We are all going to be replaced by robots, right? We are at last on the cusp of the leisure society or, by another analysis, about to enter a new era of serfdom where we are all beholden to our Silicon Valley/Chinese/robot overlords. Or are we? A very similar narrative played out in the 1970s … Continue reading Generating untold demand
Category: Themes
For many years IT departments struggled with the idea that the way in which they delivered services should be based around delivering to the needs of their business. Technology projects would be self-serving, and as a result often fail to deliver anything of value. In the 1990s we started to see the rise of business case-led … Continue reading The need to play
There are a couple of tropes on LinkedIn that I find irritating me with increasing frequency at the moment. The first is the "made good" trope, where someone who had nothing now has a job doing something. There's a variant where they have a job and a flash car. I'm sorry, I don't care. The … Continue reading Focus on the middle
Whatever your views on Britain leaving the European Union, the country is certain now to be entering an extended period of negotiation with the EU and its member nations to unpick the UK from its forty-year relationship. In the past few weeks there has been a repeated claim from various government ministers that we shouldn't be … Continue reading Poker face
Next week, along with good chum Chris Weston, I am launching my latest media experiment - a podcast called WB-40. Every week, for 40 minutes (or thereabouts) Chris and I will be exploring a couple of subjects. Next week we start with the themes of Robotics and the Internet of Things. It might be good … Continue reading Announcing: the WB-40 Podcast
I've been recently orbiting again in public sector circles, and it's striking me how much of the work that is the Civil Service is about implementing change. The delivery of new policy, the dramatic changes in funding in the past six years, the forthcoming consultancy jamboree that will be the country's skulking out of the … Continue reading The need for change
My esteemed former colleague Euan Semple published an interesting little video on YouTube yesterday. I think I've seen the "Ambulance Drone" clip before, but through my new-found PRTech lenses, I smelt something of a rat, and called it out. "Spoilsport" said Euan, quite rightly. https://youtu.be/y-rEI4bezWc For the record, Ambulance Drone was a design concept from a … Continue reading Virtually reality
"How do you eat an elephant?" The metaphor is oft repeated in working life, and elephant eating seems to be a stock in trade of the average large organisation. But nobody seems to stop and ask "Why the bloody hell are we eating elephant? Isn't there something a little smaller?" Simplification has become the mantra. … Continue reading Everything is a complex system
A randomised trial of fitness trackers has resulted in data that shows that data doesn't necessarily lead to improved health outcomes. Let's just replay that. Giving people data about their exercise activity has not been proven to lead to outcomes like weight loss. In a massive case of confirmation bias, my prediction has yet to be … Continue reading You can’t manage what you can measure
There's an awful lot of technological Utopian bullshit spoken at the moment about how we are at the cusp of a massive revolution in the hands of technology. On the one hand I think there's a strong argument that this has always been the case, at least since the first industrial revolution. There's a chronocentricity that … Continue reading The Money Siphon
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