In the post-war period in Britain scientists Eric Trist, Ken Bamforth and Fred Emery conducted research into a strange thing that was going on in the coal mining industry at the time. Having survived the ravages of the global conflict, the mining industry was investing heavily to bring it into the modern age. New state-of-the-art machinery was deployed, but … Continue reading The engineer’s fallacy
Category: Themes
A thought-provoking evening last night spent at the first #culturevist event, a side project from Matthew Partovi (who is otherwise gainfully employed as a Customer Success Manager at Yammer, who hosted the event). The audience seemed to split into two camps - those seeking to instill a "great culture" at their place of work, and those … Continue reading #culturevist
A couple of days after the news that Google is to acquire the smart thermostat and fire alarm company Nest, my main thought now is that I’m jolly glad I don’t work for a utility company right now. The poor things, just about catching up with the web. Making tentative steps into the world of … Continue reading Welcome to the disrupt-o-zone
My wife recently entered the world of the quantified self and wearable computing when she got a FitBit activity tracker. It's really interesting to see how quickly the device, the app, and the "10,000 steps a day" target has changed her behaviour. We are walking to places where before we would have driven. I'm … Continue reading The only person you’re cheating is yourself
To finish off this short series about the Digital Architecture framework, let's take a look at what we can learn and infer by looking across, and up and down, the quadrants. The functions and services that span across the top two quadrants are the way in which businesses differentiate themselves (unless, of course, you … Continue reading Digital Architecture: the rows and columns
The final quadrant of the Digital Architecture framework is the one which I believe poses most challenge to traditional models of management of technology (and maybe even management of people) in businesses today. The external-facing supporting activities that, for the most part, boil down to how we communicate with other people. For many years, this … Continue reading Digital Architecture: Comms services
At the end of January I'll be releasing the third quarterly stamp #socialCEO report. Including interviews with O2 CEO Ronan Dunne and UK advertising legend Andy Law, as well as in-depth analysis of the social networking of the FTSE100 CEO community, you can receive a copy before anyone else by signing up here: http://stamplondon.us3.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=9ccfb69afa7877afb460eb1fe&id=12abf47dc1
I've now been using a Samsung Chromebook for six months as my main device. There's been lots of talk about them in recent weeks (particularly in regard to that nonsense world that is Tech Company Sales Numbers). But let's be honest, do you know anyone (apart from me) who actually uses one? And that's probably … Continue reading Six months with Chromebook
Continuing the tour around the quadrants, we come to the external-facing, core product-related activities that a business conducts. This is the area in which there has probably been the greatest change in the past decade as a result of digital technologies - first with the Web, and latterly with smartphones, tablets and the world of … Continue reading Digital Architecture: Product services
One of the things that I was told in my two years of working in the software supplier world was that "there are only two sorts of people; those who make products and those who sell products". As on the day I heard it, I still believe that there is a one word, Anglo-Saxon retort … Continue reading Digital architecture: Production services
mmitII 