The “new normal” in business
Business partners LINQ Ltd state “The ‘new normal’ is to think differently about project change and transformational programmes”, I proposed last year at FindingPetroleum Transforming Subsurface Science , PESGB Preserve & Protect Geological Assets in Time of Crisis, and PETEX Future Working Zone.
On the other hand, this cartoon refers to the back-office cleanup of electoral rolls into a national campaigning platform run by a handful of volunteers. Affordable ETL (extract, transform, load) software and web platform on a freemium model and a shoe-string budget, helped manage a significant north European database and yield a local edge against national mega-projects.
Discussing The ‘new normal’ in current affairs in my other channel showed how “the story behind the story” has changed in the new news media: that enormous information base hitherto unreachable, either through the sheer difficulty in accessing old media or through government or political control, help break out real news from fake news and democratise news information.
In Bridge of Spies, стоящего (stoyaschego) or standing man quietly succeeded against all odds. In the PESGB meeting above I argued that in the current economic climate digital assets are companies’ stoyaschego:
- business process re-engineering tasks that spanned teams and tools in the past, can today be unified online dashboards
- data can be finally treated as an asset, meaningful and useful across departments, to help corporate bottom line
From a previous AGI meeting, data should be treated as an asset:
- traded, exchanged, and moved around to help the organization
- regulators in the City should allow data to show up on balance sheets
- And trading works better with standards like coins or weights & measures
Thus are newer “lean and mean” business practices not helped by information standards? The last post on this channel focused on the geospatial arena: that standards such as Open Geospatial Consortium codify practices gleaned by national mapping agencies are then passed onto SMEs (small and medium enterprise) in new and affordable web tools such as those mentioned above.
And looking forward, a recent AGI conference uncovered a sleeper: block-chain codify not only a new currency but also contract documents in internet packet messaging services that are totally distributed. But as the UK government stressed in its white paper, that relies on digital encryption standards as well as legal and technical codes. Watch this space…
In his Minister for Digital and Culture Creative Industries speech, Matthew Hancock said that digital economies are based on openness and access. Echoing that, Open Data Institute asserts that not only do open data promote the flow of information — a new digital currency if you will — but also foster standards in data and communications to remove barriers to entry.
Disclosure: Mr. Hancock is MP for the UK county next to mine, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire respectively, and he visited the computer club where I help senior citizens get on email, internet and Skype to reach their families abroad:
