Ten years ago when I was working in the world of management training, I had the opportunity over the course of a couple of years to ask a large number (100s) of people a question: what's the single thing that most gets in the way of you getting your job done? Unsurprisingly the most popular … Continue reading Five hurdles between us and the death of email
Category: Technology
There are some impressive numbers being bandied about in the recent announcement that RBS is the first bank to sign up for Facebook at Work, the social network's fledgeling business offering. By the end of March they aim to have the service available to 30,000 users, and all 100,000 employees will be "using the tool" by … Continue reading No need for training
I have developed two coping strategies for dealing with Big Data vendors that I thought worth sharing. The first is a simple technique. When bombarded with marketing slop about how big data is going to change the world in general and your industry in particular, ask them to present the data that allows them to … Continue reading Coping strategies
All weekend the question "A SQL injection attack, in 2015?" has been going around my head. If you don't understand why, you must have missed the news that UK Telco TalkTalk had suffered a major theft of data from what it appears were its woefully inadequate systems. If you don't understand "SQL injection attack" I'm increasingly … Continue reading Crying wolf
In my Cloud-based, multiple device world of work, skipping freely from one software as a service to another, it's sometimes difficult to remember that most people's working life simply isn't like this. In the past seven days I've had conversations with people from two organisations where the default position for access to online services (including … Continue reading Issues of trust, competence and a nailgun
There are few things in the tech industry these days as pervasive as the Gartner Hype Cycle. And I'm done with it. Why? Why done with something that through its commercial success and ubiquity has obviously proved its utility? Because I think it perpetuates the "sudden invention" myth that stymies so many people from thinking … Continue reading I’m done with the Hype Cycle
I found myself chatting to a few folk about the IBM Watson artificial intelligence thing at a lovely event organised by Slalom Consulting. Being in that mild state of belligerence that only a couple of glasses of a nice red can give, I was a bit dismissive of the undoubted achievement that the Watson team had … Continue reading Britain’s Got Robots
It's easy to glibly assume that technology is relentlessly getting better. How often do we stop to assess how true that assumption actually is? I'm currently re-reading John Seely-Brown and Paul Duguid's 2000 book The Social Life of Information. The second chapter looks at the rise of intelligent agents, or bots, which seems somewhat timely given the … Continue reading The rise of the Knobots
Lots of product announcements out of Microsoft yesterday. Most of them reinforcing the idea that everyone wants everything to be a PC. As I write this I'm standing on a packed commuter train. In the carriage around me, in the hands and on the laps of the people around me, I can see: 2 Macbooks … Continue reading The scale of the challenge
This morning I received some key facts and figures from one of the emerging major players in the world of collaboration. What is striking to me is how much they look like the key facts and figures of a traditional media company: active users (read: readers); paid subscriptions (read: circulation minus comps); some stuff about … Continue reading Mass media collaboration
mmitII 