Foden Grealy is on the "Digital Leaders 100" list

This post was originally an announcement on fodengrealy.com - Changes in Foden Grealy explains why it is here. ---

Here’s a nice thing: Foden Grealy has been selected for the Digital Leaders 100 list for 2014.

The list... "recognise(s) the top 100 individuals, organisations, and products making a real difference in the world of citizen-facing eServices"

There were 575 nominations across all of the ten categories of the list; and we were one of ten firms selected in the SME category.

Huge, huge thanks to those who nominated us.

There’s some voting and judging going until 2 June to select winners in each of the categories and also an overall top ten; if you are prepared for some minor online faffing - you can vote here.

Foden Grealy and G-Cloud III in 60 seconds

This post was originally an announcement on fodengrealy.com - Changes in Foden Grealy explains why it is here. ---

We are delighted to hear this week that our services have been accepted for the G-Cloud III Cloudstore. The 60 second video above explains what we do and was inspired by the G-Cloud in 60 seconds video we made for the G-Cloud programme in 2012.

New focus: new website

This post was originally an announcement on fodengrealy.com - Changes in Foden Grealy explains why it is here. It refers to a previous website and not the 2015 version of markfoden.com. ---

If you have been here before then you may have spotted that our website and its livery have had a fairly major re-fettling. This post explains why.

Over the past year or so there have been earthquakes in Government IT. Good ones. Some enlightened folk in the Cabinet Office with the right mindset and a sensible approach have begun a substantial and workable-looking reform.

This week, for example, the last of the 24 ministerial departments has switched off its website and moved to the new centralised gov.uk website created by the Government Digital Service. A striking technical achievement certainly; but it is the deft cat-herding of so many diverse organisations that has most impressed us.

Having worked in Government IT for a dozen years or so and watched (through our fingers) some of the quite dreadful things that have happened, it is hugely cheering that there are such changes in the air.

We intend to focus our business on supporting these changes. Specifically - and you'll see this plastered over our home page in big letters - to provide "Sleeves-rolled-up help to implement the Cabinet Office’s IT reform agenda within Government organisations". (If we are completely honest, we will mostly be doing the same things we have always done; it's just that now we don't have to be quite as stealthy.)

We are delighted to say that we have been successful in our tender for the latest G-Cloud contracting framework (G-Cloud being a noteworthy Government IT success in itself). We have been on the framework since its inception and have done work for two departments. We wrote the change strategy for the G-Cloud Programme and helped set up an agile change programme within Defra to improve information sharing and collaboration. See the G-Cloud supplier sales leader-board: we are one slot above Microsoft. Sure to change, but nice while it lasts.

And, incidentally...

...although we are not a tech firm, we have built this website ourselves. In the vein of the G-Cloud ethos, we gave up our traditional web services provider and took on more of the responsibility of creating and managing the site ourselves. In the process, we learned that the service we had before was not that good and we could do better by being a little bit adventurous. Again, in the spirit of G-Cloud we used pay-by-the-hour cloud services and free open-source software. We were amazed at how quickly we made progress and how enormously helpful dozens of people, from all over the world, were in resolving the technical snags we came across. Fine-tasting dog food.

Mark Foden is speaking at the Defence Academy 'Agile' symposium

This post was originally an announcement on fodengrealy.com - Changes in Foden Grealy explains why it is here. ---

I will be speaking at a symposium - An Agile Approach: The key to success? - at the Defence Academy at Shrivenham on 12 September 2012.

After some head-scratching I decided to call my talk "Complexity and the incremental change revolution"; the conference blurb says...

This talk is about complexity in organisations and the need for a revolution in how we think about and manage change. It will explain why it is critically important for government to develop a capacity for incremental change and the deep shifts in mindset that will be needed to enable it. Drawing on real examples, it will describe the profound cultural barriers to adopting incremental approaches and practical things that can be done to get over them. It will look at ‘Agile’ and the challenges for IT people in particular.

There are more details on LinkedIn. It's £50 (or £15 if you are a Cranfield/Shrivenham alumnus). Nice day in the country. Bang up lunch. Come along to cheer/heckle.

FG and G-Cloud

This post was originally an announcement on fodengrealy.com - Changes in Foden Grealy explains why it is here. ---

We are properly chuffed to announce that Foden Grealy (Ltd) has been awarded a place on the Government's new G-Cloud Services Framework.  The framework has been set up to make it easy for UK public sector organisations to procure low-cost, flexible cloud computing services from a wide range of suppliers: see the announcements - CloudStore open for business .

We believe that the Government's approach to IT is very clearly changing for the better and G-Cloud is a good example of the positive stuff that is happening. Moving to cloud-based services is absolutely the right thing to be doing; but what is really encouraging is the way that it is being done. G-Cloud has a refreshingly open inclusive approach and, crucially, is working in an incremental, learn-by-doing, non-big-expensive-bang kind of way.

Great too is the change in attitude to small companies: there are hundreds on the G-Cloud framework including us (big smile). It's a huge breath of fresh air for us to be able to contract directly with Government (soulful violin starts up in the background) as it's not always been easy to maintain our independence, and work in the way that would like to, in a marketplace dominated by big firms.

We will be doing our usual helping-out-with-change-management stuff: for details - and an opportunity to listen to Bananarama and the Fun Boy Three from 1982 - take a look at the description of our service. Hurrah!