Category: Themes

I heard on the Today Programme this morning that this afternoon will see a milestone in broadcasting history as the BBC World Service makes its last transmission from its headquarters in Bush House in advance of a move back to Broadcasting House. If you know me, you well know that the BBC has a very … Continue reading Bush House

One of the great things about my current job is it gives me the cause to go and have conversations with people that I probably wouldn't otherwise get to meet. A couple of weeks ago I took a trip up to Oxford to meet Baroness Susan Greenfield, an academic who specialises in the physiology of … Continue reading Privacy for the digital natives

I've written quite a bit in the past months about where the IT Management role within organisations might be headed in the next few years; the CIO abbreviation has been used by others to indicate a whole series of potential options, from the ominous "Career Is Over", through "Chief Innovation Officer" and beyond. In a … Continue reading Meta-IT

It seems to be a fairly well accepted wisdom these days that smartphones are generally used more for the smart rather than the phone bit, and that they to all intents and purposes should be regarded as pocket-based computers rather than the natural legacy of the work of Alexander Graham Bell. If I think about … Continue reading Form over function

OK - so before I go any further, I realise that I'm a lone voice in the wilderness. I fly in the face of accepted wisdom - that management is an activity based around control and measurement, and so if you can't measure you can't manage. But there have been three separate news stories this … Continue reading The minute you start to measure is the minute it starts to go wrong

The journey to Microsoft's Reading campus that I took back in the early months of 2011 for one of the rounds of interviews I had before joining the organisation was one of the most stressful trips I have ever made. It wasn't the prospect of three, one-hour interviews back-to-back that worried me (let's be honest, … Continue reading Liberated

I've been looking this morning at a mobile app building service called Conduit - it's an interesting proposition: point it at a website and it will automatically generate Windows Phone, iOS and Android apps based on the content available (including RSS feeds, Twitter streams and Facebook content). Pay a one-off fee, or set up a paid subscription, … Continue reading Software development: Self-deskilling/Self-perpetuating

There was consternation last week amongst Watford fans with the unveiling of the new club shirt. The team's kit sponsor, recently announced as "The Happy Egg Co." (a free-range egg brand) led some to be worried that the new top would be sporting a large cartoon chicken. As it was, we were spared the fowl, … Continue reading The QR Code Mystery

When I was 15, I spent a week of work experience at the Watford Observer, the paper locally published where I was brought up. In between trips to the local Crown Court to watch proceedings, and time spent looking for ambulances to chase, most of my time was spent taking rather verbose press releases from … Continue reading The joy of brevity