June 30, 2020
Lenovo has published a new study which claims that organisations are placing business and shareholder goals above employee needs during their digital transformation. The research, conducted among 1,000 IT managers across EMEA, suggests that just 6 percent of IT managers consider users as their top priority when making technology investments. More →
June 16, 2020
A ‘golden age’ of workplace technology could be coming, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic according to a new report, co-authored by Professor Michael Dickmann from Cranfield University which investigated the Global Mobility response to COVID-19. The report claims that some multinational companies were completely lacking crisis response plans when the pandemic hit, and many are now adjusting their goals because of movement restrictions and employee wellbeing. More →
June 4, 2020
If there has been an underlying driver of workplace thinking over the past several decades, it has been a rejection of the principles of scientific management. These begat the idea of the office as a factory, subject to the same rigid times and places of work and the same culture of process, efficiency and productivity. This made a pantomime villain of its key figure Frederick Taylor. The worst adjective you could use to describe a working culture was Taylorist. More →
June 3, 2020
The reimagining of business in the digital age to create new — or modify existing — business processes, culture, and customer experiences to meet changing business and market requirements has been happening at varying speed for decades. The coronavirus pandemic is impacting digital transformation in a range of ways. More →
June 1, 2020
When it comes to that annual announcement the publishers of dictionaries like to make about their Word of the Year, 2020 will have only one candidate. But if there were a shortlist, you can bet that Zoom would be on it. The uptake of Zoom and other apps to help people connect during the lockdown has been remarkable. Numbers emerge each week of the scale of growth, but they’re instantly out of date and probably meaningless anyway. We could make up something like there having been a 2,300% increase since March 23rd, and it might as well be true. More →
May 28, 2020
A new report from Tessian claims that nearly half of employees (48 percent) are less likely to follow safe data practices when working from home. The State of Data Loss Prevention 2020 report suggests that the global shift to remote working poses new security challenges for businesses and why traditional security solutions are failing to curb the problem of the insider threat and accidental data loss. More →
May 21, 2020
Organisations should build on the lessons they have learned about themselves and their employees during the pandemic and embed them into their work culture. That is the main claim of the tenth annual Global Human Capital Trends report from Deloitte. More →
May 20, 2020
Deloitte has published its 2020 Global Technology Leadership survey, “The Kinetic Leader: Boldly Reinventing the Enterprise,” which sets out to examine the broader scope and evolution of tech leadership roles. The findings claim to reveal the increased need for agile and kinetic leaders — change instigators adept at driving tech-enabled transformation and organisational change. More →
May 19, 2020
Not long ago, innovation was a largely internal affair. The journey from the laboratory to the marketplace took place largely within the four walls of the firm. Think of Bell Labs, IBM Research, or Xerox PARC. Each of them created important technological breakthroughs. And each breakthrough was commercialized through the company’s own businesses. More →
May 18, 2020
The UK is making great strides in adopting process automation technologies like robotic process automation (RPA) and process mining, according to new research from digital intelligence company ABBYY. The research report, The State of Process Mining and RPA (registration), claims that 64 percent of UK businesses are already using process mining technologies, with almost 3 in 10 (28 percent) currently using RPA and a further 34 percent intending to start in the next year. This comes as no surprise, since a vast majority believe that process mining (91 percent) and RPA (87 percent) are, or would be, useful to their business. More →
May 15, 2020
From the archive. Originally published in 2013. People have been talking about the death of the office for at least a quarter of a century. Leaving aside the often misleading conflation of flexible working with homeworking that is often involved, the underlying premise of such talk has been the same for all of that time. The main argument is, and always was, that there is an alternative to the tedium, aggravation and expense of travelling to an office solely to work inside its hermetically sealed and fluorescent-lit, blue-carpeted interior alongside people who can drive you spare, before you schlep home again. More →
June 18, 2020
Charles Handy was a true visionary about the modern workplace
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Technology, Workplace