Presentation given at the JISC Conference, 2011 on the value of local developers to the higher education sector

1. The value of local
developers
Paul Walk
p.walk@ukoln.ac.uk
UKOLN is supported by:
www.ukoln.ac.uk
A centre of expertise in digital information management

2. questions to think about
• stakeholders we surveyed think that local (locally
employed) developers are important to H/FEIs
• ...but they're not always entirely sure how....
• why are local developers valuable?
• What do H/FEIs need to do to ensure that their
developers can innovate successfully?
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3. local innovation
knowledge transfer
strategies for recession
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4. “successful companies
innovate in a down market”
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5. responsive innovation
• agile & embedded
• frequent F2F between developers & users - finely tuned &
tailored solutions
• responsive - perpetual beta
• small, responsive incremental changes are possible
• “if you want to keep incrementally improving the user experience then
you need to retain a local capacity to do this”
• gluing - the day job! (AKA enterprise integration)
• from gluing locally installed vendor software to gluing SaaS
• bespoke interfaces on common platforms
• innovation happens in a local context
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6. disruptive innovation
• “Put the customer, and their important, unsatisfied job-to-
be-done at the centre of the innovation equation”
• be responsive, know your users!
• “Create organisational space for disruptive growth”
• invest in capacity to innovate, develop your
developers!
• “Become world class at testing, iterating & adjusting”
• local integration, tweaking SaaS, rapid
innovation
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7. • building capacity
• cost-effective training
• local development expertise is a
pre-requisite for some funding
• peer support
• raising the profile of developers
within H/FEIs
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8. knowledge transfer (KT)
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9. local & sector-wide KT
• from developer to:
• developer (pair-programming as route to continuity)
• researcher (data wrangling, computational thinking)
• librarian (Mashed Libraries)
• developers sometimes end up understanding business
processes better than the users because they have to model
them
• also knowledge retention
• internal technical consultants
• user groups around products
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10. KT beyond the sector
• commercial
• Transfer Summit (OSSWatch)
• commercial developers working with
H/FE developers much more closely
• testing APIs
• challenges
• standards development
• challenges and hack days
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11. • training at dev8D
• 80K worth of peer-peer developer training delivered
to sector
• ticked the difficult ‘staff development’ box
• events!
• Rapid Innovation; Pair Programming; Developer Challenge at Open Repositories;
Developing for mobile devices in education;Reading List Hack Day; Developing for
the Mobile Web; Agile Prototyping Techniques; Workflow Tools; Linked Data
Hackdays; OER HackDays; Developing Better Software Documentation; Developing
Better Software Documentation; Local developers: making your work more visible;
Cloud Computing Workshop with Penetration Testing; Epub; Managing local
developers better for innovation; Dealing with noise in data; Accessibility Hackday;
SOLR; RabbitMQ; More agile methods; Visualisation around Large Data Sets
• worked with OSSWatch, SSI, Cetis, commercial vendors,
conferences
• reached 1000+ people F2F in year 1 11

12. strategies for recession
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13. value from networks
• having local/institutional
developer resource
available is valuable
• that local resource, while
limited, can be backed-up
by a community of peers
• a well connected
community of
developers is
greater than the
sum of its parts!
• developers can empower
users
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14. the strategic developer
Local
Systems
this is where the developer
Technical
net works with peers
Requirements Peer
Developer
this is where economies of
Organisational
End User scale and cost reduction is
Requirements
Requirements achieved
User/ Remote, Remote
Local
Domain (commercial) System
Developer (SaaS
expert Developer
}
} this is where local
innovation happens
local context
this is where the cost of
outsourcing is mitigated
remote context
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15. discussion
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16. • stakeholder survey:
• 495 respondents including developers, their managers, IT
directors, vendors, funders, users (academics, librarians,
researchers)
• 75%+ agreement that local developers understand the local
context and act as a bridge between remote service
providers, open source communities, and local end
users, and add value by integrating into local contexts
• 75% agreement that local developers work closely with end
users to deliver innovation (more work needed though)
• 70% agreement that local developers are undervalued as
evidenced by short term contracts, lack of professional
development or career opportunities and poor management
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17. questions
• the stakeholders we surveyed think local developers
are important to H/FEIs - but they're not always
entirely sure how....
• why are local developers valuable?
• What do H/FEIs need to do to:
• develop this capacity to practice innovation locally?
• support their developers?
• what else needs to be present in an H/FEI to ensure that
developers can successfully innovate?
http://devcsi.ukoln.ac.uk 17