Matt Ballantine's thoughts about technology, marketing, management and other stuff…
Every so often I need to take stock and outline where my thinking is at. This is one of those moments. In the past few months my work increasingly has turned to helping my clients to plot courses through the need to make change happen to the services that they deliver to their clients and … Continue reading Innovation in 4 diagrams – 1. Digital Architecture
I’ve been working with lots of teams in different organisations over the past few years on a question that generally starts along the lines of “We’d like to know how to use Product X”, where ‘Product X’ is one of Microsoft Office 365, Google G Suite, Slack or one of many of the dozens of … Continue reading Understanding collaboration through rich pictures
I’ve been working on developing a product. An actual physical thing that you can hold in your hands. It’s a set of playing cards. I call them CIO Priorities. The idea has been gestating for a while: I spend a lot of my time talking with and looking at what technology leaders in organisations do … Continue reading Some games to play
This week I have learned: it's the ability to spot the serendipity that makes it valuable. Sometimes it just passes us by. Other times it smacks us in the face. the countryside is great. But I only like to visit. getting some notes out about a thing is really useful practice. It's all about the … Continue reading Weeknote 790: Wrapping up
About a month ago, I decided to start using a fountain pen and notebook again. I’m not quite sure why. I had a Waterman pen that I’d been given in my early 20s sitting on my desk and wanted to use it again. I had an old, unused notebook on my bookcase. I ordered some … Continue reading Note-taking
This week I have learned: you can undoubtedly get to know more about people when you are in their physical presence. that my newfound (hand) writing practices are useful, but I mustn't get too caught up in the idea that they are task-based. being able to take the seed of an idea and quickly turn … Continue reading Weeknote 789: Yorkshire
This week I have learned: the difference between different types of technology provider. The old model of Systems Integrator was often built on a business model that was essentially the same as the one used by local councils to collect bins. There's a service provided by people. When a service provider changes, the majority of … Continue reading Weeknote 788: day trip
This week I have learned: so very much at OffGrid that a new way of working (taking notes by hand in a notebook, scanning the pages with the Google Drive document scanner, uploading into Claude and then analysing them with my Zettlekasten app) is helping me to find new things. I definitely prefer a tent … Continue reading Weeknote 787: off grid at OffGrid
This week I have learned: the joy of rediscovering a fountain pen and paper. And then seeing what happens if I feed my daily note taking into Claude. So far, it's curious, but not necessarily productive. And that's fine for me. the joy of mentoring. Well done Mel on the new job! how the conversations … Continue reading Weeknote 786: Baking
What I have learned this week: The speed at which LLMs code-writing has advanced is really quite something. I spent a few hours over the weekend building an MVP for Random the App, and the pace at which I could create a fully functional Android app was really quite impressive. Artisan software development at the … Continue reading Weeknote 785: Monumental
This week I have learned: ah, conference. Three days of intense peopling. It's hard work, but it's worth it. lots of conversations over the past few days about the book. People continue to seem intrigued by the whole idea. what if we could create leadership support for technology and digital leaders as part of our … Continue reading Weeknote 784: Conference
This week I have learned: I got contacted by someone I know who needed to knock up a budget for a grant application with little information and very little time. We plugged his needs into Claude and asked it to create a budget modelling tool. Using a probabilistic tool to create a deterministic one feels … Continue reading Weeknote 783: Brum
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