Magic Box will go forward to the semis and we really hope both London teams make the finals. But the great thing is that all 7 ideas address real pain points, and all got to a position where they really should follow through and get to market. We’ll be encouraging that to happen, and we really want to see some new companies formed out of GLH 2020. We had a blast!

If you want to find our more about the Global Legal Hackathon, or to join our new LinkedIn community, then please contact us.

March 2, 2020 By David Terrar

Lawyers + Coders + Beer + Pizza = Global Legal Hackathon London 2020

The third Global Legal Hackathon starts this Friday. When you put lawyers, marketers, designers, consultants and developers in to room with beer and pizza what do you get? If the last 2 years of this event are anything to go by, we’ll get something really special! And by the way, other food and drinks will be available.

GLH2020 is happening over the weekend of 6-8 March. Back in 2018 40 cities joined in simultaneously across 6 continents. In 2019 we had 47 cities, and this year, even with the Caronaviris scare, over 40 cities will be involved and teams will be able to participate remotely if they want to. We aim to make London bigger, better, and even more fun. First a disclosure – Agile Elephant and I have been part of the organising team since the start. Actually, the idea for this event was formed when Brian Kuhn, who at the time ran IBM’s Watson Legal business, met David Fisher, CEO of Integra Ledger, at a workshop Rob Millard of Cambridge Strategy Groupand I ran back in 2017. Rob and I have hosted the London edition ever since, with a lot of help from our friends, sponsors and the University of Westminster. This is a not for profit event, free to enter for the participants, with our sponsors covering the cost of some prizes, as well as lunches, evening meals, soft drinks, coffee, tea, beer and wine. A hackathon wouldn’t be a hackathon without beer and pizza!

Here I am explaining it in a bit more detail:

David Terrar explains why GLH2020 needs you!

What’s the objective?

To progress the business of law, or to facilitate access to the law for the public. Ideas will be pitched on the Friday evening, and teams of 3-10 will form to work over the weekend to create an app or a service. We expect ideas using technologies like AI, Machine Learning, Chatbots, Blockchain, or the Internet of Things. Our 6 judges will deliberate and pick the winning team for London. That team will enter the virtual semi-finals with all the winners from the other cities on 22 March where 10 teams will be chosen to compete in the grand final in London on 16 May.

What’s this Inclusivity Challenge you mentioned?

“Participants and teams around the world, in every Global Legal Hackathon city, are challenged to invent new ways to increase equity, diversity, and inclusion in the legal industry.”

At the conclusion of the GLH weekend, a local winner of the GLH Inclusivity Challenge will be selected by each city alongside the main winner and will progress to a global semi-finals too. This will be an extra stream and, like the main stream, finalists will be invited to the GLH Finals & Gala, to be held in London in mid-May. On top of that, the overall winner of the GLH Inclusivity Challenge will be invited to present its solution during a diversity and inclusion summit that BCLP is planning to host in September, where leading figures from the industry will be asked to commit to ensuring the idea is brought to life and scaled up to deliver a lasting impact on the legal industry as a whole.

#GLH2020 London is bigger and better

The London stream of the Global Legal Hackathon is being co-hosted by Cambridge Strategy Group, Agile Elephant and our venue is kindly provided by the University of Westminster, Marylebone Campus at 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS (near Baker Street station).

All of the details, latest news and how to register are at: https://www.legalhackathon.london and follow #GLH2020 with #London on social media.

Who are sponsoring this?

This year the bills are being paid by law firms Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, White & Case and software company BRYTER, who are providing access to their low-code platform for participants. The Law Society, Disruptive.Live and Techcelerate are supporting us too.

How can you get involved in the GLH?

Hacker teams and team members – Anyone involved in the law, interested in the law, involved in technology for the law, developers, marketers, graphic designers, app designers who want to join the fun. We know some firms will submit teams, and new teams will form on the first evening around a great idea at the GLH.
Helpers – We need volunteers over the weekend to make it happen and keep everyone happy.
Mentors – We need subject matter experts and technologists who can mentor the teams over the weekend to help crystallise their ideas, challenge them, or keep them on track.
Judges – We’ve got 6 great judges.
Sponsors – It’s not too late to get involved and spend some of that marketing budget you had planned for big events overseas. This is a ‘not for profit’ exercise for the hosts, but we need to cover our costs.

We think this is going to be something special. What really happens when you get a bunch of lawyers, coders, designers, consultants and marketing types with their laptops and cloud platforms together over a weekend? Please register, come and join us and find out!

February 12, 2020 By David Terrar

#GLH2020 launches the GLH Inclusivity Challenge

We just yesterday blogged the details and opened registration for the London edition of this year’s Global Legal Hackathon, which might be the largest hackathon ever! To add to an already great event, The Global Legal Hackathon have just a short while ago announced a worldwide collaboration with with She Breaks the Law, RSG Consulting, and global law firm BCLP to launch the GLH Inclusivity Challenge and you’ll know inclusivity, diversity and LGBTQ issues are always high on our agenda. In any case the GLH weekend coincides with International Women’s Day (March 8), so the idea is a natural fit!

GLH2020 adds the GLH Inclusivity Challenge

The 2020 Global Legal Hackathon will be held between March 6-8 simultaneously in more than 50 cities and 25 countries around the world. This year is the third year Agile Elephant has co-hosted London with our friends at Cambridge Strategy Group, and our the second year that the venue is kindly provided by the University of Westminster, although this year we are moving to a bigger space at their Marylebone Campus.

As we’ve described, our goal is to get legal brains, marketers, business analysts and coders in to teams over a weekend creating apps and services that improve the practice and business of law, or provide better access to law for the public. We’ll be fuelling their creativity with beer and pizza, although other food and beverages (including wine) will be available too, thanks to our sponsors – this is a not for profit exercise, and free to enter for all participants (so somebody has to cover our costs please!). But this year, the Global organisers are setting this extra challenge:

“Participants and teams around the world, in every Global Legal Hackathon city, are challenged to invent new ways to increase equity, diversity, and inclusion in the legal industry.”

At the conclusion of GLH weekend, a local winner of the GLH Inclusivity Challenge will be selected by each city alongside the main winner, and will progress to a global semi-finals too. This will be an extra stream and, like the main stream, finalists will be invited to the GLH Finals & Gala, to be held in London in mid-May. On top of that, the overall winner of the GLH Inclusivity Challenge will be invited to present its solution during a diversity and inclusion summit that BCLP is planning to host in September, where leading figures from the industry will be asked to commit to ensuring the idea is brought to life and scaled up to deliver a lasting impact on the legal industry as a whole.

Kearra Markowich, Executive Director of the Global Legal Hackathon, and who is based here in London told us:

“the Global Legal Hackathon is remarkable for the fact that it is a global technology event that is majority women-led around the world. Women lead the event in Brazil, Israel, Romania, Singapore, the United States, and many other countries. On the occasion of International Women’s Day overlapping with the Global Legal Hackathon, we are thrilled to be joined by women-owned RSG Consulting, She Breaks the Law, and the diversity and inclusion team of BCLP to challenge the world to invent new and novel approaches to increasing equity, diversity, and inclusion in the legal industry.”

We think this is a fantastic addition to what is always a great fun weekend. Follow these links to find out more about:

We look forward to seeing you in Marylebone!

February 11, 2020 By David Terrar

What do you get when you mix Lawyers, Coders, Marketers, beer and pizza?

In our experience, the answer is “something special”!

Next month the third Global Legal Hackathon is happening over the weekend of 6-8 March in London and simultaneously in over 50 cities across 6 continents. Back in 2018 40 cities joined in. Last year we had 47 cities, and this year will be bigger, better and even more fun! First a disclosure – I’ve been part of the organising team since the start. Actually the idea for this event was formed when Brian Kuhn, who at the time ran IBM’s Watson Legal business, met David Fisher, CEO of Integra Ledger, at a workshop Rob Millard of Cambridge Strategy Group and I ran back in 2017. Rob and I have hosted the London edition of the hackathon ever since, with a lot of help from our friends, sponsors and the University of Westminster. This is a not for profit event, free to enter for all the participants, with our sponsors covering the cost of some prizes, as well as lunches, evening meals, soft drinks, coffee, tea, beer and wine. A hackathon wouldn’t be a hackathon without beer and pizza!

Is a hackathon with lawyers going to work?

We know that the legal profession has a reputation for being conservative and corporate across all sizes of firms, but like every industry sector the profession is facing the need to digitally transform and reinvent (what our friends at Bloor Research would call a Mutable Business™). New approaches, new uses of technology and, more than anything, new business models are going to be required. Every firm has a position on embracing cloud and mobile technologies, but automation in general and Artificial Intelligence in particular should figure prominently in many plans. This Hackathon is all about getting our best legal brains and innovators in a big room with smart marketers, designers and developers to collaborate, feed off each other’s creativity, experiment, and come up with fresh ideas, cool apps and new ways to interact with clients. It worked like that in 2018 and 2019 with some great ideas, great teamwork and a lot of fun!

What’s the objective?

To progress the business of law, or to facilitate access to the law for the public. Ideas will be pitched on the Friday evening, and teams of 3-10 will form to work over the weekend to create an app or a service. We expect ideas using technologies like AI, Machine Learning, Chatbots, Blockchain, or the Internet of Things. Our 5 judges will deliberate on the Sunday afternoon and pick the winning team for London. That team will enter the virtual semi-finals with all the winners from the other cities on 22 March where 10 teams will be chosen to compete in the grand final in London on 16 May (London venue to be confirmed).

#GLH2020 London is bigger and better

The London stream of the Global Legal Hackathon (GLH) is being co-hosted by Cambridge Strategy Group, Agile Elephant and our venue is kindly provided by the University of Westminster. This year we are at the Marylebone Campus, 35 Marylebone Street, near Baker Street station.

All of the details, latest news and how to register are at: LegalHackathon.London and follow #GLH2020 with #London on social media. Attendees will be invited to join our Slack channel to collaborate and communicate in the run up to the physical event.

Who is involved?

GLH London has only just opened registrations. Last year there were teams from LexisNexis, Pinsent Masons, Vodafone, and Hult International Business School along with involvement from Thomson Reuters, Said Business School, Oxford university, City University, South Bank University and more.

Two of our five judges are on board – Jeanette Nicholas, Deputy Head of Westminster Law School, and Chris Grant, Head of Legal Tech at Barclays (and we hope to announce the other three very soon).

This year our sponsors are Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, and White & Case with Global Sponsors to be announced shortly. The Law Society, Disruptive.Live and Techcelerate are supporting us. techUK and Westminster Council are helping spread the word.

How can you get involved in the GLH London?

Hacker teams and team members – Anyone involved in the law, interested in the law, involved in technology for the law, or general developers, marketers, graphic designers, app designers from any industry sector who want to join the fun. We know some law firms will submit teams, and new teams will form on the first evening around a great idea at the GLH. We have a particular focus on diversity and inclusion this year (more details on that soon).
Helpers – We need volunteers over the weekend to make it happen and keep everyone happy.
Mentors – We need subject matter experts and technologists who can mentor the teams over the weekend to help crystallise their ideas, challenge them, or keep them on track.
Judges – We’ve got 2 great judges, but we need to find 3 more.
Sponsors – As well as the venue we will be providing food (participants need to tell us if they have any special dietary requirements) and drinks, name tags, other supplies as well as some prizes. This is a ‘not for profit’ exercise for the hosts, but we need to cover our costs.

If you are reading this and you aren’t near London, Manchester is hosting this year, as are cities in Brazil, Israel, Hungary, China – check out the Global Legal Hackathon site for a city near you.

Like we said at the start, we know this is going to be something special. What’s going to happen when you get a bunch of lawyers, coders, designers, consultants and marketing types with their laptops, toolkits and cloud platforms together over a weekend? Please come and join us and find out!

November 22, 2019 By David Terrar

Steve Jobs and why Collaboration is so important

This is a shortened version of a post I wrote for our friends at Kahootz.

We believe a properly implemented company collaboration platform (or enterprise social network) is one of the key building blocks for an organisation to adapt to the fast changing business landscape and handle digital transformation more effectively. Why is collaboration so important? Why don’t we take some advice from Steve Jobs and his time with Apple, one of the most successful companies in the world? Watch Steve being interviewed for a few minutes and you get some great lessons on collaboration, teamwork, and real leadership that you can apply to your organisation:

What are Steve’s messages?

“Apple is an incredibly collaborative company”
How many committees at Apple? Zero! (think teams instead)
Apple is organised like a startup, the biggest startup on the planet
The senior leadership all meet once a week for 3 hours and talk about everything they are doing
“There’s tremendous teamwork at the top of the company which filters down to tremendous teamwork throughout the company”
“Teamwork is dependent on trusting the other folks to come through with their part without watching them all the time”
Apple is great at figuring out how to divide things up in to great teams
“If you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you have to let them make a lot of decisions, and you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy – the best ideas have to win, otherwise people don’t stay!”

All of our research backs up these great ideas. Steve’s advice maps in to the Team of Teams approach that we highly recommend. The organisations that manage to connect all of their workers across their information silos work more effectively. The organisations that harness their people’s knowledge and collective intelligence generate more revenue, more profits and are worth more. But how do you put that in to practice?

Go over to Kahootz for the long version to hear how to put that in to practice, what can go wrong (and how to fix it).

If you want help on how to make your collaboration platform and approach more successful, or advice on choosing a platform and how to start, then please contact us.

October 25, 2019 By David Terrar

HPE have a new angle on managing today’s Hybrid Multicloud World

Everyone’s talking digital transformation in today’s volatile, uncertain. complex and ambiguous business landscape. We all want our organisations to keep relevant, reinvent themselves and avoid going the way of a Thomas Cook or a Kodak. To support the transformational change that’s required enterprises have been talking app modernisation for a while, and moving business processes to the Cloud, sometimes “as is” and sometimes by redeveloping them from scratch. Today, both in terms of cost and agility, using Cloud technology for new developments is a given, but for most organisations there is no one right Cloud. We live in a Hybrid Cloud World whether we like it or not. Depending on the size of your organisation, from medium to large, according to the Rightscale State of the Cloud survey, you might be dealing with 5 different Clouds, along with the business critical systems you are, most likely, still running in your data centre. Even a born in the Cloud start up usually has more than just one Cloud/SaaS platform to drive their business. There is no single Cloud platform that has all the answers, and the three major Public Cloud providers are adding features and functions to their platforms continuously. How do we manage that Multicloud challenge? There is no one answer to that either, but a few days ago I heard HPE’s new angle on looking at the problem from the data layer, which ought to be the starting point for thinking about business solutions in any case.

The ingredients of their solution, in my mind, involve a combination of data abstraction and 3 Cs – Cloud, Containers and Choice. Let me explain their product and what I mean in a little more detail.

HPE Cloud Volumes

HPE explained their new Cloud Volumes series of data and management services at a workshop run by Nick Dyer, their Field CTO for Nimble and Intelligent Storage, and Tony Stranack, their EMEA Head of Information and Data Strategies. The problems they are trying to address are common across the Multicloud enterprise. They want to allow portability between the various Public Cloud options and/or on premises hardware so customers can choose the right tool for the job both now, and over time as platforms, circumstances and costs change. They want to provide those services with enterprise grade resilience and availability. They want to make the data repository itself easy to manage and in a unified way across the options. Above all they want to give customers choice and flexibility, whether you are working on existing mission critical apps, or developing new apps with an agile and DevOps mode of develop and deployment.

Nick asked the question “where is the right place for my data” and then went on to explain that data always has “gravity”. By that he means that data is bound by the constraints of where and how it was created, and how it is being stored. Depending on that context, there are various factors “pulling” at that data if and when you want to move it and use it.

Ingress and Egress

The biggest pull is Ingress and Egress, now a normal part of our cloud terminology, but why don’t we just say in and out? Putting my quibble about words aside, we are talking about the costs of getting your data in to and out of the major Cloud provider’s platforms. For Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform moving your data in to their platform doesn’t cost a thing. Of course, they charge you for the storage you use, and they hope you stay a long time, but then they charge you when you want to move that data out of their platform, back on premise or to some other destination. The costs can be significant.

Data Abstraction

With the Cloud Volumes service your data is held in a single repository that is logically connected to your on-premise compute, or to any of the 3 Public Cloud Services. This brings significant benefits in both time and cost. Because the data isn’t being physically moved, there are no egress charges and no elapsed time for the data to move. This gives you all the flexibility and portability between platforms that you need, with the advantage that HPE only bills you for exactly the amount of storage and management services you consume.

Enterprise Grade Availability

You need enterprise grade security, resilience and availability. The service uses HPE’s Nimble storage, designed for low latency with 256-bit AES encryption and 99.9999% availability.

Potential Solutions

The key benefits the approach drives are choice and flexibility. Cloud Volumes allows you to move workloads and data from on-premises to any cloud (and back) simply and efficiently, helping you avoid being locked in to the first Public Cloud you chose. It allows you to develop natively in Cloud and deploy on-premises or vice versa. You could run production on-premises but apply AI and analytics logic in the Cloud adding the ability to scale capacity up and down as necessary. The service allows you to run multiple instances across several Clouds and on-premises simultaneously. You could run production on-premises but recover in the Cloud. It allows you to spin up a new instance to try something in seconds.

Data Management

Cloud Volumes allows choice on management of the data service too, as well as providing a consistent approach across Cloud and on-premises. You can use their portal, a Software as a Service based data management approach, as well as command line or cloud first APIs. The service embraces Docker and Kubernetes to support the kind of Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery approach to allow you to release more, faster and better – to develop once and deploy anywhere.

Underpinning the service is HPE’s InfoSight. This is an AI based tool that analyses and correlates millions of sensors from all of their globally deployed systems. It constantly watches over your particular environment but has learned from managing the entire HPE customer hardware estate to predict problems. If it uncovers an issue, it resolves the issue and prevents other systems from experiencing the same problem. It continuously learns so it gets better and more reliable over time. It takes the guesswork out of managing infrastructure and simplifies planning by accurately predicting capacity, performance, and bandwidth needs. Pretty smart.

Conclusion

Cloud Volumes provides a new angle on the Multicloud management problem that every enterprise faces. By separating out the data it addresses a key cost and time issue as you are moving your data between platforms logically, not physically. It simplifies the options for developing new cloud first apps, dealing with mission critical systems, disaster recovery, fail over and more. It’s a set of tools that helps you choose the right Cloud, use a modern containerised approach, and allow you to change your Cloud or on-premises choice as the cost equation or other factors change. From what I saw at the workshop it’s well worth exploring, and we hear there will be more announcements around the service coming very soon.

Check back here once we’ve had that briefing, or contact me if you want more detailed advice now.

Views from my colleagues who also attended the Cloud Volumes workshop:

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is a customer and includes me in their global influencer programme.

The Metaverse doesn’t exist yet, but…

Impossible Things get Disruptive

Clarity, Cloud, and Culture Change at IBM

We need to shift from Linear Thinking to Mutable Thinking