Technology – Collected Reading

Digital Strategy ?

When someone says “digital strategy”, or just “strategy,” what comes to mind? You might think of strategic roadmaps, strategic pillars, ROI, KPI’s or a whole range of other deliverables and concepts that create a strategy.

Yet, today many of these tools are based on a foundation that is no longer true. Assuming consumer and business behaviors and activities are not going to change for 12 months is a vision of the past. In reality, the only constant is change and the rate of adoption of new forms of technology and consumer experiences are way in advance of any roadmap that tries to predict the future. So what can you do? This collection of articles looks at ways to become more agile, critiques best practices, and tries to help you avoid doing things that are actually destructive to your own success.

The SIMPLE Answer to Digital Strategy

“Most of the challenges you’ll face will be with folks trying to make this bigger (because that’s easier), slower (because that’s easier too) or stalling (because that’s easiest).”

“The idea of purposefully introducing into my life a service designed to fragment my attention is as scary to me as the idea of smoking would be to an endurance athlete, and it should be to you if you’re serious about creating things that matter”

“By learning to act and iterate quickly in small ways, companies build their most sustainable competitive advantage: agility.”

“Designers bring this intuitive sense for what it [the assignment] means. They understand the power of delivering a great experience and how to treat a user as if they were guests in their own home,” says Gilbert, who’s also the company’s designated chief design evangelist.”

Why “Agile” and especially Scrum are terrible

“The worst thing about estimates is that they push a company in the direction of doing work that’s estimable”

Smart cities

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This is a collection of articles which look at the idea of using technology to build “smart” cities.
This can mean a wide variety of things, but at a high level can they build towards the “triple bottom line” of economy, environment, and social equity” as one of these articles states.

Tools for Sustainable Cities

The effort builds on IBM’s Smarter Cities initiative, which is focused on how the strategic use of data and technology can drive sustainable growth and prosperity.

An Exclusive Look At Airbnb’s First Foray Into Urban Planning

Is it naive to think that you can simply drop a building onto a community and expect them to reorient their lives around it? Gebbia answers that community centers have always been a strong part of Japanese culture; this effort in fact is simply piggybacking on government efforts to build new ones.

How Smart Cities Save Money (and the Planet)

Cities around the world are getting bigger, fast. By 2015, there will be 22 metropolitan areas with populations of more than 10 million people. Around the world, some 180,000 people move into cities every day.

New York’s Bryant Park is tracking visitor behavior

As AdAge reports, PlaceIQ and several other similar companies gather their information from mobile app location data (which most users allow access to when they download free mobile apps) or from geo-targeted mobile ads. Although the data is anonymized and not tied a specific user’s phone, it still creates a surprisingly complete picture of the visitors to the park.

How ‘shared parking’ can improve city life

Technology gives us new ways to think about addressing these questions. Many parking lots already have entry/exit counters. If we combine those with aggregated, anonymized location data from smartphones, we can get a pretty good idea of when and where parking spaces are available, without requiring operators to install new equipment.

The promise of technology

The promise of technology was that it would deliver people form the tedium of manual work. Robots would do all the jobs that we do not or would not do and that people would be free to pursue ideas and dreams of a higher order.

So why today in 2013 are people in China and most of South East Asia making all of the goods that were meant to be made by robots?

Here are some articles / videos which go some way to explaining where the tech utopia went and how it is effecting us as people. – KP

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

“A series of films about how humans have been colonized by the machines they have built. Although we don’t realize it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers. It claims that computers have failed to liberate us and instead have distorted and simplified our view of the world around us.”

Adam curtis documentary

Source : topdocumentaryfilms

When Will this Low-Innovation Internet Era End?

“Then there’s another view, which I heard from author Neal Stephenson in an MIT lecture hall last week. A hundred years from now, he said, we might look back on the late 20th and early 21st century and say, “It was an actively creative society. Then the Internet happened and everything got put on hold for a generation.”

Source : HBR

The Army of Technological Slaves

“That is Benedikt’s call, cited above: take advantage of the machines, they are made for this! And that means: also creative professionals, mind workers, editors, journalists, should think like hackers. Hacker for me is a neutral to positive term. Hacker make use of technology as completely as possible. Like the famous investigative journalists, they don’t let themselves hold up by arbitrary rules which are supposed to tell us, how we should use information.”

Source : Slow media

Tech And toddlers

“She recently carried out a study to see if the ways mothers interacted with their toddlers differed depending on whether they were playing with more traditional toys –a shape sorter, a book, a toy animal – or battery-powered equivalents. She found that with the electronic toys, “Parents were not less affectionate, but they were less responsive, less encouraging and did far less teaching. It was almost like the toy was interfering.”

Source : Guardian

You think you are a consumer but maybe you have been consumed

“One of the guiding beliefs of our consuming age is that we are all free and independent individuals. That we can choose to do pretty much what we want, and if we can’t then it’s bad.”

Adam Curtis documentary

Source :Adam Curtis

How depression people use the internet

Another example: the Internet usage of depressive people tended to exhibit high “flow duration entropy” — which often occurs when there is frequent switching among Internet applications like e-mail, chat rooms and games. This may indicate difficulty concentrating. This finding, too, is consistent with the psychological literature: according to the National Institute of Mental Health, difficulty concentrating is also a sign of depressive symptoms among students.

Read more

Source : NYT

A Super-Efficient Email Process

As I go through this process, I try not to use email to give someone negative feedback, and I rarely respond to negative feedback over email. Email is a great tool for transactional conversations (Where should we have lunch?), sharing information (Here’s that file, there’s someone I want you to meet), or showing appreciation (You spoke powerfully in that meeting, I’m touched by your support — thank you). For anything else, you’re better off calling or talking to someone face to face. I also do my best never to go back and forth with someone on email about something more than two or three times. If it’s gone that far, it’s usually a better idea to pick up the phone.

Read more

Source : HBR

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