Successful Workplace

Ken Robinson recently delivered yet another great talk on the state of American education.  He pointed out that countries that take a more organic approach (e.g. Finland) perform much better overall than those who take a mechanistic, standardized approach (e.g.  The United States with “No Child Left Behind”, emphasis on testing). Remarkably, the organic approach, […]

There’s no doubt the world is enthralled by the promises of cloud computing and why not? Freeing up enormous capital expenditures in favor of subscription-based services for functionality someone else has to worry about? What’s not to like? Well, the fact that most SaaS applications are merely silos of their own, not significantly improved from […]

In case you missed 60 Minutes on CBS last night, there’s a new challenge to privacy that is coming faster than people realize and was made more urgent by the terror attack in Boston a month ago. The 60 Minutes piece started with the following: The ability of computers to recognize faces has gotten a […]

I finally did it…I broke my longstanding relationship with Bose sound systems and bought my first Sonos equipment…starting out with the Bridge and one Play 3 speaker. I brought it home and had it running in ten minutes. No wires, and even though I had a manual, I didn’t need it. Like my all of my […]

There are two things we can expect every morning when we wake up. The first is that the sun has returned from the other side of the world and the second is a queue of loyalty program emails waiting in our inboxes, screaming of discounts and one-day sales. According to The Colloquy 2011 Loyalty Census, the […]

The need to maintain great relationships at work has never been stronger than today. Organizations are flatter, work is more collaborative and the future will bring even more of the same. The further we get from the industrial age workplace structure of our parents, the more important gaining the cooperation of our peers and even […]

Day 2 of the Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration Conference in London and I can’t help but ask myself, “Does the combination of cloud, mobile, social and data usher in the eventual end of the stand alone application? There’s a frank reality that these four ‘movements’, called the Nexus of Forces by Gartner, intersect […]

The Gartner AADI Conference in London kicked off this morning with a keynote on how to bring IT organizations into the future. The first speaker, Gartner’s David Mitchell Smith, started off by asking the question, “Are you comfortable?” The crowd didn’t respond for the most part but Smith didn’t wait very long before following up […]

I made great money in college recruiting people for focus groups. Those were tough days for students in a state (New York) where the minimum wage was only $3.35 an hour. Instead, I was making $25 an hour working in a phone bank that called and convinced specific demographic groups to spend a few hours […]

There’s an increasing perception across the enterprise that the role of the CIO as we know it won’t survive the decade. This isn’t anecdotal evidence, either, as respected institutions like the Harvard Business Review, the Economist and others are publishing studies that show that the average CEO is unhappy with the status quo of their […]

Getting the right information on demand is an eternal problem of today’s knowledge workers, and will only grow. Lack of knowledge causes a delay in decision-making, and ultimately leads to bad decisions. This is the essence of the Two-Second Advantage, where a little knowledge in the correct context at the correct time is much more […]

The Big Data Workshop at InterOp Las Vegas wrapped up the morning with a presentation on Big Data requirements by John West, CTO and Founder of Fabless Labs. John kicked off with the challenge of having your enormous data set all ready to work with when you discover any one of the following problems: Your […]

Sometimes, just sometimes, what happens in Las Vegas shouldn’t stay in Las Vegas. That was clearly the case this morning when TIBCO CTO Matt Quinn took the stage to talk about the myths and realities of Big Data. In Why Big Data Won’t Make You Smart Rich or Pretty, Quinn provided his perspective on Big […]

In a story everyone could enjoy, Heineken announced the creation of special beer bottles that are connected devices. That story raises a great point…why should humans ‘carry’ a single mobile device when everything we come into contact with can be the point of interaction? If we think about it, the idea that our desktop, tablet, […]

Data scientists are in short supply! Or at least that’s a headline you can find nearly everywhere. There are people trying desperately to hire them and also people trying hard to jump into the perceived gap and become one. Meanwhile, there’s plenty of skepticism over whether the role is real or a function of all […]

It seems big data means something different to everyone. In the great debate/hype about big data, there’s no lack of opinion on the topic and it seems to mostly depend on an individual’s product, skill set and business challenges. This ambiguity shares a great deal of the blame for why the term is often polarizing […]