Mark Samuels

1. When I was a kid, the excitement associated to the anticipation of pre-season was almost unbearable. Every season, you’d look at your squad and think, “this could be our year”. As a Villa fan, that misguided belief would now be laughable. It must be a shame for all these Brummies growing up and never, ever thinking: “This could be our year”.
2. Go to football. There’s a severe lack of kids. Why? Well, the lack of competition – producing a lack of anticipation – could be one thing. Expense is another; who can afford to travel round the country with their kids? Computers are also significant. Most kids would probably rather play Fifa then watch the Premier League. And if they do, they won’t pay for a ticket, or pay for a Sky subscription. They’ll watch if free on the interweb.
3. In fact, there’s a severe lack of anyone. Newcastle got just over 40,000 for their match against the Villa last week. That was the Toon’s first match at home in the Premier League since they’d been promoted. Villa, for their part, have been associated to an (unproven) 40% drop in season ticket sales. Their lovely local rivals Small Heath attracted just 6,000 for their mid-week League Cup match against Rochdale. Meanwhile, attendance figures for games have been modified to include tickets sold rather than people actually in the ground. I wonder why…?
4. The reason people don’t go to matches is because football is bloody expensive, and you’re basically paying for flash gits to drive round in stupid cars with naff paint schemes. These flash gits finally got their comeuppance at the World Cup, when the so-called Golden Generation exposed itself as an over-rated generation that, well, couldn’t give a toss.
5. You know how everyone loved football after Italia ’90? Well, South Africa 2010 will be like 1990 – except in reverse. Everyone has finally woken up to the fact that the Premier League is uncompetitive, the ‘Chumpions League’ is a closed shop for rich swines and the players are nowt like us ordinary peasants. Bring back trips to Brum with my Dad as a kid, stopping at the sweet shop in Aston to buy a bag of chocolate éclairs and then watching the Villa lose 2-0 at home to Charlton in the pouring rain. At least I used to be able to think next year could be our year (expect it never was, of course).

Summer’s recently released CIO Connect magazine featured a profile interview with Deloitte UK partner and CIO Mary Hensher, a people person with a passion for the potential of IT to change business. The feature covered the following areas:

1. Deloitte UK CIO Mary Hensher is only too aware of the fact that she remains a scarcity amongst the rarefied air of UK business leadership; a woman with a responsibility for technology at a leading firm.
2. There is hope that the balance will once again shift towards women, and that hope comes in the form of social media: “Technology used to be anti-social; now it’s social,” says Hensher, referring to the increasing prevalence of collaborative technology.
3. “You need pioneers to prove that new models of working are possible,” says Hensher. “Part-time employment will not work in every job but IT should be more accommodating. Employees need to be as flexible as they can. A good working relationship can make new models work.”
4. Information is everything. It is crucial that a central core of IT experts are retained in-house to ensure that client data is secure: “We can’t afford ignorance and managing secure data is essential,” says Hensher.
5. Hensher says issues of security and mobility come together and create concerns around connectivity: “The challenge is to connect your people effectively,” she says.

To read the full article please, click here.

CIOs say a principal part of their role is developing strong partnerships with external suppliers and internal colleagues. But what makes a good relationship and how do you maximise its effectiveness? My latest feature for silicon.com investigates:

Read the marketing bumf from most technology vendors and you would be forgiven for thinking that just about any technology system is a potential cure-all for the business’s ills.

Words such as ‘solution’ are allied to terms like ‘leverage’ to suggest a meaningful – but actually, meaningless – route to IT-enabled operations. If only IT could deliver everything that supplier’s promise. In most cases, it simply cannot.

“The industry’s not as bad as it was but there’s still an issue of over-promising,” says Neil Pamment, a technology veteran and IT director at legal firm Denton Wilde Sapte. With previous experience of working with vendors across various sectors, including manufacturing and healthcare, Pamment says over-zealous marketing assertions can create issues for CIOs.

For the full feature, click here.

A former editor suggested to me that anyone who doesn’t buy The Guardian in their 20s hasn’t got a soul, and that anyone who doesn’t buy The Times in their 30s hasn’t got a brain.

It is, of course, an over-simplified generalisation. Like the quote (wrongly?) attributed to Margaret Thatcher which suggests: “A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure.”

But I digress – and the point I am trying to make is that over-simplifications, however generalised, can sometimes strike a chord. Take the recent column in The Guardian by author Jenny Colgan, which rejoiced in the falling sales of three-wheeled buggies.

The column – which starts with the word “Hurrah!”, possibly the poshest introductory one-word sentence imaginable – explains why the three-wheeled buggy is the noughties symbol of “more-money-than-sense parenting”. The offroad buggy is, apparently, naff conspicuous consumerism: “No longer would a handed-down Maclaren do,” she says.

In our case, Colgan’s kind of right – but not for the reasons she suggests. We have two children who both need to be pushed in a buggy. The three-wheeler allows us to push both at the same time. It’s not possible, you see, for one person to push two buggies.

And naff conspicuous consumption? Do me a favour – our buggy was passed on free by mates, who’d had it passed to them by other parents. So talk to the hand, Jenny Colgan; our offroader is practical and cheap as chips.

Over-simplifications? Like I said at the start, they never work…