There is a great deal of hubbub in the legal tech community around a well-PRed artificial intelligence system called Ross. Aside from the cute trick of anthropomorphizing the inanimate object with a clever acronym, Ross is the sort of machine automation that many have been warning will herald an existential crisis in middle-class professions in … Continue reading Black Boxes
Category: Themes
I spent a day recently working with colleagues at the Leading Edge Forum, helping the board of an NHS clinical commissioning group to think about the impact and the potential of Digital in their context. I had done quite a bit a research into case studies that might help to ground the more conceptual stuff … Continue reading Unleashing the innovation monster
For the first few decades of the automobile industry, cars looked like horseless carriages. The infrastructure to support them was ropey. There were restrictions place upon them, like having a man walking ahead with a red flag, that made them fairly useless. But over time things changed; the infrastructure to support motoring began to expand … Continue reading The typewriter-less office
This week I have learned: - learn from disasters. It makes stuff better. - crystallization of ideas takes a while - digital is not the same as a little bit o' agile - short weeks. Hmm. Next week: BCS breakfasts
It's tempting to sometimes think that the world neatly fits into things that are inherently knowable, and those that aren't. A world of things to which "proper" planning can be applied, and of others to which an agile approach needs to be applied in its slapdash, scruffy way. A world of clocks and a world … Continue reading Iterative bridge-building
For many years information technology focused itself on automating processes. My distant memories of studying SSADM at University were of an approach that looked at the current reality and tried to map that into a system. In my defence, University was a very long time ago and I wasn't necessarily paying attention. In recent years … Continue reading Reorganizing
There's a weird set of paradoxes that appear to be opening up in the realm of technology management in business at the moment; on the one hand technology is becoming increasingly commoditized so that the needs for running technical stuff - servers, email systems and so on - in house is diminishing. At the same … Continue reading Keeping people API
In my time working at the Government Digital Service I have to admit I got a bit weirded out by the relentless focus on User Needs. It felt cultish. To an extent it still does. But having had some time to reflect, and having spent some time working in different environments in the past six … Continue reading Business needs, user needs, theory x and theory y
This week I have learned: - once you start to ask questions is difficult to know when to stop - the desire to create solutions is strong - "digital" had created a new wave of magic boxes to solve intractable problems - is all about the network - it's hard to emotionally detach from critique … Continue reading Weeknote 284: multiple personae disorder
During my recent research project, which I continue to write up into a coherent report for the lovely people at the LEF, one of the conversations that appeared to happen again and again with my interviewees went along the lines of: Me: "Would I be able to attribute this conversation to you?" Them: "I'd love … Continue reading Uncommunicative
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