There is a truth held dear in traditional IT management that with scale come economies of scale. In the old world of on-premises technology in server rooms that were run exclusively for the company consuming the technology, this might have been the case. Costs nestled in the price of running the infrastructure plus the costs of … Continue reading Cloudy economics
Category: Technology
A couple of unrelated conversations in the past week... At the LEF executive forum event last week I heard the London Business School's Rob Goffee speak, and the one abiding memory is how he explored the idea that organisations need to move beyond the idea of employee engagement and motivation if organisations want to be … Continue reading We are all suppliers now…
As consumers, we tend to like to buy products and services that are the sum of their parts. The history of industrialisation has been one of businesses providing bundles of things together in ways that makes the end product or service much more valuable than if we bought the individual elements in isolation. Take, for … Continue reading Time to get unbundled
Microsoft yesterday made some big new product announcements, with updates to Windows, and a new range of Surface devices. At the moment I'm involved in a project looking at providing core technology refresh in big corporate organisations, and I struggled to see anything that would have sent a message that Windows is a business-focused, cost … Continue reading Monetising legacy
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
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
I remember a news story from probably about 20 years ago where a full scale nuclear panic was instigated in the back garden of a suburban house in the South East of England when small capsules marked as nuclear waste had been discovered when flowerbeds had been turned over. To cut a long story short, … Continue reading Data as nuclear waste
My LEF colleague Dave Aron posted about a fast food drone delivery service a couple of days ago. Having been recently reading James Garvey's takedown of the PR industry The Persuaders, it got me thinking about how there is an increasing breed of technology publicised these days which, for want of a better term, one could call … Continue reading The unstoppable rise of PRTech
My earliest experiences of computers were as them being tools of creativity, and that's framed my use of them ever since. The BBC Micro didn't really do much unless you gave it fairly comprehensive instructions. Sure, they could be used to play pre-bought games, but in the very early days the thing came with a … Continue reading The tools of mass creation
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