Changes are, you’ve heard of DALL-E or tools like it. DALL-E and the others will generate a unique image given a text prompt. The cover image for this article is one that I’ve generated for: “Starbucks at night by a motorway”, because I’m writing this in a Starbucks, at night…

Buying an IT system of any complexity is very hard. And it’s not necessarily for the reason you think. Yes, they can be hard to specify, cost, or manager, but those are more properly described as symptoms and the root cause is much more simplistic. The underlying issue with any…

Halley’s Comet & Musk’s Twitter — Separated at Birth? Matthew Reynolds, 19th November 2022 In 1986, back when I was a kid, Halley’s Comet made a visit to our solar system. With a period of about 75 years, I remember at the time being intrigued about that idea that there…

What happens if you use your employment contract to give more freedom to employees and bind the company into greater levels of commitment? — We’ve been busy over the past couple of weeks working on a new employment contract with support from our HR consultant. Our mission as a social enterprise is to look at, ultimately, changing the way that the IT industry recruits. Every social enterprise has their own impact area or areas…

We’ll always have a need to manage paper in our offices. — Long time readers of mine will know that I grew up around computers and associated technology — my dad was a computer analyst in the late 1970s, and so it was usual in my house to talk about minicomputers, mainframes, and computerish terms like “paperless office”. The term comes from…

Telephone systems have always been an odd fit within the IT market. Might we prefer just to use Zoom instead? — When I was growing up, my dad was a computer analyst and my grandad was a mechanical engineer. This influence led me to develop a fascination with systems and technology — about how things could be ordered and structured and systemised. Before I was in double-digits I used to catalogue…

SharePoint is a weird product that nearly everyone uses, but no one really uses properly. — SharePoint is a strange beast because a good number of SMEs merrily pay for it each month, but don’t use it and/or don’t even realise they have it. …

Don’t lean in to the compromises inherent in laptop design. — The principle of flow is that it’s a state of productivity where we get completely absorbed in our task, and produce work at a very high rate. …

The way that we work and our relationships with employees, suppliers, and customers has changed forever. — In general, IT teams tend to be very bad at reacting to unannounced changes. We are not a discipline that is good at dealing with emergencies — we do not like emergencies. We like everything to be set out, planned and agreed. But recently, IT teams throughout the country have…