I am a cautious person. A manager once pigeon-holed me as a ‘glass half empty’ temperament. When it comes to cyber security, I’m close to paranoid. Who, after all, would want to be targeting small fry like my company? One does not need to be the target however to get caught in the crossfire. The British NHS (National Health …
Category archives: All
Presentations Without PowerPoint
I remember “Old School”. As a child at school in the 1960’s, teachers wrote with chalk on a blackboard. As a schoolteacher myself in about 1980, I used an overhead projector and I’m surprised they are still available today. When dealing with any technology, albeit at its most basic, it is always as well to keep …
An Event Organiser’s Nightmare
The last indoor presentation I was scheduled to give was 23rd March 2020. Covid‑19 happened, and lockdown, and the presentation was cancelled. The venue, part of a chain, still has an embargo on any events like that. Last autumn legal advice was was to classify an outdoor presentation as a ‘performance’ and work to those …
The Big Shift in British ‘Employment’ is already underway
Giving up on regular employment and turning to self-employment has been a growing trend, accelerated by the Covid pandemic. The generation before the ‘Boomers’ lived in the era of the Great Depression and WWII; the men probably had only two jobs in their working lives: the generation before them perhaps only one. A university degree …
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Cynefin
Cynefin is a Welsh word meaning ‘habitat’, in the sense used in the biological sciences: a place where many things live. It is a framework for understanding why some incidents and problems are so difficult to resolve. The author of the Cynefin model is Dave Snowden: his excellent talks introducing the Cynefin framework can be …
Overtrading and Other Financial Traps for Startups
Where are all the customers? There are plenty of traps for startups: a solution without a problem, thinking they’re in a blue ocean when actually the market is already crowded, not building and retaining a customer base, reliance on a technology that itself isn’t going to survive. In this article I’m covering a further set of problems: …
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Digital Transformation: Part 2
Once, as Operations Manager I was training a new graduate joiner on a routine task. As I was doing so, I said: “Oh, I can have this automated”. The third time I said this the newbie retorted “you’ll have me automated out of a job!” A month later this graduate came to me about another …
Satellites in Intelligent Transport
Most people are familiar with maps on their smart-phone, with their location displayed, either with pin-point accuracy or at least good enough. I’ll not normally give any thought to perhaps eight satellites providing signals that are interpreted and combined to provide not only latitude and longitude, but also height relative to a calculated earth’s surface. …
Politics or Money Killed the Better Idea
In the 1960s the Beeching cuts decimated the railways in Great Britain. The intent was that by closing 55% of stations and 30% miles of track, the then nationalised British Railways would be profitable. Passenger travel and freight were diverted to cars and lorries. Some investment in rail did follow, with 125 mph trains between …
Machine Learning & Expert Systems: they’re not necessarily the same thing
In 1973 I considered ‘Artificial Intelligence’ as a postgraduate research degree: as it worked out, I stayed with Organic Chemistry. In the intervening decades it seemed to me that not much happened with artificial intelligence, except hype and hijacking “AI” to perhaps mean Augmented Intelligence, Advanced Innovation or similar. Genuine AI advances were happening, but …
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Supply Chain Hacks
There are four basic ways that malicious code can be introduced: Programmer or Administrator with legitimate access Payload delivered by a user action Direct attack on the hosting server through a security weakness A “Supply Chain” attack on a company providing software or ‘library’ code to other companies. 1: About twenty years ago when …
Efficient Promotion of a LinkedIn Article
How hard can it be? Write 500 words, drop it into LinkedIn. Job done: Bob’s your Uncle, Fanny’s your Aunt? No, not job done: if you’re lucky, very lucky, as much as a handful of friends and one stranger will view it. Presumably you’ve written the article because it has some importance to you? You …
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An Old Twist to a Current Buzz Phrase: Digital Transformation
As a consumer I have a high level of expectation on services, driven by the likes of Costa Coffee, British Airways and the Intercontinental Hotels Group. Most of us will have similar experiences and service expectations. I perhaps don’t notice every aspect of the service every time but can be noticeably caught by surprise when …
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The “A” in RACI
RACI is an abbreviation for the roles “Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed”, a concept used in project management. In a project, or sub-project, there must be somebody accountable, and there can be only one accountable person. There may be one or more people delegated as responsible for parts of the project, but the accountable person has …
Staying on the Customer’s Radar
Customers and prospects are fallible people: they have a big project that is just right for you, they’re already doing business with you, but for some reason you’re not included in the RFP (Request for Proposal). One answer to this conundrum is to find a good reason for being on the customer’s radar every three …
Do ISO 10002 & Balanced Scorecards Work?
About twelve years ago I started running the service desk at a small multi-national SaaS company. From being its sole operator, I gradually built a team of five other members who were spread around the globe to cover different time zones. The company’s management were focused on new Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and Service Level …
Customer Support: First Point of Contact?
Customer Support is so much more than Service Desk software plus a room of people answering telephones and e-mails. Taking a step back, my personal contention is that a Customer Services team should have a target that the Service Desk is not the customer's preferred "First Point of Contact". A well curated knowledge base is …
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Service Measurement
Some definitions: KPI Key Performance Indicator. CSF Critical Success Factor. You want your managers to realise that just because something can be measured, does not mean it should be measured: it needs to be useful. You want information for reports for your peers to be "summarised up". A rule of thumb is that they want less …
Asset Management
Knowing about physical assets is important to many organisations as a theft preventative measure, and financial auditors need to verify that assets in the company's accounts exist. IT asset configuration management is different. The Infrastructure Manager should ensure that apart from their identities (names) these servers, their firewalls and load balancers are set up the …
Knowledge Management
Knowledge falls into two main types: explicit knowledge that can be written down, and tacit knowledge that can only be learnt from tens of thousands of hours of experience. Relaying explicit knowledge, passing it from person to person, from generation to generation, is not unique to humans, but in such abundance is a crucial difference. …
Service Reporting
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." The message of a data-set can be dramatically changed by careful exclusion. A chart with five years data can be used to present a process as being easy to control: adding nine months more of immediately prior older data might show that the five …
Business Continuity
Any business using computer services has at least some susceptibility to loosing those services. Continuity Management looks at the risks and makes judgements about what is an acceptable risk. Imagine there's a 1% chance of a specific disastrous event in the next twelve months: if you can prepare to protect your systems from that risk …
Change Management
Adopting change management best practices reduces the risks in any business transition. The first time, the second time, the last time, and the next time. The risks may be technical or reputational, but always financial. This applies not just in the IT area, but also elsewhere in the enterprise. The main resistance to implementing change …
Software Release and Deployment Management
Software release and deployment is one of the highest risk transitions a company can make. This is a lesson airlines and the UK banks seem to have not learnt: problems with upgrades and migrations causing misery for customers were still happening in 2018. For routine upgrades, delegation to a process is a good strategy: past …
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