It's well acknowledged that Steve Jobs took great inspiration from a visit he and others from Apple made in 1979 to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Xerox were a strange company - they invested in an R&D facility that had huge prophetic influence, and yet they managed to commercially exploit just about none of its output as they couldn't draw themselves away from their cash cow of photocopying.

The basics of the now commonplace computing interface of Window, Icon, Menu and Pointing Device (WIMP as it used to be known) was invented at PARC, witnessed by Jobs on his visit there in 1979, refined in the Apple Lisa, and then commercially exploited in the Mac and Windows operating systems.

I had a quick play with an iPad for the first time yesterday. As you'd expect with a product from Apple, it's beautifully designed, the interface is quicker to respond than I expected, and my undoubted dislike of the control-freakery of Apple means that I'm almost certainly going to dashed in my hopes that it's not a commercial success.

I was chatting to Dad on the phone last night (he's made massive improvements in the last 48 hours), and he mentioned that Alan Kay, one of PARC's most influential thinkers, had had a concept of the DynaBook knocking around at the time of those Jobs visits to PARC, and that the DynaBook would be more than a little familiar...

Having done a little research, I found that Kay actually published his concept of the DynaBook back in 1972 in this document. Whilst no-one would argue that it is a blueprint for the iPad, the DNA is unmistakeable. However, whilst the form factor is very similar, the underpinning theory was very different... Kay saw the DynaBook as a tool for child learning, and today is heavily involved in Nicolas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child initiative.

So next time you hear about the next amazing new innovation from Apple, maybe take a look at the PARC history and see if it's another one to roll off that illustrious (if ancient) ideas production line.

I've been witnessing the NHS at reasonably close quarters again in the past fortnight. Dad has been in for fairly major surgery, and will be convalescing for some time to come.

My experience of the health service, both as punter and as consultant (management variety) makes me think that the fundamental issues facing the NHS are of the managerial challenges posed by vast quantities of expertise. The continual sideshow of left-versus-right ideology in terms of state control miss the big issue. Bottom line is that we all seem to crave expertise, but experts generally make poor managers and even poorer leaders.

Over the years I have taken part in a management training game that is based on the scenario of a plane that has crash-landed in the desert. A number of items are salvageable by the survivors, and the aim of the exercise is for the group of participants to collectively rank the priority of the items in terms of their importance to survival in the desert. The game is used to observe group and negotiation behaviours.

As both participant and facilitator of the game, I have seen the emergence of 'experts', usually when someone utters the words "I've done this before, and...".

On the basis of such little evidence, a whole group can be taken in by someone who shows enough conviction. At least once, as a result, a group ranked the object that would be of least use to them as most important to take (for the record, a box of salt tablets).

We seem to love the words of an expert. They allow us to stop thinking and pass the buck to someone else. Being an expert also can then reinforce expert behaviour... making pronouncements from on high which will be followed.

And there's the rub in the health service - lots of powerful experts strutting around issuing edicts to minions who will do their bidding (or, after a while, start to push against it subtly and possibly quite destructively). Describe "doctors" and "consultants" as "scientists" or "medical boffins", and maybe you start to see less of a caring profession and more of the not-particularly-socially-skilled world that's all to easy to observe in hospitals.

The problem in health is that how people feel about the way in which they are treated has a very material impact on the way in which they respond to treatment. Just read Ben Goldacre's description of the placebo effect to understand that.

What about other industries? Well, engineering-based worlds (including IT) tend to have more than their fair share of expert boffins. The risk is if expertise alone is allowed to run organisations... Good leadership comes from inclusion, not just bossing people around on either dictatorial or expertise-based principals.

(as an aside, given these election times, an interesting report on the BBC News last night which kind of puts pay to any of the nonsense being spoken at the moment by any of the parties about maintaining NHS frontline spending by cutting back on management costs. Management costs amount to just 3% of NHS spend...)

There's a model that's common within the MBA world that describes the different sorts of competitive forces to which an organisation may find itself subjected. Defined by Harvard Business School's Michael Porter in 1979, his "Five Forces" are, in simple terms:

- market rivalry (simple competition from others doing what you do);
- client power in bargaining;
- supplier power in bargaining;
- new entrants into your market;
- and the threat of substitution - people finding alternatives to your products or services

There's more of a description here.

For years, CIO's would have looked at the Porter model and thought "Hmm. Interesting. Wonder if that's how my business regards the market that it's in? Now,let's get on with managing a monopoly." This kind of MBA stuff was of general interest, but of no consequence in terms of the practicalities of running an IT function.

Now, however, the provision of internet to an organisation has moved the IT department from being in an isolated island of calm into a maelstrom of competition:

- our (internal) clients are asking why, if I can do so-and-so easily at home on broadband, why can't I at work?
- our software suppliers are increasingly challenging us to move to subscription models because that's what they want us to do
- new entrants are coming to market, challenging the monopoly (Salesforce, heavily marketing the "no software" (read "no IT department") benefits to sales and marketing teams
- and substitution is happening... business being done not via email, but by Facebook, DropBox, YouSendIt, the list goes on...

Tie that to the competition that has been around for ten years from outsourcing and offshoring models, and all of a sudden IT departments are caught in a perfect storm.

Now if our house were in order, we could just compete back. However, and here is the rub, the history of corporate IT is of constant and sustained mediocrity (the monotonous depressing news from Standish year after year).

So, we're under competition and most of our history is in delivering poor (if not complete failure) projects.

My contention is that the cause of the failure is getting bogged down in the technology - so IT teams should reposition themselves as facilitators of business change by ditching their involvement in the technology part (and not just by rebranding as "business partners" whilst continuing to try to build boxes and code).

Here lies the transformational benefit of SaaS. If someone's doing the tech for you in a commoditised way, projects are less likely to fail because of people buggering around with technology. And if IT departments focus on becoming experts in how their organisation uses technology, then you have a unique competitive advantage that sustains your reason for existence.

The first phase of our Google project, migrating 550 users across the globe onto the system for email, calendar, contacts and chat, completed last week. The project has run very smoothly so far, and it looks like we are in a good position to move forward into utilising Docs and Sites in the next few months.

One of the consequences of moving to Software as a Service is that improvements and upgrades of software move from being infrequent and extensive, to frequent and of varying impact. In the past seven days, new functions for the management of labelling, and to allow inbox preview have been rolled out (oh, and completely new word processor, spreadsheet and graphics applications as well, but we haven't deployed those yet).

The continuing changes to the tools will take a really big mind-set shift for most people. We get used to tools, including their limitations, and shape the way in which we work around them. If the tools continually change, our ways of working need to as well. And whilst for some this would be seen as positively exciting, I'm sure that there is going to be resistance from some to the idea that the tools continually change.

Eventually, I'm sure that people will generally get used to it. But it's this kind of fundamental difference between the SaaS model and more traditional software that will need continued support to help everyone adapt, and an empathy to the view that new isn't necessarily always welcomed by everyone. It's also an area where the, erm, "empathy-challenged" software engineering community sometimes struggle to understand that there could even be a problem.

There is a real risk that unless we help all to adapt to new functionality, a big divide will open up between those who can and those who can't.

So here we go. The 2010 General election. Something to keep the bookies busy in the run up to the World Cup.

Whilst my own voting intentions are already made up (I don't like tax evaders at the best of times, more so when they have the audacity to ask for responsibility for spending HMRC income, so I will be voting Lib Dem in Richmond in a hope it keeps Blue/Green nom dom Goldsmith out of Westminister), many appear to be undecided and an unprecedented many also appear to have levels of disillusion with the political system in its entirety.

There has been much talk about how this will be the first Social Networked Election 2.0, and there has been much coverage of how, in particular, the Tories will be using social media to help there campaign. It's not been entirely successful so far, and I fear that there is something more intrinsically outdated with our political process that means that we are seeing a clash of eras.

Adversarial politics appears to be stuck in a timewarp where leaders are expected to know all the right answers, live flawless lives, and tell us all what we should do (either in terms of government intervention on the left, or go out and get yourself a job to support yourself on the right). There is no conversation (that would be derided as focus-group politics), just black and white platitudes providing a veneer over plodding status quo.

The explosion of the Internet has often been described as democratising (well, for those who can afford to be on it). But democracy in election terms happens in old-media time frames whilst Web 2.0 is real time and two-way.

Don't get me wrong- I'm not advocating the sort of web-enabled rolling referenda that some talk of. Some of the decisions that need to be made need to be considered, and quite frankly the wisdom of crowds is sometimes just plain stupid (capital punishment is one example of note). However, move to a more consensual form of political debate could be facilitated by elements of technology. I'm sure, though, that the 'yah boo!' form is going to prevail for some time to come...