The ethics of doing business

A friend of mine recently confided in me over drinks, concerning a dilemma he was facing at work. He is part of the upper Management of a major IT service provider embroiled in the bid for a tender possibly worth several million euro. Unfortunately, the party who put the tender…

Five hundred words on Sente

Sente is a beautiful Japanese term often used in the game of Go. It denotes initiative, the ability to dictate the course of play by executing a leading move and thus impose your will and strategy upon the game.

Moving the fulcrum over with Service Design

IT services have a large lever on business results. How those services are managed has a huge impact on the agility of the business and the contribution of IT to the options a business has to generate value. The relationship between business and IT has…

Governance on the edge of the future

“Organizations should tread near the edge of the future, making it up as they go along with as much sensitivity, awareness, knowledge, compassion, feeling, and beauty as they can muster” — James Ogilvy.

Bring your own service. Now what?

‘Shadow IT’ is a real pain in the rear for IT managers. I know it’s a pain for mine. Bring-your-own-device seemed like a good reaction to the invasion of the personal mobile device in the workplace, but it came with a catch.

Metanet

The darned thing about the Internet of Things is that it is not about things.

It’s about adding a layer of ubiquitous inputs and outputs to the network which allow far more data-driven and automated decision making and new kinds of services. I call this layer the metanet. The ‘things’ in…

Trusted trio

It used to be that here were three persons in life one has to trust implicitly: your doctor, your lawyer and your accountant. It’s increasingly clear that this trio has now become a quartet, including the person(s) in charge of your IT.

If you want to enjoy things, don’t read philosophy.

Today my girlfriend said something to me that struck me as a core truth. I was reading Brian Greene’s the fabric of the cosmos, a brilliant book but to me particularly irksome for the way it claims to be about physics, not philosophy, only…