Developing a digital organisation

I published a post today on the Department of Health’s Digital Health blog about the work I am doing there building digital capability across the organisation Here’s a quick snippet: To my mind there needs to be a three pronged…

Founders at Work

Am currently reading, and very much enjoying Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston of Y Combinator. It’s basically lots of interviews with founders of companies that were once startups about what life was like in the early days. The book’s blurb sells it…

Markup rules

I like to use plain text when I can. Plain text is just text without any formatting, which you edit with an app called a text editor, like Notepad on Windows or TextWrangler on a Mac. It’s pretty much a…

Collaboration – 10 steps to success

Digital tools provide great ways to collaborate online. Whether working with a smallish team to co-create a document, or engaging the wisdom of the crowd to build a list of ideas, the net allows us to work with people at…

Five for Friday – 11 April 2014

Five for Friday is WorkSmart’s weekly roundup of interesting stuff from the week’s reading. Dancing Giants: How Cisco Innovates How to write an internal communication strategy How To Convince Your Boss To Try New Things Tips for starting a podcast…

Why digital capability (or comfort) matters

I spend a lot of my time at the moment talking about digital capability. To my mind, this means the ability of people throughout an organisation to make the most of the opportunities offered by digital technology. Capability is less…

Dropbox launches a swathe of new features

Some interesting developments from Dropbox – everyone’s (well, most people’s) favourite cloud storage/backup/sharing tool. Firstly, a new app called Carousel, which is a photo gallery app. According to the blurb, it …combines the photos in your Dropbox with the photos…

Digital transformation report from Altimeter

A quick post as I am just back from a short break with the family and didn’t have anything lined up to publish today! Altimeter Group have just published a really interesting report called Digital Transformation: Why and How Companies are…

Five for Friday – 4 April 2014

Five for Friday is WorkSmart’s weekly roundup of interesting stuff from the week’s reading. Google Chromebooks at work in the fragmented PC era How Gmail Happened: The Inside Story of Its Launch 10 Years Ago A Brief Guide To Selecting…

A GDS approach to internal systems? Please?

The Government Digital Service is the UK government’s solution to the issue of ensuring that government services are accessible and usable for citizens online. Quite rightly they have received plaudits for their approach to service design and delivery. This is…

What’s on your tablet, Matt China?

Matt China previously worked in local government, where he championed new ways of working in his authority. Due to recent senior management restructure he is now looking for a new job, preferably with a more ‘agile’ organisation. All offers can…

Where does the talent lie?

I was working once for a pretty big organisation, who wanted to start a blog. This was about ten years ago, so for a lot of people blogging was kind of new. Despite the fact that I was working there,…

Making remote work work

A key part of working smarter is the idea of flexible or remote working. One neat way of describing it is that work isn’t a place you go to, it’s what you do. There’s a lot of misunderstanding though about this…

Five for Friday – 28 March 2014

Five for Friday is WorkSmart’s weekly roundup of interesting stuff from the week’s reading. Your wiki is a dump Mixing the unconference format into a traditional conference Why Companies Fail To Engage Today’s Workforce: The Overwhelmed Employee The Responsive Organization…

Fixing email : inbox zero

So I posed a fair few questions in my last post about email. How about some solutions? Here’s one – inbox zero. Inbox zero is… what? A methodology? A process? A mindset? Who knows. What we do know is that…