Category Archives: Technology

When old CMS software happens to good people

One of my current work assignments has taken me into the Public Sector for the first time in my 25 year career. It’s not an easy place to be these days but I tend to favour challenging environments rather than those that are all going swimmingly well, as I personally find it more fulfilling and enjoy striving to make a difference.

Fortunately I am surrounded by a thoroughly likeable and dedicated bunch of people who have clearly been going through times of great upheaval and uncertainty with political change and the major cuts in public spending.

It is refreshing to be working within organisations with good information management processes and practices and I admire the folks who work faithfully and tirelessly to keep everything in order and accurate for local residents – often working to maintain approaches that seemed like a good idea at the time but have since fallen out of favour. Quite often those who are supposed to be supporting them are making their jobs even harder.

Continue reading →

Could playing 'games' help safeguard our planet?

via cycling.com

The success of the London 2012 Olympics shows that our enthusiasm for ‘The Games’ has not waned since our earliest civilisations battled to become Citius, Altius, Fortius (Faster, Higher, Stronger).

As the sun sets on the Games of the XXX Olympiad and we head off to XXXI in Rio, the next 4 years have been deemed crucial by some organisations for addressing potentially one of the biggest issues facing our planet – global warming.

We are just 2 short months from the onehundredmonths.org half way point and the remaining 50 months will take us up to the next ‘Greatest Show on Earth’ in Rio 2016.

London 2012 has been described as the ‘greenest games ever’ and this article debates quite nicely just how true this is. Regardless of the efforts that have gone into building the venues from recycled materials and creating new wildlife habitats, the article points out that …
Continue reading →

Ender's Game – 35 years on …

When Orson Scott Card first wrote his novelette Ender’s Game in 1977, I was 10 years old – the age at which Andrew ‘Ender’ Wiggin was in the midst of saving the human race from *evil* aliens in the story.

Coming to this Sci Fi classic 35 years after it was first published and before a new blockbuster film based on a fusion of two of the ‘Ender series’ books is due to be released in 2013 has been an interesting and timely experience.

As with many Sci-fi novels from the last 100 years it prophesied how some aspects of our society could developed over the subsequent decades.

The full novel was published in 1985, predating the web and a time when the Sinclair ZX Spectrum was the peak of home computing and gaming.

The ‘newsnets’ that the story refers to were no doubt based on Card’s understanding of the rudimentary communication structures on the Internet at that time, before Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the hypertext mark up language that made the environment accessible to everyone.

Continue reading →

To engage or not to engage – that is the question:

Whether ’tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them …

This slight adaptation of Shakespeare’s famous soliloquy seemed fitting in a week when the ‘engagement’ debate has raged again.

Amongst the various discussions on Twitter, I noticed reference to an article on the Marketing website describing what it called ‘The great brand engagement myth’.  To set the tone of the article, it is accompanied by an image of Gone with the Wind character Rhett Butler and the phrase “Frankly marketeer I don’t give a damn”.

You will need to be registered to read the whole article. If you are not, it isn’t the most ‘engaging’ registration process or ‘customer experience’ so I hope the publisher’s don’t mind if I give the article more exposure by quoting some passages from it in order to give you a flavour of the comments from pundits and marketers …

A comment that stood out to me particularly was from Ben Hammersley, editor of Wired UK magazine:-

Continue reading →

Reasons to be cheerful – one, two, three

Well, we’ve made it through Blue Monday, which is reckoned to be the most depressing day of the year – and presumably the rest of the week isn’t deemed to have been much better.

If I was looking at things on face value I’d have to say they weren’t looking so good right now. This last year has been the toughest I have known it since first entering the workplace in the mid 1980s and a lot of commentators are talking about us teetering on the edge of a double-dip recession. Some recent number crunching by The Guardian illustrates quite well what this latest recession looks like graphically in comparison to other major downturns.

Ian Dury - legend of the UK new wave scene - had a good list of reasons to be cheerful in the dire 1970s

Although young at the time, I remember the effect the recessions of the 70s and early 80s had on family members. In the recession of the late 80s/early 90s, I lost the first main job I’d ever had when the construction industry I was working in virtually imploded overnight. In the early part of this century during the dotcom bust, the two big companies I worked for, NTL and Lucent, lost billions and laid off many, many thousands.

It doesn’t surprise me therefore that this current recession looks graphically closer to the great depression of the 1930s because, based on experiences of other recessions and market bubble bursts, it feels like it too, as it grinds on year after year.

On face value this doesn’t look like a great time to be trying to start a business but then this wouldn’t be the first time I’ve gone against the flow. So, as new wave rockers Ian Dury and the Blockheads sung back in the 1970s …

A bit of grin and bear it, a bit of come and share it
A little drop of claret – anything that rocks

Reasons to be cheerful – one, two, three

Continue reading →