I love simple questions that have complex and nuanced answers. In a conversation with my dad at the weekend, we came up with three that might for the starting point for a deep dialogue with a group of people about how they work together. The first one is one I've used a fair bit already, … Continue reading What three questions?
Category: Management
Fungible is one of those words that sounds like it should be onomatopeiac but isn't. It does, though, represent a crucial element of what makes something a commodity: fungible means that you can swap in and out without concern. For example, I can buy Tate and Lyle white sugar or Silver Spoon white sugar, put … Continue reading What if “commodity” IT isn’t a commodity?
Would Microsoft Teams be used more effectively if customers had to pay for it rather than it being bundled for "free" into Office 365 packages? Here's my logic... The successful adoption of any software depends on good change management around its introduction. The amount that is spent is directly proportional to the overall cost of … Continue reading The problem with “free”
About 15 years ago I found myself running a project management course for a local authority in Scotland. I was doing my usual pitch at the start of my career history, talking about how I'd been an architect, first solution then enterprise, at the BBC. A chap in the front row's face looked like thunder. … Continue reading The trouble with Enterprise Architecture
It's been a week of interviewing as part of research with a client. And for the first time I've been using Otter.ai to record the conversations. We've been playing around with Otter for a while to do transcriptions and help with editing on WB-40, but this is the first time I've used it to help with … Continue reading The Word Cloud Game
Look at the picture above. There are about 150 or so people in a room. But notice how they are interacting. There are many small groups, and a few loners. It's not 150 people in a room interacting, it's a series of groups of people who happen to be in the same room. (The room, … Continue reading Why interactions won’t scale.
I wrote recently about the differences between interactions and transactions, and the trouble with scaling interactions. Yesterday I was chatting with a client in reflection on experiences that they have had recently in helping people to adopt Microsoft Teams, and it seemed to bear out an assumption I've had for a while that products like … Continue reading Transactions, Interactions, and Teams
I need to pay more attention. I can't remember who it was who introduced me to this concept. It might have been Mark Earls. It might have been Andy Law. The concept has stuck with me, the originator has been blurred in my mind. I'll blame autocorrect. The concept goes a little like this. Think of … Continue reading Transactions v Interactions
On last week's WB40, Chris and I spent some time dissecting the arguments put forward in a fascinating article Survival of the Mediocre Mediocre in which Venkatesh Rao proposes that the thing that humans are really good at is being not quite great at a lot of things, and this is the quality that will hold … Continue reading Mediocrity, consciousness, and competence
At the end of 2018 I presented at the London Strategic IT Partner forum. Here's what I had to say... https://youtu.be/VXmFQRk4wv8?t=45 Big thanks to Jon Baxter for permission to repost the video.
