GlencoIS

We are no longer trading as Glenco IS Ltd.
And it will cease to exist on the Companies House register.

Too few engagements where the Ltd Company status had any value,
and all future commitments are unrelated types of work.
Although technically retired,
it is not lack of things I’m committed to doing.

As Ian Glendinning,
I’m not hard to find
Always happy to talk.

(In due course these web-pages will lapse too.)

As part of simplifying my commitments we have moved to a downsized property – see change of address under Contact – not far; still based in the North-East of England – on the Yorkshire coast beneath the Cleveland Hills escarpment of the North York Moors.

As well as a house move in the “mad” post-Covid-lockdown market, summer was also complicated by IR35 fall-out even though it had never been an issue for GlencoIS Ltd – I’ve always operated PAYE on direct consulting arrangements – but public-funded projects are especially averse to outside-IR35 consulting engagements, with no exception for transparent good faith.

In the same week we eventually completed the house move, we also eventually sorted out commitment to a new part-time engagement as Systems Architecture Consultant to UKAEA Culham on their STEP prototype “spherical tokamak” fusion power-plant. IR35 “umbrella” contract aside, they seem happy with the non-exclusive consulting engagement. Interesting times.

Part-time non-exclusive means GlencoIS Ltd remains available for consulting engagements directly here or through the Travivas network. The offering which I’ve dubbed “Reference Data Architecture” is now unchanged for 10 years as the industry jargon has morphed from Lifecycle Data to Digital Twins to Digital Transformation. It’s the idea that whatever your physical systems or solutions architecture it should always honour interfaces to both tools and technologies that maintain independent referencing to your required business information standards libraries:

The architecture for Systems Thinkers.

It was probably apparent from a few recent posts, that 100% Covid-enforced home working after decades of flexible office & remote working had proven to be the busiest 18 months of my 45 year career. Contrary to received wisdom on the imminent “new normal” I happen to believe that whilst remote working can be efficient (in flexibility of time and costs) it risks being totally ineffective (in terms of desired development outcomes). The future is uncertain – by definition.

As a consequence I’ve given-up the exclusive employment contract I had taken on and, after a couple of domestic projects, I am now operating as an independent consultant once again.

My main offering is here at Glenco IS Ltd, and available for flexible engagements directly or via the Travivas network contacts.

Still working on an exclusive employment contract, but the experience of the past year prompted me to write a piece on my Psybertron epistemology blog the other day. Actually follows on from the remote working post previously here, but reinforces how much the human context of collaboration & trust, and humanity itself, is part of information & communication. Perversely, the more we formally model and automate without proper account of these, the more degenerate and disintegrated our systems become.

“The communication problem is
the illusion that it has happened.”
Einstein.

As mentioned in the previous post I’ve not been trading as GlencoIS since I took on a permanent employment contract with Wood/Jacobs. Little did I know how busy I would become.

The original scope was – still is – about long-lifecycle release of information from its IT shackles to enable agile – flexible and efficient – future business models, all the more exciting because the contracts have a 20 year timeline within which real benefits and transformative change may actually accrue. After two decades of my own working-from-anywhere lifestyle, the flexibility of working from home using any available IT kit has suddenly become fashionable thanks to Covid19 measures. Busy, busy, busy as I say.

The irony of the long-lifecycle excitement is that I was already semi-retired consulting and planning retirement to focus on writing, with gardening, home-gym and hill-walking as the physical free-thinking release from the focussed mental effort. Particularly galling for me then, that so many on social media are reporting the lack of work from the Covid19 lockdown as their opportunity for novel intellectual & physical projects – whereas for me these are practically on hold. This is my first post on this blog since Sept 2019. In that same 8 month period I’ve done just 15 posts on my main “Psybertron” blog, the one most associated with my writing project. In that same period in any other year in the last 20, there would have been 100 posts or more, 70 being the lowest ever.

Social media – the socialisation of knowledge, good and bad – has been an integral part of the research and writing project since its inception 20 years ago – on several levels too. Not just the reading and writing process, but very much part of the content. It’s my subject matter. So I’m far from being a stranger to social media, in fact I swear by it. (See details at the foot of this page.)

In the current job, in the time of Covid19, I have of course signed-up to our team WhatsApp channel although for predictable reasons – above – I’ve not participated much. But there is an opportunity to change that:

Naturally there is a focus on exercise, mental health in isolation, and an opportunity to turn that into a social-enterprise to raise charity funds. I wouldn’t normally, religiously, have my smart-phone on my person as I move around the house / office, so the idea of a step-counter isn’t really my thing. I’m more a miles / kilometres covered and feet / metres climbed kinda person. To gauge the steps to distance relation I turned-on the (free) Pacer step-counter on Friday afternoon and went for a 4 mile walk and left it on in my pocket most of Saturday, as I mowed, strimmed and tidied around the length of our drive. 8,558 and 14,839 steps respectively. The fact it keeps trying to sell me stuff means I’ll probably not keep it on.

My tracker of choice when actually walking is Strava. A habit which started 3 years ago when doing the Lyke Wake Walk in June 2017. That’s 40M / 60K in one 14 hour slog over the North York Moors up and down all the biggest of the Cleveland Hills. The parts that follow the modern Cleveland Way / Coast-to-Coast (*) long-distance walks are well marked and maintained, but this ancient route is no longer marked on maps or maintained across mile after mile of moorland bog. The long day and dry weather of June needed to negotiate it. Full story and some pictures here. It took a second attempt to do it all in one go last time. [Incidentally the CtC Walk starts at St Bees Head and passes close to the Jacobs Westlakes offices.]

I was planning with Sylvia we might do the LWW again this June, hence some of the recent training walks in Strava. Who knows?

As of 3rd September 2019 I have taken on a permanent staff employment contract for Wood Nuclear. To avoid any conflicts of interest Glenco IS Ltd will no longer be trading for the foreseeable future. I remain happy to advise and forward enquiries to other consultants who may be able to help either directly or via the Travivas network of consultants.

I run several websites for friends and non-profits as a side-line – at least partly to “keep my hand in” with some basic programming in having to modify, extend and configure functionality here and there – but I’m no developer.

99% of my web content is managed using WordPress including this business-facing site. It’s a very simple no-frills site with no user functionality, and the simplest possible visual theme, intended for minimal maintenance other than software updates and news. My main personal site at psybertron.org is also no-frills, single user, minimal interaction, but huge – 10,000’s of posts and page updates over 20 years. I was an original blogger when web-logging was invented, migrating to WordPress and hosting it on a virtual private server (VPS) at Dreamhost pretty much as soon as it was possible to do so ~15 years ago. I’ve also managed separate servers for other commercial and non-profit ventures via Dreamhost VPS and Amazon AWS services.

On other group sites I’ve added much more interactive functionality through WordPress plug ins. Some have their own domains, others with sub-domains in my sandbox. I did major housekeeping this year and last to clear out much now redundant content and installations.

The software functionality – core and plug-in extensions – are mostly free, but when it comes to upgraded functionality, security and performance, you get what you pay for so it’s not always entirely free, but very cost-effective for low-overhead non-profit business. For anyone who’s happy with a proof of concept in a subdomain, there is zero marginal cost to me, just a little time & effort.

Why do I use it?
WordPress has so much support out there, and
DreamHost customer service has proven second to none.
(There is even a DreamPress one-stop-shop bundle if you want to try it yourself and BlueHost offer WordPress bundles. Other starter bundles each with their own CMS exist from GoDaddy, Squarespace, Google and many more, many of which are free for starters.)

Latest news as we enter 2Q19 is that I have just become a Member of the Travivas consulting network. Wherever additional services are identified that I am unable to deliver, we will be able to introduce you to another expert who maybe can. All members are accredited by the membership introduction and sponsorship process, and Travivas itself is a non-profit that takes no fee on contracts awarded. “Experience you can trust.”

My thanks to Adrian Fenton, co-founder of Travivas, for the introduction to Karen Cherrill of Kingsfield Consulting and the engagement with the Czech refinery boiler upgrade mentioned in the previous post. A great way to do business. See our Travivas network LinkedIn page.

Through 2016/17 I had the good fortune to take on a piece of real engineering – both process and mechanical design – for some specialist equipment on a Chinese aerospace research facility.

Like the above, I also mentioned in passing in the two previous posts, that I was focussed for most of 2017/18 on a possible generic business app opportunity as an unfunded collaborative development, and on keeping my hand in with developments in the reference-data architecture space. That gave me pause to reflect that this was the first-time I’ve been without paid employment in over 40 years, and that in that time I’ve been fortunate only to leave any employment for a new opportunity.

So, it’s been over a year, but just last week I took-on a real hands-on engineering assignment again for a refinery upgrade project in the EU and am again available for consulting opportunities – engineering integrity primarily and/or information management as necessary. [See “About” and “Services“.]

Whatever “Digital Twin” is used to model your particular industry assets and manage the operation they embody, it seems the jargon converges and the generic information modelling aspects really do turn out to be highly generic. When we started with Plant Assets, Transport and Defence assets they became Assets more generally, and the Plant manufacturing and laboratory facilities became Buildings more generally, I was awaiting the day that Hospital and Healthcare assets would become the topic. Seems they happened whilst I wasn’t looking.

I was pleasantly surprised by the Aerospace research facility subject of the last assignment (below) and now find myself engaged in SIMS for Schools and educational establishments. I may say a little more about that if I can shortly. Each sector, for understandable legacy reasons, tends to be dominated by one or other comprehensive Business Resource or Asset Management “Solution” – usually one no-one ever got fired for buying, but one which becomes an expensive and inflexible millstone to be managed in its own right.

Especially gratifying is the continuing generic convergence, because we also seemed to have stumbled upon an opportunity for a Generic information model management system. I say system, but it’s so generic it’s really a meta-system, a system for developing and integrating systems for modeling and managing information. One that can integrate with and evolve away from any legacy system(s).

I used to joke that we’d end up with this model, but now I’m not so sure we’re joking.

Say what?

GIMS.
Say whatever it is you want to say,
and we can store and retrieve it
intelligently-connected to any future context.
I wonder.