Data. The new oil. In that you wouldn't want to cover a puffin in the stuff. The current obsession with data is predicated on one major assumption: that the data that organisations have amassed has some sort of integrity. If it doesn't, then its value is dubious. I have started to make a distinction between … Continue reading Garbage In
Category: Themes
The world of work isn't somewhere where people just exclusively work. They talk about all sorts of stuff- what they watched on TV last night; the results in their favourite sports; politics; love; life... In my research for Who Shares Wins I found a possibly apocryphal tale of the adoption of email in a law … Continue reading The power of tittle-tattle
I'm currently reading Christian Madsbjerg's excellent and highly recommended Sensemaking. At the core of the book is the proposition that whilst the modern world has become obsessed with what Madsbjerg terms thin data (mostly - numbers), to make sense of the work around us we also need to take account of thick data - emotions, relationships, context - … Continue reading Through thick and thin
There are some amazing developments emerging into the mainstream as a result of technologies badged variously as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics, Natural Language Processing and other whizzy-sounding titles. But alongside any new wave of technology comes a tsunami of marketing hype, overblown expectations, silver bullets and rainbow-pooping unicorns. Non-technologists and technologists alike need to … Continue reading 6 questions to consider when in the path of the oncoming robot overlords.
Much of yesterday was spent at an ERP vendor event listening to the usual combination of analyst ("cloud is good, data is great"), vendor ("you should buy or product") and vendor client ("you should buy their product because we did") speakers. One big theme is that AI and machine intelligence will enable companies to achieve … Continue reading How big is your data lake?
I'm a qualitative kinda guy. My worldview is one shaped more by stories than numbers. At my core I like to think that most people, really, are like me. But I also know that I am probably wrong. I viscerally react against the quantitative. That's almost a definition of the qualitative mindset, I guess. Gut … Continue reading Organisational subjectives
I, like many others, are fascinated by the concept of cognitive biases. It you want a catalogue of these shortcuts that the brain uses to make sense (often incorrectly) of the world around us, Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly is highly recommended - although be warned that by the end of reading it you'll … Continue reading Anti-confirmation bias
More discussions yesterday about the somewhat antediluvian world of records management. Something struck me... In times of yore when documents were printed on the back end of a goat, they were expensive. The only things that were created had significant filtering before creation because of the cost of vellum and scribes and that lovely gold … Continue reading Infinity & beyond
I've written in the past about the stack of old, bound editions of the magazine Punch that appear to be the closest my branch of the Ballantines have as a legacy to pass from generation to generation (if only I'd been part of the distilling branch of the family). Whilst interesting, the archive is strangely … Continue reading Disposing the future
This week I have learned: librarian's haven't taken over the world, statisticians have. Whodathunkit? there is a look of glee in the faces of people in serious jobs who are given the chance to play. the force deployed by an organisation to implement governance over spending will be met by and opposite and slightly greater … Continue reading Weeknote 335: surprise exits
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