I was chatting with my neighbour a few weeks ago, and for some reason got onto my pet subject of why measurement is at the core of so many of the problems I see in the world of business. "You know I can't agree with that, Matt. I'm an accountant." And therein lies the problem. Just … Continue reading Celebrating fires extinguished
Category: Management
There should be a word to describe words that sound like they should be onomatopoeic but aren't. Top of my list of these nonomatopoeic words would be Fungible. It sounds like an adjective that could be applied to describe the properties of the caulk materials that builders use to fill in gaps around woodwork. "Ooh, … Continue reading Fungible
I was pointed yesterday to an article on Harvard Business Review that talked about how machine intelligence was about to change the world. It was interesting enough, although talked a great deal about MI being a "predictive" technology. As I've expressed many times, the human desire for sages of the future is deep and a … Continue reading Plus ça change
Over the past few weeks I've been getting a lot of social love from employees of Oracle the world over. A video interview that I did for CIO.co.uk a little earlier in the autumn has been tweeted dozens and dozens of times by people working for the Larry Ellison Relational Behemoth. Well, I say "people". I'm actually not so sure. This … Continue reading The anti-social
There is a truth held dear in traditional IT management that with scale come economies of scale. In the old world of on-premises technology in server rooms that were run exclusively for the company consuming the technology, this might have been the case. Costs nestled in the price of running the infrastructure plus the costs of … Continue reading Cloudy economics
As consumers, we tend to like to buy products and services that are the sum of their parts. The history of industrialisation has been one of businesses providing bundles of things together in ways that makes the end product or service much more valuable than if we bought the individual elements in isolation. Take, for … Continue reading Time to get unbundled
We are all going to be replaced by robots, right? We are at last on the cusp of the leisure society or, by another analysis, about to enter a new era of serfdom where we are all beholden to our Silicon Valley/Chinese/robot overlords. Or are we? A very similar narrative played out in the 1970s … Continue reading Generating untold demand
For many years IT departments struggled with the idea that the way in which they delivered services should be based around delivering to the needs of their business. Technology projects would be self-serving, and as a result often fail to deliver anything of value. In the 1990s we started to see the rise of business case-led … Continue reading The need to play
There are a couple of tropes on LinkedIn that I find irritating me with increasing frequency at the moment. The first is the "made good" trope, where someone who had nothing now has a job doing something. There's a variant where they have a job and a flash car. I'm sorry, I don't care. The … Continue reading Focus on the middle
Whatever your views on Britain leaving the European Union, the country is certain now to be entering an extended period of negotiation with the EU and its member nations to unpick the UK from its forty-year relationship. In the past few weeks there has been a repeated claim from various government ministers that we shouldn't be … Continue reading Poker face
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