For some years now I've been using the analogy of the music industry to explore how digitalization can have varying stages. It goes a little something like this. Prior to digital, music was distributed by performance, then printed sheet music, then through vinyl (and to some extent tape). The first wave of digital saw the … Continue reading The evolution of digital work
Category: Technology
There are three things converging in my working life at the moment: Government client work on delivering modern IT services is at last at the point where we are starting to deliver actual technology into the hands of actual people who aren't in the technology team. My work has been to help shape the activities … Continue reading Workplace Safety
I've been working on developing a product. An actual physical thing that you can hold in your hands. It's a set of playing cards. I call them CIO Priorities. The idea has been gestating for a while: I spend a lot of my time talking with and looking at what technology leaders in organisations do … Continue reading Some games to play
Yesterday at their I/O conference, Google announced a couple of new developments that place Simulated Intelligence technologies into the world of collaborative platforms. The first, Smart Compose, extends out the quick response features already available in Google Inbox from a single line message (usually things like "Thanks!" or "I'm running late!") into full-blown messages. The … Continue reading The collaboration arms race
So apparently Theresa May has asked her Brexit subcommittee to go away and think a bit harder about their two proposed solutions to the post-Brexit EU border and customs problem. One of the two approaches has been summarised as: A 'highly streamlined' customs arrangement - This would minimise customs checks rather than getting rid of … Continue reading Problem-less solutions
We are obsessed with being busy. Think about how you answer the question "How are you?", particularly at work, these days... "Rushed off my feet!" "Back to back!" "Swimming not drowing!" and other such epithets. We use busy-ness as a sign of importance, of status. Of Godliness. The Protestant Work Ethic has a lot to … Continue reading The curse of busy-ness
When you start to look at the world through the lens of User Experience it can start to become both obsessive and sometimes somewhat depressing. Where the user experience meets organisational compliance is usually the most miserable. A week or so I had a migraine. I get them a few times a year, and have … Continue reading Making things usable
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
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
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