There's a bit of a push on at work these days for the organisation to be paperless. For the most part I am: I barely ever use the printer and am quite happy to consume information on the various screen devices that I have about my person. However there are two cases in which paper … Continue reading Hidden meanings
Category: Technology
Never a day seems to go by without another article predicting either the death of email or it's inevitable dominance. The thing is, the technology isn't the issue; it's all in the way we use and abuse it. So following on from recent thoughts about stricter structures for how meetings might work, a colleague Rob … Continue reading Effective email?
I hear a lot of talk about millennials. The generation after Gen-Y, who will be coming through into the world of work, social-networked up to their eyeballs. They will change the way in which we work, apparently. Actually, I'm getting a bit bored of this cult of youth. Maybe it's because I'm getting a … Continue reading Rise of the TechnoGranny
I've spoken and written in the past about how the general expectations that we have as consumers of technology these days are going to place increasing pressure onto IT departments as people rise up against the controls and constraints of traditional "systems". I thought it worth exploring a bit from the other perspective - how does … Continue reading Consumption patterns
You can stick your Gartner hype circles in a pipe and smoke them; this is all you need to know: Something is invented Somebody else successfully brings it to market Some people buy one Some more people buy one My Dad buys one My Mum spends her time saying "why do you spend so … Continue reading The Ballantine Family tech adoption cycle
Nomenclature is terribly important to the way in which we make sense of the world around us. Here are some terms related to the tech world that, quite frankly, are lazy and we could do without*... Digital What isn't digital these days? I'll tell you something... The carpet that my wife and I recently bought. … Continue reading De-cybering digital language: ten terms we could do without
Many years ago, computers were disconnected. Then they started to become networked, but with a few notable exceptions in academia and the defence world, the networks themselves were disconnected. That was just about the situation in the early 1990s when I started working. One needed extra special permission to be able to have an … Continue reading A “behind the firewall” state of mind
Ofstead's Chief Sir Michael Wilshaw is reported this morning as wanting to provide "at a glance" dashboards to allow for monitoring of the performance of schools. The dashboard metaphor is one that has developed over the past dozen years or so, in the corporate ambition of providing "one version of the truth" to aid management … Continue reading A dash to dashboards
Microsoft UK's token Long Hair, Dave Coplin, spoke at Research Now last week about how new technology is forcing new social rules for how we interact and engage with each other. His example, from his experiences of family snapshots last summer, is when someone proffers you their mobile phone to show you a photo from their … Continue reading Techiquette*
The social networks are all aglow with news of the next generation of wearable computing. Will Apple release an iWatch? What's the latest on Google Glass? Will someone be releasing digital underpants, and will they be touch-enabled? (There's a new spin on the internet of Things...) I don't know if I'm getting increasingly Luddite as … Continue reading Staring into the middle distance
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