Digital.ai’s Workplace of the Future
9 December 2020 Our Alan Brown helped deliver this webinar alongside Christine Ashton (CIO Cogventive Ltd), Danny Presten (Digital.ai’s Chief Methodologist) and Derek Holt (Digital.ai leadership team). Dropbox, Twitter, and Shopify have confirmed their employees will continue to work from home as long as they want, according to Forbes, while companies like Amazon, Zillow, and […]
Digital Transformation: Looking Back, Looking Forwards
It has been exactly a year since the publication of my latest book on “Delivering Digital Transformation: A manager’ guide to the digital revolution”. During that time, an extraordinary period in all of our lives, we have seen many businesses face a fight for survival, endured personal challenges that have redefined how we view the […]
Workplace Culture: Let’s Take This Opportunity To Make Lasting Changes
‘May you live in interesting times,’ an English expression whose origin is commonly (and very probably wrongly) understood to be a Chinese curse, seems particularly relevant right now. It’s definitely an interesting time in which to live. Democracies hacked. Public health in peril. Economies under pressure. And amongst all these challenges, we have to keep […]
Two challenges for councils
On 2 July, housing secretary Robert Jenrick announced that a recovery and devolution White Paper will be published later this year. The paper and its outcomes will be ‘jointly commissioned between central government and local government’, and local authorities ‘[will] be at the heart of our ideas’. The White Paper thus presents one of those […]
Combatting the Male Mental Health Crisis in Corporate Culture
With World Mental Health Day coming up on Saturday 10 October, we revisit David Plans’ insights into male mental health in corporate culture. Corporate culture and practice have gone through significant change over the years. From the deeply sexist and toxic Mad Men-esque environments of the ’60s and ’70s, to the mind-numbing and isolating cubicle-based […]
How Not To Be Agile
Agile approaches are now widely used not just in mainstream software development but also in many other sectors. However, experiences working with large established organizations trying to use agile approaches highlights that their application in mature organizations remains fraught with difficulties. What are do their failings tell us about how to succeed in agile delivery? […]
The Future of Work: Reflections on 3 Panel discussions during July 2020
A range of fascinating topics During the last few weeks, I was fortunate to be asked to speak and participate in a series of events with Leaders groups (including the Councils, Chamber of Commerce, professional organisations) in the South West discussing evidence-based practice and policy on the Future of Work is Now. Topics covered four […]
Patterns and insights for distributed design teams
Paper by Philip Cash, Elies Dekoninck, and Saeema Ahmed-Kristensen Distributed design teams are commonplace, with globalisation, where parts of the value chain are offshored or outsourced. Today, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, non-co-located design teams are everywhere. Shared understanding is central to a design team’s performance and to the success of distributed development […]
Digital Transformation – Time to burn the boats?
In a new blog article published at Digital Leaders, Professor Alan Brown asks whether the recent acceleration in digital transformation is a significant permanent step forward or a temporary blip. Here is a short introduction: ——————– The global economy is struggling to cope with the unprecedented challenges of the last few weeks as we proceed […]
Post-COVID: re-organising Localism around 3 digital principles
On Tuesday, I keynoted a senior leadership session for Birmingham City Council. The session was for leaders, councillors, and senior executives – about 35 in total – to discuss post-COVID re-organisation and management. We discussed a range of pressing issues confronting the Council. These included: data trusts, data security, supply chain resilience, efficiencies, and cross-silo […]
