Frank Buytendijk delivered a great keynote at 8am in Las Vegas at the TDWI conference in February 2012. He avoided the technicalities of data architectures, the rigours of data modelling and the disciplines of agile methods. Instead, over breakfast, he dipped into the world of philosophy and asked us to consider the centuries old… [Read more…]
January 19, 2012
As working practices change, many decision makers are ‘telepresent’. I have at least two customers that operate a two desk for three policy so are clearly assuming a third of their workforce are simply not in the office on any one given day. The decision makers cubicle is empty or more likely gone along with… [Read more…]
December 21, 2011
The couple in Ira Gershwin’s song Lets call the whole thing off lamented the way they pronounced the same words differently because it exposed class differences which might eventually be their undoing. Human communication is a funny thing. If Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers had met on Facebook then regardless of how they pronounced neither,… [Read more…]
October 15, 2011
Mention social and we immediately think about the dizzying number of people using Facebook and, as businesses, how we reach them as customers or prospective customers. This is only part of the story though. Today, my own business, a provider of information software and services, will not find it’s customers on Facebook however hard… [Read more…]
September 18, 2011
First off, let me stipulate that I absolutely support the notion that technologists of a certain age (let’s go with over 40) should regularly evaluate what they need to ‘unlearn’ in order to make way for new thinking. However, some older techniques really do stand the test of time when attempting to understand new concepts.… [Read more…]
August 29, 2011
There was a time when databases came in desktop, departmental and enterprise sizes. There was nothing larger than ‘enterprise’ and very few enterprises needed databases that scaled to what was the largest imaginable unit of data, the terabyte. They even named a database after it. We now live in the world of the networked enterprise.… [Read more…]
August 15, 2011
I have spent a fair amount of blogspace this year discussing how good business decisions need more than information. That the evolution of Business Intelligence tools need to extend beyond crosstabs, charts, scorecards and dashboards to collect and share social intelligence. However, this does not mean that decisions should be made without information, it means… [Read more…]
July 9, 2011
Social Gestures If, in the middle of a conversation, I put my index finger to my lips you would instinctively lower your voice. If I held my hand out flat towards your face whilst you were talking you would stop mid-flow. These social gestures are powerful forms of human communication. They are efficient communication short-cuts.… [Read more…]
June 17, 2011
Social So Far This week, I was asked to contribute some comments for an article in Vision, an IBM publication about Social Media. Clearly this was in my capacity as a keen amateur rather than a Social Media professional. My interest in Social is partly driven by the converging fields of Social and Business Intelligence… [Read more…]
May 14, 2011
You’re Fired I know that anyone that watches ‘The Apprentice’ is not doing so for an insight into how a modern business is run but hearing the words ‘You’re Fired’ frequently bellowed through an office door couldn’t be further from my own experience. It represents a clichéd and caricatured view of management that I last… [Read more…]
February 13, 2012
0