When your company’s CIO strolls into the board room, does he or she quake at the thought of taunting rebukes from the ‘suits’ who just won’t understand the plight of the IT department? Or will our redoubtable CIO hero (or heroine) have three top tricks up their shirt sleeve (or blouse) to help them bridge the divide?

As Harry Hill would say: there’s only one way to find out!

(no not “fight!” – but read the survey commissioned by Serena that I’ve just been looking at)

By all accounts it’s all about visibility, productivity and agility - if you believe surveys that is. Progressive CIOs strive to create a more business-savvy culture by:

1) Providing visibility into all projects, both major and minor, to understand how people, time and resources are allocated.

2) Assessing productivity gains and business improvements, making adjustments as needed.

3) Practicing agility in setting priorities and trying new technologies, delivery platforms and outsourcing relationships to get the job done more effectively.

Basically, it sounds like it’s about getting CIOs to think like business people. Let’s hope the management media take heed and try to get the ‘suits’ to understand the difference between a kernel and a keyboard eh?

What’s your favourite technology quote? I’ve always thought that Bill Gates’ apocryphal, “I’d say 640 K ought to be enough for anybody,” comment – which he has since dismissed of course – was a good one.

I was reminded of this topic when I was asked to get hold of a Bloomsbury Reference book this weekend for my father entitled Quotations for Speeches. Promising as it does to provide the, “right quote for every occasion,” I leafed through, giving the Woody Allen and Roosevelt entries top priority - while at the same time avoiding any of Germaine Greer’s teachings of course.

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On the lookout for technology-focused words of wisdom, I did find a couple. Aldous Huxley seemed to be on a bit of a ‘downer’ when he said, “Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.”

There are a few other good ones…

“Technology presumes there's just one right way to do things and there never is,” according to Robert M. Pirsig. This is a hard one to get past your average software developer isn’t it? Problem solving and flexibility are an inherent part of the software engineering process these days right? Maybe this is why his book wasn’t called ‘Zen: and the art of application lifecycle management’ huh?

So to finish up – this is the one that really got me thinking about software application development…

"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man."
Elbert Hubbard 1856 – 1915 American Writer

… and the reason why I think this is so pertinent is that it means we can build all the computing power under the sun, but without the creativity that comes from one individual (at any level be it the project manager or the junior code script kiddie) then we can build nothing.

So, please, share you thoughts.

It’s not often that you hear the acronyms IBM and HIV in the same sentence, but news from Big Blue is that the company is working with the University of Edinburgh on a research project to use supercomputing simulations combined with lab experiments to speed the design of drugs aimed at inhibiting infection by the HIV virus.

This project gives the Blue Gene supercomputer another chance to flex its muscles and, I’m told, combines a new experimental characterisation aimed at targeting the infection process itself.

Now I’m no medical specialist, but if I had time to daydream development dilemmas a little more I think I could see how sophisticated algorithms coupled with experimental techniques could improve molecular therapies.

That said, when I was in Poole General Hospital for a broken ulna and radius I did sit there thinking about how technology could be better used to help me. My drip ran out in the middle of the night and there was no system to tell the night nurse that I had started to double up in pain. How about an RFID tag connected to a pager (or something) so he knew who was running out of what and where and at what time..? Y’know?

In fairness – they already spin so many plates and looked after me so well, I am not complaining.

IBM’s project is focused on how the human HIV-1 virus attaches to cells in the body and injects its genetic material. Researchers are examining a fragment of the surface protein of the virus, known as a peptide, which is crucial in stimulating the body’s immune response to viral attack. Understanding the structure and behavior of the peptide will allow for multiple drugs to be designed simultaneously capable of targeting the infection process.

More power to them I say.

Opera is shunting out a beta preview of Opera Mini today. It works, so they say in the first line of the press release, on almost every mobile phone. In the last line the company states, “Note that not all features may work on all phones or in all regions.”

Anyway, Opera Mini 4.1 “interacts” with your phone to make browsing more convenient, more productive and more fun. This is a “fun” way of saying that it has auto-complete for URLs and saves pages for offline viewing, so don’t get too excited and start thinking it’ll hook you up with Paris Hilton, Katie Holmes etc… (insert fantasy celebrity of choice).

It’s speedier too by all accounts – up to 50% faster than Opera Mini 4 for some tasks. This one is good too, “Now you never have to leave Opera Mini for your phone's clunky native browser to download images, ringtones and other content, or add attachments to e-mail. Opera Mini handles all of these files.”

Opera is a great company with a great product. But please keep the ‘clunky’ and ‘fun’ elements to a minimum for your next announcement please. Bah humbug.

In a shock press release this morning I learn that Perfect Programming Inc. has launched version 1.0 of its “Superb Software Suite” (SSS).

Finally, we can get our hands on a fault free piece of software that is guaranteed to work faultlessly for all perpetuity. Its 100% guaranteed 24/7 uptime comes packaged on a handy 1 Meg memory stick and installs for all popular operating systems in just 30 seconds.

Super-intuitive in its use, SSS will be appealing to seasoned software engineers, but is so easy to use that novice programmers, students and hobbyists should be up and running and able to code within five minutes of install.

“We couldn’t believe it really. I mean who would have believed that we could just knock up the perfect software suite that needs no testing wherever it is deployed. But, stone me, we just threw a few ideas into the pan and out came this perfect solution,” said Dave ‘honest’ Datadodger, CEO CTO president MD and global VP of Perfect Programming Inc.

Available in both open source and propriety formats, SSS features an autonomic lifecycle management unit in its kernel that literally means you can just install it and walk away. Or as the company’s single-sided A4 instruction ‘manual’ puts it, “Stick it in the side of your PC and go off and have a nice hot cuppa.”

Scalable for use in large-scale enterprises such as banks and major corporate businesses, the SSS product is equally suitable for use in two-person “Mom & Pop shop” size businesses from gas stations to grocery stores. Its auto-update functionality has been stripped out due to version 1.0 already having a complete feature set guaranteed to work in a state-of-the-art format until at least 2345 AD.

You can download “Superb Software Suite” at no cost from the company’s website here: www.don’tbe-silly/thisisan-AprilFool.com