Back in the early 00s, as a result of my work with Internet services at the commercial arm of the corporation, I was lucky to be able to spend some time at the BBC's Research and Development organisation. Nestled in the middle of a leafy Surrey estate, Kingswood Warren was a mansion house scarred with … Continue reading Anti-innovative
Category: Technology
Back in the last millennium when I was studying Information Systems at university, there was a hierarchy of value that went a little like this: data was the least valuable stuff - it was just numbers (sometimes just 0s and 1s); information was next up the stack - it had some sort of meaning, but there … Continue reading Data, Information, Knowledge, Insight
There's a meme about digital disruption doing the rounds of technology and digital presentations and social networks at the moment that goes along the lines of The world's biggest taxi company owns no taxis (Uber); The world's biggest hotelier owns no hotels (AirBnB)... I increasingly am starting to think that this particular train of thought … Continue reading AirBnB isn’t a hotelier…
With news coming through of the Government's Spending Review this week, one particular piece caught my eye and got me thinking... Now maybe I'm reading this incorrectly, but that to me reads as a £1.3bn project to deliver a set of defined outputs by next year. Call me a cynic, but if that is the … Continue reading Agile procurement
Over the years I've always railed against the concept of "best" practice. It annoys me probably mainly because I'm a bit of an iconoclast. But less emotionally the concept jars for two reasons: first of all because "best" practice is something that a team achieves through learning, rather than something that can be simply adopted, and trying … Continue reading Best Practice versus Good Ideas
One of the things I find myself saying a great deal at the moment is "I don't think you mean culture, I think you mean behaviour." Like a pedantic stuck record, the phrase usually comes about when people are talking about trying to get people to behave differently in organisations, and then describe that as … Continue reading Sub-culture
Organizations have a natural tendency to think of IT systems as repositories or as machines. Places for things to be stored or for processes to be executed. But when it comes to collaboration platforms, we might be better to think of them as places. As Danah Boyd’s “It’s Complicated” describes of social networks being like the … Continue reading The time and place
The True Church of Information Technology holds a few articles of faith. One of the most enduring is that belief in the One True System. This monotheistic doctrine is one born of a time when computing power was scarce and the search for "one version of the truth" was the holy journey. Right, let's stop … Continue reading 5 reasons why “one” enterprise collaboration platform might be a bad approach
There is, quite frankly, an awful lot of guff talked about social networks. Top of the list of guff for me at the moment is "An enterprise social network will make people connect with lots of new people." Why do I see this as marketing flatulence? Well, because it just doesn't map to the ways … Continue reading A Tinder for business
Back at the beginning of 2014 I wrote a handful of articles exploring a simple model for making decisions about where to put effort and investment into things digital that I termed "Digital Architecture". Nearly two years on, I thought it worth revisiting the technique as I have had quite a number of opportunities now … Continue reading Digital Architecture revisited
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