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What is your worst technology pain? Has it changed recently?

Posted by on May 14, 2013
Some years ago, a survey commissioned by Dell came up with some pain points from the perspective of business owners, and also business experts.  This was in 2007, and I wonder if they have changed much, and especially whether the increasing...

How much longer can you stay out of the Cloud?

Posted by on May 9, 2013
There was a summit recently in New York, organised by Amazon, at which their CTO, Werner Vogels, attributed the success of Amazon’s various Cloud offerings to their principles of offering value, flexibility and simplicity. He said that a...

What useful information is buried in your IT systems?

Posted by on May 3, 2013
Ginni Rometty, the CEO of IBM, has recently called data “the next natural resource”, and predicts that information will be the basis of competitive advantage in the future.  The better your capability as a business to make some...

Names are changed to protect the innocent (or the guilty) …

Posted by on Apr 26, 2013
I expect it’s true of everyone who works as a ‘consultant’ or provides a business service.  You go and see a client, and you spot something that is a complete disaster that has been done by another service provider.  If...

Keep your social media simple …

Posted by on Apr 15, 2013
Now the first thing to say is that I am not a social media guru.  I don’t pretend to have analysed every network, and tried out every channel.  Neither am I up to speed with the latest up-and-coming sites.  I don’t spend all day...

Do you have a work you and a play you, or are you just you?

Posted by on Apr 1, 2013
If you’ve made it past the slightly convoluted title, then you could probably do with a bit of clarification. I was reading a forum thread recently that centred around whether to put your Twitter feed onto your website, on the basis that...

Outsourcing – is it good or bad for your business?

Posted by on Mar 26, 2013
I was having a conversation about outsourcing earlier today, so thought I’d revisit the topic.  I’ve mentioned it before, in relation to the problems that NatWest Bank experienced a while back, which some (predictable) elements of...
recent from Cloud Computing What is your worst technology pain? Has it changed recently?
Some years ago, a survey commissioned by Dell came up with some pain points from the perspective of business owners, and also business experts.  This was in 2007, and I wonder if they have changed much, and especially whether the increasing takeup of ‘cloud’ services has made a difference. See...
recent from Business Intelligence What useful information is buried in your IT systems?
Ginni Rometty, the CEO of IBM, has recently called data “the next natural resource”, and predicts that information will be the basis of competitive advantage in the future.  The better your capability as a business to make some sense out of the mass of data you hold, the better placed you will...
recent from Business Processes Business Analysis and the ‘Interpretation Gap’
One of the roles that I perform fairly regularly is the one of ‘interpreter’ between a business and its technology providers.  Sometimes this is deliberate, in that I have been asked to help source a particular product or service on behalf of the business, in cases where the requisite technical...
recent from MS Office When should my spreadsheet become a database?
Well, here’s a surprise – the answer is ‘it depends’!  However, there are some general pointers, and a couple of recent conversations I have had with people have made me think that it’s worth setting out one or two of the indicators that your business may be outgrowing...