A few years ago a debate raged in design circles. Skeuomorphism, the use of analogous reference to real-world objects for no practical purpose, was much beloved in the design language of Apple.From faux leather backgrounds to mock metal grilles, fragments of real world objects were littered all over the digital tools and services that people … Continue reading A return to skeuomorphism?
Things I have learned this week: - Cloud telephony isn't really a thing (and maybe never will be) - Recipes are great (but creating menus needs some help) - I might have been wrong about the CIO role Next week: two games to go; two wins gives promotion. And a stack of work things after … Continue reading Weeknote 241: clouds, phones and bellyaches
Over the course of my career I've made a couple of significantly sideways steps to extend my experience and learning. The first came at the end of 2004. After a dozen years of working in the IT industry, and having had eight years working for the BBC, I needed a change. Technology was significantly changing … Continue reading Disrupt yourself
I spent some time chatting yesterday with a CIO who is planning his own succession. There are two potential internal candidates, but obviously neither has the experience of leading a technology organisation, so there are capability gaps. On an interim basis the organisation is looking to put both in charge until a new leader can … Continue reading Singular Leadership
Yesterday and today I'm part of a discussion panel organised by Dimension Data looking at the move of telephony into the Cloud. The discussions, part of the UCExpo event, find me alongside representatives from some of the big telecoms vendors. It's been an interesting experience so far, and it strikes me that telephony is running … Continue reading Phones in the Cloud
For some time now I've been toying with the idea of writing a recipe book. Not recipes for food, but instead for how to manage and lead in organisations in the early 21st; a time where technology is changing, to a lesser or greater extent, how we communicate, and how we operate. Mostly this is … Continue reading 21st Century Management recipe cards
Things I have learned this week: - a roomful of project managers will inevitably want everything run as a project - the "out of the box" experience of a new PC is, quite frankly, as shit and confusing as it ever has been - ask a room of senior working people how many have been … Continue reading Weeknote 240: pratfalls
Seems like a fairly innocuous question, doesn't it? Surely a piece of information that HR can just roll of the tips of their tongues? Well, in the shifting sands of today's virtual organisations, it's not as easy to answer "how many people work for us?" as it used to be. You have employees. You have … Continue reading How many people work for us?
A frequent refrain in UK election coverage at the moment is that this is the UK's first "Social Media" election. The truth is that five years is an awfully long time in media and technology these days, and the dynamics of communications for this year's ballot are vastly different to the last... The Social Media … Continue reading The (insert Tech buzzword) Election
The problem with Legacy IT as a metaphor is quite simple: to the whole rest of the world, a legacy is a good thing. If you're trying to get people to see something as bad, it's really, really important not to hamper your mission by naming it after something good. We might as well call … Continue reading Crap Tech Metaphors: 14 Legacy IT
