Speaker: David Levine (HP Ltd)
Title: Putting students first: How mobility enables adaptive education

About 15 minutes into this talk, so far we’ve heard about ‘adaptability’ and ‘agility’ – which seem like platitudes to me. Of course we need to be able to adapt quickly to changing demands/technology, but this is self-evident isn’t it?

So – from an agility point of view, we need to
Look at simplifying the business process architecture
Adopt one single enterprise-class architecture
Standardize across all departments

OK – so no argument with the first one, as long as it doesn’t impact on what we want to acheive (perhaps sometimes things need to complicated?)

The second and third parts are both easier said than done. I think these are easy to assert, but we need to look at exactly what is needed. Perhaps flexibility at a dept level sometimes works in our favour. It also shows a complete disregard for how users actually work. If you force them to use a centralised system which doesn’t do what they want, you disenfranchise them, and they’ll probably find a ‘local’ workaround anyway – never underestimate your users.

In the last few minutes of the talk, at last we’ve reached some mention of mobility. Unfortunately not very many insights here.