On Friday I was at a presentation given by one of the big IT vendors on the subject of Big Data and analytics. During the session the story was told of how US retailer Target had got so good with predictive analytics that they had infuriated the father of a teenage girl by sending her … Continue reading The legends of Big Data
Category: innovation
Last week I wrote about the pioneering work of the Tavistock Institute and the thinking that they provided into dealing with a world of cloud-like problems. That terminology was taken from philosopher Karl Popper's beautiful analogy of a world in which some problems are clock-like (complex, complicated, but ultimately knowable) but many of the real … Continue reading Dealing with Clouds
As part of my work for central government, over the past few weeks I've been immersing myself in the work of Tim O'Reilly and the concepts of Government as a Platform. The concept at its heart is a metaphor. In fact a metaphor of a metaphor which is always a slightly risky approach prone to … Continue reading Platform thinking
Diary planning is currently underway for the next steps in the co-coaching experiment. A quick recap: find two organisations that are significantly different but have an areas where they are essentially facing the same challenges. Bring the two organisations together. Help them find ways to work together to address their common challenges. I've been putting … Continue reading Co-coaching: the next stages
That was the question that David Terrar posed yesterday morning when tweeting a link to an HBR article that stated what many of us know to be the bleedin’ obvious: you can teach people to be more “creative”. You Can Teach Someone to Be More Creative https://t.co/CzQLt8XTbz - so why are thinking skills so rarely … Continue reading So why are thinking skills so rarely taught?
On Friday morning the little experiment in co-coaching (for want of a better term) took place at a venue in London. The Chief Executive of a professional institution, the Technology Director of a major sporting association and I met up for a couple of hours of conversation and ideas. I'm going to split my reflections … Continue reading Co-coaching – first reflections
There is an accepted modern wisdom that goes a little like this: Change is good. Continuous change is even better. Delivering to user needs is paramount. The only way to test what are the best things to meet a user's needs is to put things in front of them. Change is the only certainty. Everything … Continue reading Desponsive Design
Yesterday was the first day of adjudication for the CIO.co.uk 2015 CIO100 - the celebration of the best business technology leadership talent the UK has to offer. I've been very privileged to have been asked to join this year's judging panel, and it was a solid few hours of debate as we went through some of the … Continue reading Disruption, what disruption?
So amongst a flurry of new product announcements yesterday, Microsoft announced that with Windows 10, the "voice assistant" Cortana will become part of the desktop and laptop experience. Putting aside that Cortana conjures up images for me of the 1960s Ford, this has got me wondering: in the age of Siri and OK Google and … Continue reading Don’t talk to me
Charles Arthur flagged an interesting article by Richard Chirgwin on The Register about the weird worldview that the Google Nest Internet of Things house has about it's occupants. Put simply, it really struggles to understand that there might be more than one person living in a house. If you use online services and you are … Continue reading Groups think
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