Orginally published on CIO.co.uk, December 2015. I still wholeheartedly believe that Curiosity, Empathy and Humility are the key to successful technology leadership. This week the panel for the 2016 CIO100 awards met for the first time and we discussed what we thought would be the important facets to look for when judging the awards in … Continue reading CIO Archive: Ideal CIO Personality Traits
Category: Themes
This week I have learned: that maybe butterfly metamorphosis is the metaphor I need to describe the change work that is coming up. Building a structure around what in many cases will be a matter of taking things right back to basics.the teardown of a "digital" pregnancy test is a perfect example of when a … Continue reading Weeknote 501 – Chrysalis
First published on CIO.co.uk, March 2016. The early glimmers of what became the Play Matrix. In Project Management 101 there is the concept of the Project Golden Triangle. There are three dimensions: cost, time and specification. The idea is that for any project, some of these dimensions are likely to be constrained. If cost is … Continue reading CIO Archive: Agile methodology best avoided when you have known answers
First published on CIO.co.uk, May 2016. CIOs should still be careful for what they wish for. For some time I've been voicing scepticism of the importance of the CIO having a seat on an organisation's board to be effective. Too often it has sounded to me like a perceived shortcut to the hard work of … Continue reading CIO Archive: Sitting on the board might not make you a more effective CIO
Humanoid intelligence is more than just skin deep First published on CIO.co.uk, July 2016. Sticking a face on technology is still a cheap trick used regularly. There's a friend of mine, a colleague from back in the days when I worked at the BBC, who is a touch obsessed with the psychological concept of pareidolia. Every week … Continue reading CIO Archive: The rise of the anthropomorphs
Agile, Waterfall and stupid ideas First published on CIO.co.uk, November 2016. I still see people making the mistaken assumption that a methodology can make a bad idea good. From my extensive research I can tell you exclusively that the following three things do not exist: UnicornsMermaidsA software development methodology that will always successfully deliver From … Continue reading CIO Archive: The siren call of the unicorn
CIOs need to prepare for a future business computing model without the PC First published on CIO.co.uk, January 2017. This one has turned out to be a bit wrong, given Covid... In my work in the last few years I've been skirting between the worlds of digital and traditional IT. One of the things that … Continue reading CIO Archive: #noPC
In the sheep-filled fields surrounding the Yorkshire Dales village of Threshfield where we spent last week on holiday, we stumbled across some strange earth workings whilst out walking with the kids. Built between 1900 and 1902 at the peak of the speculative railway building in the UK, the Yorkshire Dales Railway was hardly a rip-roaring … Continue reading The cost of failure
This week I have learned: why they put health and safety notices on the back of product packagingthat I've yet to find a sector where everyone rants and raves about the incumbent industry Line of Business software providersthat maybe all language is metaphorthere are definitely some metaphors where people generally don't understand the original meaning. … Continue reading Weeknote 495 – sticky fingers
This week I have learned: the language that people use in CVs is almost always utter tosh. All one generally learns is how unwilling people are to leave the herd.I feel that I am on the precipice of some really important work.getting people to stop doing things is an underrated part of transformation.I cannot stress … Continue reading Weeknote 494: Changing Tack
