The London cab firm Addison Lee has created a great deal of commentary about the great deal of business that they have generated from getting into the world of mobile apps early. They were already of a reasonable size, so have been able to invest in technology to gain an early mover advantage in the … Continue reading Virtualised companies
Category: Management
My dad is currently in the process of preparing a module for a course he's running at UCL next year, and asked me a specific question this morning: When looking at the benefits and disadvantages of moving from in-house to cloud computing, security issues aren't prominent yet surveys show that security is the biggest single … Continue reading Risk perception and Cloud security
Kleiner Perkins' Mary Meeker has just published another presentation, with reflections on the state of the Internet and technology world in 2012 and beyond. As usual, lots of data points, and some thoughts on how many industries have been "re-imagined" (a phrase I'm now stopping using as I've realised it means little more than "changed"). … Continue reading Value of advertising
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking with a substantial number of the people who work for the WPP agency The Partners. The gist of the talk was about the power of analogy in designing systems, and how fun analogies could in turn deliver experiences that would solve otherwise thorny issues through … Continue reading Small victories
The recent announcements by Barclays Bank about their bulk purchase of iPads has got me thinking about the way in which it seems the consumerisation of technology is having an interesting effect - we are becoming more besotted with the software and devices than ever before. The "news" was the purchase of the devices, yet … Continue reading Business change in a consumerised world
The building that I work in at the Microsoft Campus in Reading was remodelled at the end of the year. It's all hi-tech and futuristic, with LED displays all over the place and a showcase of our consumer products in the reception area (including a mock living room with XBox Kinect to boot). However the thing that … Continue reading Motivating through games
The London Conference on Cyberspace and associated commentary , along with seeing "ethical hacker" Jason Hart speak last week has got me thinking about what seems to be the central paradox of information security: The problem with information security isn't the information, nor the system, but the people using them. But the more that you … Continue reading The security paradox
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otc5n0pWn8w Another whiteboard session for you - covering a bit of management theory that I think is particularly relevant to IT heads today.
Nice interview by Aleks Krotoski on the Guardian's Tech Weekly podcast this week with game developer Jane McGonigal. In it, McGonigal quotes from a Canadian philosopher Bernard Suits that "a game is an unnecessary obstacle that we volunteer to try to overcome". She goes on to say that the volunteering aspect is what makes the … Continue reading What is a game?
I mentioned a few days ago that I would talk about how organisations might better manage their clients’ experience. So here we go... Unless you want to take the chance that your client will only ever find out how well you can deliver a service (over and above your core product or service proposition) by … Continue reading Managing the client experience
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