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Category Archives: Speculation

Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, and story-telling apes

Thursday, January 25, 2018

I’ve been reading, and focusing on AI. In the fiction area, Gnomon is a complete mind-melt. One of the many premises of the book is that a “system” will run society. If Then takes it a step further, positing a system that runs multi-variate testing on communities to optimize itself. In the popular science range, […]

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Microservices in the enterprise – breaking out of the IT silo.

Tuesday, October 17, 2017

Microservices are entering the “early adopter” phase in large, established corporates.  I was talking to a friend who works for a large systems integrator, and he told me that this is now a common topic of discussion with CIOs. His client is a large insurer, and they are migrating the back-office IT systems to a […]

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Enterprise innovation through escalating bets

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

A lot of my work involves working with large, established enterprises to find new ways to reach customers. Sometimes, that’s “just” marketing, sometimes it’s product development, and sometimes it’s business model design. Enterprise innovation is challenging. Most established models for innovation in software build on the concept of “lean” and “iterative/incremental”. The most common point […]

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Can an agency be a consultant?

Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Adweek published an article noting the rise of “consulting services” within agencies. I think it misses the point. I’ve worked at both “agencies” and “consulting shops” – and I’ve worked on several engagements where agencies and consultancies worked together. I’ve spoken to many friends in agencies and consulting firms, and the fundamental difference is not […]

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Inevitable futures – manufacturing

Wednesday, September 28, 2016

I recently finished Kevin Kelly’s “The Inevitable” – it’s good, positive, often revealing. But I want to work through some of the ideas and see what scenarios they might open up. First up – manufacturing. When I left university in the late 1980s, I worked for a small multinational manufacturing conglomerate, and I saw a […]

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