Putting Information Technology at the Heart of the Business: The Open Group San Diego 2015

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By The Open Group The Open Group is hosting the “Enabling Boundaryless Information Flow™” event February 2 – 5, 2015 in San Diego, CA at the Westin San Diego Gaslamp Quarter. The event is set to focus on the changing … Continue reading →

Reimagining the Digital Workplace

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Just as technologies invite us to be more innovative in our approach to customers and business processes, there are new frontiers for how we might reimagine the workplace. No longer are we restrained by physical locations or time. This provides organizations with opportunities to rethink things like talent identification and engagement, formation of organizational structures, […]

On (not) changing the world

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Back on the ‘no more arguments‘ theme, there were a couple of responses I received that, although nominally private, were so apposite and to-the-point that I really do need to reprise them here. (Because the messages were private, I’ll paraphrase them…

How to Successfully Communicate Your IT Project

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Part 2 of the Breakthrough IT Series
Breaking through cultural barriers in an organization is more easily said than done. So, as we continue in this series, we’ll start with the foundation, communication.
Photo by Paul Shanks (Flickr)
In an ever-conn…

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More notes on toolsets for EA

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Various notes following on from my recent post ‘New toolsets for enterprise-architecture‘. Most of this is about some great interactions on the ‘EA-toolset’ themes with Phil Beauvoir (@ArchiToolkit), Peter Bakker (@mapbakery) and Gene Hughson (@GeneHughson), and also, if somewhat peripherally,…

The Role of Meaning and the Meaning of Roles

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Let’s start with roles. ‘Role’ comes from ‘roll’, as it was on a paper roll where the actor part was written. It is about something prescribed and then performed. But it evolved from roles that were performed as prescribed, through those that were not, to performing roles that had not been prescribed at all. Roles […]

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From Coincidensity to Consilience

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In my post From Convenience to Consilience – “Technology Alone Is Not Enough”  (October 2011), I praised Steve Jobs for his role in the design of the Pixar campus, whose physical layout was intended to bring different specialists together in serendipitous interactions.

Thanks to @jhagel and @CoCreatr, I have just read a blogpost by @StoweBoyd commenting on a related project at Google to build a new Googleplex. Because this is Google, this is a bottom-up data-driven project: it is based on a predicted metric of coincidensity, which is sometimes defined as the likelihood of serendipity.

With the right technology (for example, electronic monitoring of the corridors and/or tagging of employees), a corporation like Google can easily monitor and control “casual collisions of the work force”.

But as Ilkka Kakko (@Serendipitor) points out, such measures of coincidensity cannot be equated with true serendipity. I wonder whether Google will be able to correlate casual meetings with enhanced knowledge and understanding, and measure the consequent quantity and quality of innovation? And then reconfigure the campus to improve the results? Hm.

However, the principle of designing physical spaces for human activity rather than for visual elegance is a good one, as is the notion of evidence-based design. Form following function.

Stowe Boyd, Building From The Inside Out (February 2013)

Paul Goldberger, Exclusive Preview: Google’s New Built-from-Scratch Googleplex (Vanity Fair, February 2013)

Ilkka Kakko, Are we reducing the magic of serendipity to the logic of coincidence? (April 2013)