My mobile phone is increasingly the most powerful data aggregation service in my life. It knows everything from my whereabouts to my where I should be abouts; it processes information about the world around me in audio and video; it pulls together my communications and my social networks; it gives me access to my business, my … Continue reading Hobson’s Choice
This week I have learned: - the power of a good game - how explaining to others is the best way to understand something yourself - and how helpful the exercise of data modelling can be to understand broader challenges Next week: Venezia
You have just been informed that aliens are coming. They will take over the Earth in 60 minutes. You are the only person on the planet who knows this information. You must tell the Prime Minister. But you must tell them in a way that means that they actually take some action. What do you … Continue reading The aliens are coming!
"So what's the difference between IT and Digital?" That's a heck of a googly to receive at the end of a 90 minutes workshop. (For American readers, a googly in cricket is what a curveball is in baseball, but we Brits don't play baseball. We play rounders. When we are seven.) Anyway, an interesting question, … Continue reading IT vs Digital
The world of homeopathy is an interesting thing. Pseudoscience cobbled together to produce medical interventions that are no more effective than a placebo, but have some sort of efficacy as a result of that effect. If you want to create a placebo effect, then you need to tell people a story to get them to … Continue reading Homeopathic IT
On Friday I was at a presentation given by one of the big IT vendors on the subject of Big Data and analytics. During the session the story was told of how US retailer Target had got so good with predictive analytics that they had infuriated the father of a teenage girl by sending her … Continue reading The legends of Big Data
Things I have learned this week: - never over estimate how bored and disengaged people are by how they look - the world of tech startups never fails to underwhelm me - essentially I'm a show off. Big audiences are more fun... - ... or maybe it's just more fun when the audience fits the room properly … Continue reading Weeknote 244: year 6
I learned this week of the term Madtech. Marketing and advertising technology. It's good to see that cobbler's child syndrome is alive and well in the world; they might as well call it Sales, Hustling, Interrupting and Tracking Tech. Thing is, for all the talk about how smart marketing is becoming, driven by big data … Continue reading Retargeted
In a few weeks' time I'm running a short workshop for a group of people who work in the world of marketing insight. In preparation, I'm looking to find a few volunteers who can help me test a theory... I'm someone who has a lot of theories. I try to test as many of them … Continue reading Surveyed
Last week I wrote about the pioneering work of the Tavistock Institute and the thinking that they provided into dealing with a world of cloud-like problems. That terminology was taken from philosopher Karl Popper's beautiful analogy of a world in which some problems are clock-like (complex, complicated, but ultimately knowable) but many of the real … Continue reading Dealing with Clouds
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