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Top 10s for '10

November 12, 2009 in Community2.0, Social web, Working, customer experience by Stephen | No comments

It’s nearly the season to make merry – but it seems that it’s already the season for people to start making predictions for the coming year. I’m going to start a collection of interesting ones, hanging off this post, in an attempt to revitalise my blogging instinct.

Here’s Verizon’s top 10 in which Enterprise Social Networking comes top. No surprises there then, and this is something that we’ve been discussing with clients for a couple of years now. Couple of barriers to takeup – the lack of any really good tools, and the reluctance of business to see the real value in social tools for collaboration and effective working. Clearly, many companies still see social interaction as a distraction from the important cut-and-thrust of work, and lock down their employees’ access to Facebook, Twitter, and the rest. Time to reconsider surely – we need to start seeing the ability to collaborate and communicate in a more natural way as a differentiator, and something that’s vital to success rather than an inhibitor.

I’ve been spending a lot of my time this year travelling backwards and forwards to the Middle East, and found myself wishing for better tools than we’re currently using – and on the back of this, to work with people that find it second nature to work remotely when required. We’re still not very good at it.


Upcoming trip to Abu Dhabi

January 2, 2009 in Photography, Working, travel by Stephen | 1 comment

In one week’s time I, and 11 colleagues from LBi will be travelling to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates to work with Etihad, the national carrier…should be a fun trip, and I’m going to document it on my fresh new photoblog. I’m aiming for a picture a day but we’ll see…there’s going to be plenty of work to do as well…

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World 3.0

January 21, 2008 in Business 2.0, Life, Working, business, learning by Stephen | No comments

AAAArrrgggh. While I completely agree with the majority of this article on the increasing blend between home and work, work and learning - and I’ve been advocating many of its ideas for some time, it does wind me up that it has to end the way it does.Just what the world needs.Another slogan. 

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Radiohead pricing

November 30, 2007 in Business 2.0, Working, business, digital by Stephen | No comments

Spotted this over at an old friend, Tom Smith,’s Everythingability site. He’s decided to ask his clients to pay what they think he’s worth for the work he does for them :)  Brave. Hope it works Tom!

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Measuring creativity

March 23, 2007 in Business 2.0, Working by Stephen | 1 comment

At work, we’re smack in the middle of a discussion about setting objectives – and how best to do this in a creative environment. It gets really hard, particularly as it’s *much* easier to measure hard and fast tangible things like how often we ‘use a design pattern’ or the frequency of application for a patent (why is it that every time anyone mentions this, I keep hearing the Bill Hicks‘ line about fellating Satan ;) .

It’s WAAAY more difficult to measure things that we think we should be measuring – mistakes made, ideas used etc. I’ve not read Richard Florida’s book ‘Creative Class‘, despite having heard about it by proxy, but I suspect there are answers in there. Does anyone that reads this have any good ideas? I’d love to have some sort of discussion about this…

Ambient remote working – a.k.a. 'workstreaming'

March 3, 2007 in Working by Stephen | No comments

…through video conferencing. The Hexagon project is an interesting research project that has created a live video wall on screen that allows participants to view a number of different video feeds. Through this, co-workers can see what’s going on with their colleagues, ask quick questions etc. I came across this through Stowe Boyd’s link to Web Worker Daily, and their piece on Workstreaming.

I’ve experienced this kind of working though, and I think there’s something in it. A few years back I was in Toronto on a trade mission. Whilst there though, I was also required to launch a new site (ah, those were the days when I actually did get my hands wet) so I ended up spending a lot of time in front of the screen preparing code and testing what I was doing. Using Apple’s iChat software and iSight camera, I was able to connect back to the office in the UK – but instead of ‘picking up’ calls when we needed to talk as you might do when you’re doing traditional video-conferencing, we instead left the connection up, and running in the background. This meant that when someone left the room or returned to the room in the office in UK – or even got in first thing in the am, I knew about it. I didn’t have to ask questions or play catchup because I was virtually in the office.

This might sound a bit…well, sad really, and of course it’s likely that this might only suit certain team dynamics, but in one sense it worked really well – it did mean that there was a real connection back to the team from the remote space, and I’d certainly do it again.