Organizations have a natural tendency to think of IT systems as repositories or as machines. Places for things to be stored or for processes to be executed. But when it comes to collaboration platforms, we might be better to think of them as places. As Danah Boyd’s “It’s Complicated” describes of social networks being like the … Continue reading The time and place
Category: Management
The True Church of Information Technology holds a few articles of faith. One of the most enduring is that belief in the One True System. This monotheistic doctrine is one born of a time when computing power was scarce and the search for "one version of the truth" was the holy journey. Right, let's stop … Continue reading 5 reasons why “one” enterprise collaboration platform might be a bad approach
There is, quite frankly, an awful lot of guff talked about social networks. Top of the list of guff for me at the moment is "An enterprise social network will make people connect with lots of new people." Why do I see this as marketing flatulence? Well, because it just doesn't map to the ways … Continue reading A Tinder for business
I had the pleasure of spending yesterday at the Leading Edge Forum event in London, listening to some of my research peers, leading figures from the world of technology, and others, about the need for organisations to build up new capabilities to cope with both "Big D" ("Uber-esque") and "Little d" (self, from within) disruption. … Continue reading Curiouser and curiouser
Back at the beginning of 2014 I wrote a handful of articles exploring a simple model for making decisions about where to put effort and investment into things digital that I termed "Digital Architecture". Nearly two years on, I thought it worth revisiting the technique as I have had quite a number of opportunities now … Continue reading Digital Architecture revisited
What follows is pure conjecture, based on a bit of guesswork and some circumstantial evidence, but here goes... Within the #sharingorg research a common theme emerging is the necessity for senior leadership to both support and live the values of any organisation-wide collaboration initiative. It's also clear that there is a level of technological disassociation amongst … Continue reading The last of the PA generation
Ten years ago when I was working in the world of management training, I had the opportunity over the course of a couple of years to ask a large number (100s) of people a question: what's the single thing that most gets in the way of you getting your job done? Unsurprisingly the most popular … Continue reading Five hurdles between us and the death of email
There are some impressive numbers being bandied about in the recent announcement that RBS is the first bank to sign up for Facebook at Work, the social network's fledgeling business offering. By the end of March they aim to have the service available to 30,000 users, and all 100,000 employees will be "using the tool" by … Continue reading No need for training
I have developed two coping strategies for dealing with Big Data vendors that I thought worth sharing. The first is a simple technique. When bombarded with marketing slop about how big data is going to change the world in general and your industry in particular, ask them to present the data that allows them to … Continue reading Coping strategies
All weekend the question "A SQL injection attack, in 2015?" has been going around my head. If you don't understand why, you must have missed the news that UK Telco TalkTalk had suffered a major theft of data from what it appears were its woefully inadequate systems. If you don't understand "SQL injection attack" I'm increasingly … Continue reading Crying wolf
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