My Digital FootPrint

Not sure about you but there is something different about the current situation (Feb 2021).  I wrote about the  7B’s as our responses to lockdown and I believe still that viewpoint stands. However, there is something new, right now, which is different it is a mistiness,  a malaise, fatigue, sapped, brain fog.  To be clear, this is not a loss of motivation, depression or other mental issues - which are all very real and getting to everyone but I am talking about something else. In 1996 (web 1.0) the market discovered the opportunity for an online market, everyone took their physical business and replicated it exactly (give or take a bit) to work in a web browser.  On-line arrived.  We quickly worked out that this was an unmitigated disaster as a user experience, operationally and back office was a mess.  Come 2001 post-crash we had stopped taking off-line thinking and plonking it on-line and saying to ourselves, this is fab.  We started digital-first.   2020 we were forced to take th

Framing the problem I am fighting bias and prejudice about risk perceptions; please read the next lines before you click off.  We tend to be blind sighted to “risk” because we have all lived it, read it and listened to risk statements.  The ones on the TV and radio for financial products, the ones at the beginning of investment statements, ones for health and safety for machinery, ones for medicine, ones on the packets of cigarettes, the one when you open that new app on your new mobile device. We are bombarded with endless risk statements that we assume we know the details of, or just ignore.  There are more books on risk than on all other management and economics topics together.  There is an entire field on the ontologies of risk; such is the significance of this field. This article is suggesting that all that body of knowledge and expertise has missed something.  A bold statement, but quantum risk is new, big, ugly, and already here, it's just that we are willingly blind to i

We continually move towards better data-led decisions; however, we can easily ask our dataset’s wrong question. Without understanding “What is the purpose of data” on which we are basing decisions and judgements, it is easy to get an answer that is not in the data. How can we understand if our direction, Northstar or decision is a good one?  Why am I interested in this? I am focusing on how we improve governance and oversight in a data-led world.  I wrote a lengthy article on Data is Data. It was a kickback at the analogies that data is oil, gold, labour, sunlight - data is not. Data is unique; it has unique characteristics. That article concluded that the word “Data” is also part of the problem, but we should think of data as if discovering a new element with unique characteristics.   Data is a word, and it is part of the problem.  Data doesn’t have meaning or shape, and data will not have meaning unless we can give it context. As Theodora Lau eloquently put it; if her kiddo gets

We are continually moving towards better data-led decisions, however, without understanding “What is the purpose of data / Does data have a purpose”   on which we are basing decisions and judgements, it is hard to understand if our north star (a good decision) is a good one.  Why am I interested in this, as I am focusing on how we do governance and oversight better in a data-led world.  I wrote a lengthy article on Data is Data. It was a kickback at the analogies that data is oil, gold, labour, sunlight - data is not. Data is unique; it has unique characteristics. That article concluded that the word “Data” is also part of the problem, but we should think of data as if discovering a new element with unique characteristics.    For a while, the data community has rested on two key characteristics of data: non-rivalrous ( which plays havoc with our current understanding of ownership ) and non-fungible ( which is true if you assume that data carries information .)  Whilst these are both