Successful Workplace

The following is a guest post by Mike Gammage, a business process expert with years in the field both selling solutions and solving problems at the customer site.  At Nimbus since 2003, Mike has worked with clients such as Accenture, Dell, Unilever, Steria and Marathon Oil on process management and performance improvement programs. When Noah Webster […]

Today kicks off the 2012 Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit (AKA AADI) in Las Vegas, Nevada. It’s bright…no, still dark…and early and I’m ready to head over to Caesar’s Palace for the breakfast. Even before the getting to Las Vegas, I was able to use Gartner’s app to find the agenda and to create a personalized […]

Forrester’s John Rymer sums up his opinion succinctly when he says, “Big Data: The worst category name ever.” It certainly has challenges in name and how people conceive of it. Big Data as the hype would have it, I call, “The elephant riding the bicycle.” I’ll give you the seven things you need to consider, […]

Not just a provocative title, mobility will be more disruptive than social media. We’re really only going through the first phase of this new age now with the rapid spread of smart phones that can consume information in ways beyond the browser (the app as only one example). I spoke recently with a major pharmaceutical […]

If you don’t see much of me in the next couple of weeks, it’s because we’re in the home stretch for my company’s big technology conference, TUCON. I’ve attended plenty of conferences, but this one is the first where I’ve been closely involved from the early stages. The level of effort is incredible. Just getting […]

Just a couple of years back, the question in most organizations was, “What is our mobile strategy?” That was a relatively brief moment in our history where mobile was considered another way to reach people. Things have changed dramatically in just a couple of years. The rise of the iPhone, then the iPad and other […]

Impatience. That’s the worst thing that can happen to a CIO and his IT department. In the old days the CIO was responsible for everything that managed information, commanded an enormous budget and sat in a very tall chair at the CEO’s table. This was the norm until the ‘Internet of things’ took over and […]

At the weekend we visited Bletchley Park, home of the famous World War II cryptanalysts. This group intercepted Morse Code radio transmissions between the German High Command and their air force, troops and ships. The German transmissions were encoded by Enigma machines, electro-mechanical devices that transposed one letter to another. Type in ‘Q” and you […]

Companies can reduce risk and allow organizational learning by breaking major process improvements into a series of small, reversible experiments. But when the change involves a new information technology, it’s harder to make incremental updates. This approach reduces risks and allows people to learn from each, and make adjustments as they go. But when the […]

Don’t do it. Don’t approve that budget for $1.5 million for that 18-month effort. Don’t book the meeting to start the functional requirements. Don’t start the data dictionary. Just stop. Catch your break and think. Everything has changed just in the past two years. Bespoke (‘custom’, for the non-English) application development is so 2009 unless you […]

My Navy career involved flying over many parts of the world. In those long hours without much else to do I occupied my mind looking for the patterns of houses, roads, farms and nature. Still today I watch out the aircraft window and try to make sense of the patterns that I see from miles […]

Organizational speed is ever more important, as I wrote last week in Making your organization faster. As things happen faster, the organization needs to change more quickly. And size matters. One of my favorite quotes on change came from a very senior leader at UPS, “There is one of me and thousands of them.” We’ve […]

Informatica’s (INFA) stock took a serious nose dive, falling nearly 28% last Friday as the company warned that they would have revenues well below expectations. This doesn’t come as a surprise. The market for traditional databases and their associated applications should be expected to drop in the age of the Internet, Big Data, Cloud and […]