 Graham Oakes
Principal, Graham Oakes Ltd
Graham is the principal of Graham Oakes Ltd, a consultancy set up in 2003 to help organisations untangle complex technology, relationships, processes, and governance. He has worked with organisations such as Sony, Amnesty International, Oxfam, Cisco, MessageLabs, and the Open Source Academy to develop content management and customer service strategies - and hence to build systems which will support those strategies. His experience covers a range of proprietary and open source technologies.
Prior to forming Graham Oakes Ltd, Graham has held titles including Director of Technology at Sapient Ltd and Head of Project Management at Psygnosis Ltd. He has over 20 years of systems engineering experience.
Graham Oakes Ltd
Graham Oakes Ltd helps you work out how to use technology to achieve your business goals. We provide strategic independent consulting and mentoring to help you manage the ambiguity and uncertainty that surround any major business initiative.
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Presentations
Wednesday, November 7th: 10.30 - 12.00
Track: E-government
One plus one equals…?
Consolidation is in the air. Many organisations have built a portfolio of several, or even several dozen, web platforms over the last decade, each dedicated to a specific task or site. CIOs are now starting to ask whether this dispersal of skills and infrastructure makes sense.
At the same time, combining multiple websites, portals and content management systems into a single system can be challenging. Different navigation schemes, editorial voices, design systems and technical components all need to be merged. Content migration is often a much larger task than anyone envisages. Gaps and overlaps in organisational governance that can be overlooked for individual systems now come to the fore. It’s little wonder that many consolidation projects fail to achieve the anticipated benefits.
This talk will identify six questions you should consider before you kick off your consolidation project. Knowing the answers might just help you deliver a successful project (or at least avoid a disaster).
Sleep Easily – The role of independent assurance
Thursday, November 8th: 10.30 - 12.00
Track: Strategy & Governance
Projects fail. They fail for many reasons – we don’t ask the right questions at the outset; we make assumptions; we mishear what other people are saying; we let optimism run away with us. Many of these failures stem from one root cause – we lose touch with reality.
This “reality challenge” is especially relevant to web projects. Web is still a new area. People use the same terms to describe wildly different concepts. Vendors interpret the same features in very different ways. And underneath it all, we’re dealing with intangible information, not concrete and girders. It can be very hard to keep track of what is really going on.
Independent project reviews and assurance can help connect us with reality. By bringing a fresh perspective and objective mindset, external reviewers can identify misunderstandings, question assumptions and help map out the real status of the project. They can also help bridge communication gaps between project managers, sponsors and other stakeholders.
So if independent reviews are such a panacea, why don’t we all do them and hence avoid project failures? Few organisations are good at setting up and running reviews. This talk will discuss some key considerations for planning and running effective reviews, and for delivering actionable outputs from those reviews.
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