Back in September I started what felt like an unlikely experiment. Through work for a client I had the opportunity to try out using an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil to see if I could switch from being an inveterate paper notebook user to working completely paper free. For many years now I've not printed … Continue reading The little white doo-dah that changed my (working) life
Category: Technology
Parking in the UK is a big business. In 2015-2016, according to research undertaken by the RAC Foundation, UK local authorities charged motorists in excess of £1.5bn and generating a cash surplus of around £0.75bn for parking their cars. But the process of paying for parking is a ramshackle and expensive affair. There are pay … Continue reading Digital parking
When Chris & I spoke on Sunday evening about the emerging Cambridge Analytica story as we recorded WB40 I was confused. As further revelations have emerged through Carole Cadwalladr's fantastic and dogged reporting (which I have been following for months), I am reminded of the Morrissey lyric "I was happy in the haze of a … Continue reading A state of confusion
The world of Information Technology orbits around the concept of repeatable process. We program computers to process data. Programming is the act of decomposing the world into a series of repeatable, logical steps. And the software that is produced from this act invariably then expects the world in which it operates to be one where … Continue reading Processless
I was in a presentation earlier this week where a senior person from a rather idiosyncratic but large public organisation talked about their experiences of migrating to Microsoft Office 365. There were interesting and honest reflections, and many people asked if it was possible to get a copy of the slides that had been shown. … Continue reading Not from my tenant.
Silicon Valley seems obsessed with making things frictionless. At the core the removal of barriers to people using their products is a sensible business development strategy. Why on earth would you want to stop people being customers? In the "pay with your data" world of modern web services, it's even more important to allow people … Continue reading Less Frictionless
When did you last spend some serious thinking time devoted to electric motors? Since getting up I have brushed my teeth, shaved, turned on the dishwasher, seen cars pass me on the walk to the station and boarded a train into London. All have depended on electric motors and yet for the most part we … Continue reading #noIT
I have this idea of a probably mythical time in the history of office work. A point in time a few years before my own career began when computers were present but were still the preserve of typists. Tools used exclusively by specialist, trained workers. When the average desk was reserved for paper, a Rolodex … Continue reading The art of decision making
"Collaboration" - a term bandied about liberally yet rarely precisely defined. Over the past few years it's been a subject that I've spent a great deal of time grappling with for various clients. A great deal of that work is summarized here: I've thought about what are the reasons why an organisation might want it's … Continue reading Decomposing collaboration
About a decade ago, when I was heading up technology for the global marketing agency Imagination, we started to explore the idea of what would become known as Bring Your Own Device. We were thinking more radically than was ever likely to actually happen - staff given a Hardware allowance in the way that many … Continue reading Bring Your Own Software
