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
A while ago I heard someone describe the fundamental problem with modern office design as being that office workspace designers design workspaces that would work perfectly well for offices that housed office workspace designers. Unfortunately most of us aren't office workspace designers. That thought has been bouncing around my head in recent weeks as I … Continue reading Designed for (my) life
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
Things I have learned this week: one of these days I'm going to remember to pay the effing DART charge networking these days can be effortlessly international there's no better time to have a fire drill than when there is torrential rain stuff, sometimes, just comes around Northern Ireland. Major International Championships. It's like '82 … Continue reading Weeknote 260: Serendipity, engineered
I'm quite often heard calling a distinction between social media and social networks. The two terms seem to be used interchangeably, but for me there is an important difference: social media is what organisations do, based on traditional mass media models of communication around primarily broadcasting; social networks are what we as individuals do, following the long tradition … Continue reading Enterprise Social Media
One of the themes that is recurring in my #sharingorg research project is that of there being two distinct modes for collaboration within organisations. The Optimisation mode is the one that comes most naturally to big organisations - it's the direct descendent of Adam Smith's thinking, and is about delivering improvement through process and (continual) … Continue reading Three reasons for open plan offices not working
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
There is a peculiar phenomenon that I seem to be identifying in the research for the #sharingorg project - something that I'm provisionally calling the "Instant Messaging tipping point of functional uselessness". It goes a little something like this... A new tool or service is developed to address a particular need or niche. That tool is then … Continue reading Less is more
This week I have learned: it's so much easier to get something out of one's head when you've made a commitment to others (thanks Nicole for prompting the Comb-shaped article) there's a difference between a machine surveillance and human surveillance. I'm way more worried about how people seem to be spying on people (like with … Continue reading Weeknote 259: connections and combs
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