Maslow took quite a battering over the last couple of decades. His Hierarchy of Needs may surface endlessly in design, brand, advertising and UX circles – but glance at the last decade’s TV schedule, tabloid press, or advertising would suggest human nature isn’t as glorious as Maslow hoped.  Rather than society flying up the pyramid towards self-actualisation, the tabloid world would suggest we rarely left – or even cared to leave – the bottom rungs – food, sex, and occasionally morality. 

The top suppliers of IT to government have changed little over the last decade. Sure, HP toppled BT when it bought EDS, and CSC moved pretty dramatically up the list when it won significant NHS business and further up when it took over Accenture’s contracts.

The names in the Top 20 will be familiar to anyone in the IT industry – they have been referred to as an oligopoly and even a cartel (though apparently not in the legal sense of the word). Together, the top 5 (HP, BT, Fujtsu, Cap and IBM) have something like 60% of the total that government spends on IT. EMC isn’t to be found on the top 20 list and probably not on the top 50 list – but other product companies are, including Dell, Cisco, Microsoft, and Oracle as well as emerging solution organisations such as Computacenter and SCC who are looking to expand beyond their legacy offer.

But government is changing its buying approach. Its recent actions make it plain it is looking for a change Continue Reading

Forgive me reader for I have sinned…..it has been many, many weeks since my last blog contribution.  Anyway, where was I at the end of 2011?……..ah yes, I was writing about EMC technologies that give you insight into what is in your environment.  I am now going to make you aware of EMC technologies that allow you to do something about all of that data.  Whether that data resides in mailboxes, PST files, file shares or Microsoft SharePoint, you have a fantastic EMC option that can move this data off of tier 1 storage into an archive that resides on tier 2, 3, or 4 storage.  

You might say, “I have an archive already, it is my tape library.”  (Imagine you are reading my lips).   Continue Reading

Maybe it’s the furtive geeky life I inhabit, but I’ve lost count of the number of friends and acquaintances who work in one of the digital industries – games, web hosting, data management – who started out as a snotty 10-year old with a humming, hot piece of plastic and an unfettered imagination. When kids got their hands on the first cheap PCs that came out of the 80s, who then could have envisioned that the world would change entirely because of – not just the products – but the change in the means and methods of production that came out of that time. Everyone reading this blog now, the way in which it is being read, and the critical thinking behind it, were born from that dusty explosion of zeroes and ones.

We are now about to enter another new age where our world, the techniques we use to manufacture that world, and our understanding of it, are about to change profoundly.

Thanks to a £22 credit-card sized programmable board – the Raspberry Pi –  kids can now learn Continue Reading

So there I am sitting on a horse waiting to compete in a show jumping competition when one of the other competitors, having just completed their round, appears back in the warm up ring. She says to her coach

“I don’t know what went wrong, I corrected his (the horses) position before each fence, but we still knocked several of them”

The coach, clearly had been here before;

“Yes you did and that’s the problem. You’re correcting the horse after the fact. You’re waiting for something to happen before you react. The winning riders are reading all the signals and predicting what might happen and taking corrective action first”

“But there is so much going on” says a clearly frustrated pupil, “The crowd, the speed and rhythm of the horse, the type of fence, the line of the fences, the next fence, the time left, my position, the horses lead leg…”

Having attended the Greenplum Data Science Event on Feb 8^th it’s clear that whether you are Marcus Du Sautoy, Peter Hinssen or Professor Nigel Shadbolt predicting outcomes based on vast quantities of data, just like our rider, is a key skill that business needs to develop.

Peter Hinssen discussed how the

“power of participation is changing the world” and that “markets are becoming networks of intelligence and the need to have deep technology but also a drastically different consumption model.”

Whilst Marcus Du Sautoy cautioned about identifying patterns too early Continue Reading

A very short post today about the new blog design. We’ve revamped Thoughtfeast.co.uk and very much hope you like the new look.

You can now post comments on blog posts by logging in with your social accounts, no need to register anymore.

Also, feel free to click on the bloggers pages and connect directly with them, either via their social media accounts, or by clicking on “Ask me a question”.

Would love to hear your feedback, so please do not hesitate to get in touch with me or comment on this post.

I was with a client last week – an oil & gas major – at the early stages of some work to develop an ECM strategy.  I made a presentation on the topic of ‘information architecture’ and included in my musings the findings of IDC – that ‘unstructured’ information makes up at least 80% of an organisation’s information and that it is doubling every two years.

“We looked into that, and we disagree!”

I was of course not taken aback by the fact they disagreed, but the fact they challenged that statement.  Too often we all let statements float by without perhaps critically evaluating what they mean.  This client is different.  They like to think deeply about things.

Of course the IDC findings are just an average – a picture of the whole digital universe, and are useful in terms of the broad ‘direction of travel’.  It is interesting though to consider the question “How do you weigh the value of specific types of data?”.

The Euro-millions lottery winning number for next week is worth perhaps 40 million Euros if only we could get our hands on it.  After next week it is worthless.

In the world of oil and gas, the exploration data that is created is worth a small fortune to acquire – maybe a few million Euros for a seismic survey – and of course untold millions Continue Reading