While 2016 was a dumpster fire of news, in 2017 shock and outrage seemed to happen so frequently that I found myself becoming weary of it all.
But on a professional and personal note it was a decent year, which I’ll reflect on here as I did last year.
After launching great.gov.uk at the end of 2016, I tied up loose ends at the Department for International Trade in February. This means I’m now contractually free to say how bitterly sad I am about Brexit. The vote was 18 months ago yet I find I’m still furious about it, and…
An orchestra is a bit like a well run company. All of the elements of the orchestra — the strings, the brass, the percussion — are able to come together with a visible, engaged leader to make something better than the sum of its parts.
But in the modern world, is it enough? The orchestra plays beautiful, complex music — but while they may do it brilliantly, it is still old music performed just as thousands of orchestras have done before.
To maintain competitive advantage, companies need to innovate. If banks, for example, want to be around in 20 years…
Earlier this month writer Lindy West left Twitter, claiming in a blog for the Guardian that it’s now unusable for anyone but trolls, robots and dictators.
This came as something as a surprise to me, as I’m none of these things and I still find it useful every single day. So this left me wondering: is Twitter really unusable thanks to trolls? Or is it simply that media commentators see this as an overwhelming problem as they’re the ones disproportionately targeted by trolls?
West is by no means the first high-profile user to walk away from the platform; her flounce…
2016 has become a byword for misery for almost everyone. But my dreadful year started nine days early, when I ragequit my job three days before Christmas with nothing to go to.
OK, so it started months before then, with all the things that led to me ragequitting my job three days before Christmas.
So what happened next? Inspired by Alex ‘Blangry’ Blandford’s and Jukesie’s 2016 retrospectives, here’s my own year in review.
Each spring analyst Mary Meeker releases one of the most hotly anticipated slide decks of the year (arguably, the only hotly-anticipated slide deck…). Packed with stats on adoption and use of internet technologies, over the past decade it’s become the most comprehensive analysis of the State of the Internet around.
Her 2016 report was released a few days ago (1 June), and I’ve had a chance to pick out some trends which I think may create demands on digital workplace professionals in the coming years.
Arise, the Snapchat generation
In last year’s report Meeker noted Millennials were no longer an opportunity or threat to…
Another week, another report on how the demands of the millennial generation are disrupting long-established companies and industries. This week it’s the turn of Oracle, who have produced a report on banks’ urgent need to redesign themselves for the future.
Like the slew of reports that preceded it, Oracle’s Banking is changing… with or without the banks report concludes that established players are facing an existential crisis. Millennials demand more from their service providers, it contends. Banks have been slow to change, but there are a host of FinTech challengers poised to grab their custom.
Study after study shows that…
Mondo are one of the most talked-about new players on the consumer/retail banking block (just this month they reached a $1m crowdfunding target in 96 seconds), so I was delighted to get a place on their Alpha. Here’s a few early thoughts and observations on my experience and what it might signal for the future of FinTech.
It didn’t start well, for me. Specifically, I managed to destroy a coat rack within moments of arriving in their offices, sending a pile of jackets and scarves to the floor. …
Being on the internet doesn’t make you a social media expert any more than going for a jog makes you an Olympic athlete.
Yes, anyone who goes for a run is more qualified to talk about running than someone who sits on the sofa; but simply having a Twitter account doesn’t mean you know how to deliver real business outcomes using social channels.
Yet while it’s easy to tell the difference between a truly talented and experienced athlete like Mo Farrah — who is considerably faster than your average Joe — and someone (like me) who finishes a marathon in…
Amongst the bits of digital lint that landed in my browser’s belly button last week was an intriguing blogpost which argued that the company homepage is dead, killed off by the rise of social media.
“There is a new Web”, John Brandon argued, “and it’s the Web of social media and links, not the Web of domains and dotcoms”. Businesses need to accept this reality and figure out how to make it work.
And to a certain extent he has a point. The social web has transformed the way consumers find information. It’s been a long time since your actual…
This week Labour announced that it was looking at ways in which the party’s membership could determine policy through online participation, perhaps even offering an online vote over the issue of renewing Trident.
Now I firmly believe the internet is a remarkable tool which can and often does help to hold people in power to account, and have their say on the issues that affect them. This, in turn, could democratise the process of policy making so that it’s more representative and makes those deciding it more accountable.
This has been reflected in successive governments’ policies, with referenda becoming a…
Sharon O'Dea
Digital comms & strategy. Runner. Blogger @intranetizen. Co-founder @300_seconds. Wearer of hats. All views my own.
