{"id":3543,"date":"2011-07-26T12:33:00","date_gmt":"2011-07-26T11:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/?p=3543"},"modified":"2012-05-28T10:53:05","modified_gmt":"2012-05-28T09:53:05","slug":"it-and-the-law-is-misalignment-an-inevitable-consequence-of-progress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2011\/07\/it-and-the-law-is-misalignment-an-inevitable-consequence-of-progress.htm","title":{"rendered":"IT and the law \u2013 is misalignment an inevitable consequence of progress?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday evening, I had the pleasure of presenting on behalf of the Office of the CTO to the\u00a0Society for Computers and Law (SCL)<\/a>‘s Junior Lawyers Group. It was a slightly unsual presentation in that David [Smith] often speaks to CIOs and business leaders, or to aspiring young people who will become the next generation of IT leaders. \u00a0Meanwhile I was given the, somewhat daunting, challenge of pitching a presentation to a room full of\u00a0practising\u00a0lawyers – all of whom work in the field of IT law but who had signed up for the event because they wanted to know more about the technology terms that they come across in their legal work. \u00a0Because this was the SCL’s Junior Lawyers group, I considered that most of the people in the room have grown up in a world of IT and so finding a level which was neither too technical nor too basic was my biggest issue.<\/p>\n

My approach was to spend some time talking about the way we design solutions: introducing the basic concepts of business, application and technology architectures; talking about the need for clear and stated requirements (particularly\u00a0non-functionals); the role of service management; and introducing concepts such as cloud computing and virtualisation.<\/p>\n

Part way through, I dumped the PowerPoint (Dilbert fans may be aware of the danger that is “PowerPoint poisoning”<\/a>) and went back to a flip chart\u00a0to sketch out a view of why we have redundancy in our servers, networks, datacentres, etc. and to talk about thin clients, virtual desktops and other such terms that may come up in IT conversations.<\/p>\n

Then, back to the deck to talk about where we see things heading in the near future before my slot ended and the event switched to an exercise in prioritising legal terms in an IT context.<\/p>\n

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Technology, Inside the Black Box<\/a><\/strong> <\/object><\/p>\n
View more presentations<\/a> from Fujitsu UK<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

I’m not sure how it went (it will be interesting to see the consolidated feedback from the society) but there was plenty of verbal feedback to suggest the talk was well received, I received some questions (always good to get some audience participation) and from the frantic scribbling on notes at one table I must have been saying something that someone found useful!<\/p>\n

The main reason for this blog post is to highlight some of the additional material in the deck that I didn’t present last night. \u00a0There are many places where IT and the law are not as closely aligned as we might expect. Examples include:<\/p>\n