Category: General

I spent a fascinating couple of hours on Tuesday afternoon at the Royal College of Art, at an event organised by Design London, a joint venture between the RCA and neighbour Imperial College. The aim of the group is to fuse academic disciplines from design, engineering and management schools to help develop new products and … Continue reading Lacking empathy

Last week I had an interesting conversation with the Head of IT from one of London's arts theatres. They were contemplating the replacement of their ticketing systems, and in our chat it seemed that cloud platforms might offer an interesting alternative approach for them. My first question was why ticketing wasn't just outsourced entirely to … Continue reading Starting start-ups

A rewarding day yesterday at the first of my team's UK Tech.Day events in West London. It gave me the opportunity to see many of my guys in presentation action, and get the background on some of our newer technologies (Lync, as an aside, looks market-changing). Probably the most rewarding session, though, came in the … Continue reading Communities

Acheivements this week included: - Presenting and being a panellist at the Cloud Circle Forum... - ...and picking up some interesting contacts along the way - Continuing the 2012 financial year planning process - Meeting with Onalytica - A bit of manager induction training... - ... and a day learning about inclusion Next week: Tech.Days … Continue reading Weeknote 51: in front of an audience

I have been hit by a mini-spate of social network spam in the last 24 hours, and it's reminded me that the most effective way to propagate crap on the Internet is by using the easily-manipulated people using it. Prey on fear, insecurity or greed, and you'll almost certainly have success. Combine two or more … Continue reading Human-powered viruses

I've recorded a short whiteboard session to explain some thinking behind a 2 by 2 matrix to help determine what Cloud approaches might be appropriate to what business circumstance. 2x2s are the stock in trade of the management consulting industry - there is a risk of over-simplification, but hopefully I tread a reasonable balance. Appreciate … Continue reading Approaches to Cloud

Achievements this week included: - participation in a number of the 2012 "Big Bet" strategic planning sessions - further catch ups with people across the team - the first evangelist team get together - getting started on the performance review process - attending the UK Manager offsite (Reading Football Stadium isn't like football stadia I … Continue reading Weeknote 50: five day week

Maybe this has been staring me in the face for some time now, but in recent conversations I have started to realise that the economics of Cloud make for a deeply profound change for suppliers in the IT industry. First a bit of clarification. Private cloud - essentially setting up and managing a flexible, virtualised … Continue reading Sharing risk & reward

After maybe a year of gestation, Google have announced the launch of the Google Chromebook. It's an interesting product concept - essentially an operating system that is "no more" than a browser. In some ways, it could be regarded as a new iteration of thin client computing, where processing is essentially kept central, and certainly … Continue reading Chromebook