Overview: Digital Transformation

founders of the Hub Institute in Paris, have just released a manual (in French) The guide to Digital Transformation... a useful and simple way for every company to measure its progression, with prioritized steps to follow in order of degree of maturity, as well as defining the next stages to undertake.

most deployments fall into the ‘deploy and pray’ category, a minority address known pain points and use cases, whilst only about 20% of projects involve a concerted organisation-wide roll-out aimed at creating a connected company. He argued that some kind of paradigm shift is needed to go beyond just adopting social technologies towards creating a…

There’s large-scale, statistically significant research into the impact of search results on political views... Google is doing a horrible, horrible job of delivering answers here. It can and should do better... people are finally saying, ‘Gee, Facebook and Google really have a lot of power’ like it’s this big revelation. And it’s like, ‘D’oh.’”…

Business coaching to a media startupOne of the smallest, yet sweetest, projects of 2016 was helping specialist online media Borderlexrethink its business and relaunch its website. Coaching ranged from overall business model right down to the nuts and bolts of social media promotion, engagement and monitoring.

Where are companies at in their digital transformation efforts?... I define iteration as doing the same things better. Innovation is doing new things that unlocks new value for your customers. Only one of those can lead to disruption, which is doing new things over time that make the old things obsolete.

my research team’s analysis of data from Columbia University’s Emergent rumor tracker suggests that this misinformation is just as likely to go viral as reliable information... limiting news fakers’ ability to sell ads... a step in the right direction. But it will not curb abuses driven by political motives... Using BotOrNot, our colleagues found…

Robert Putnam -- famous for "Bowling Alone," ... found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects.... virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings... "Diversity... seems to bring out the tu…

Perfectly open communities always go sour. You need filters. Every functional community has them. And that’s where machine learning comes in... If you can detect trolls, you can protect the people they’re trolling by muting or putting a warning over the trolls’ posts... Twitter... already have a way of screening out porn. Why don’t they do the sam…

Seven years ago I started working full time at the Guardian in the glamorous role of SEO editorial executive. ... very like being in the Matrix but with less kung fu and more Polly Toynbee and Nigel Farage... here are a few of the things I’ve learned…

a lot of people don’t know fake news when they see it, sensationalized reports are more likely to go viral on social media than sane ones, and distrust of traditional (and genuinely more reliable) media sources is rising. Professor Nicole A. Cooke ... focusing on human information behavior, information literacy, and diversity in librarianship.... …

mainstream AI tools: machine learning and deep learning...lack an element that will be key to building the sentient machines ...

the most-coveted project planning tools include file sharing, time tracking, email integration and Gantt charts... using social media facilitates “small talk ... help build rapport and create a more nurturing, supportive, collaborative and trusting environment... dedicated Yammer newsfeeds in SharePoint, for example, can be useful for communicatin…

Let’s take a break from the Donald, Facebook and the end of democracy, and try to focus on what’s important.

If you think this election is insane, wait until 2020... technologies like AI, machine learning, sensors and networks will accelerate. Political campaigns get ... so personalized that they are scary in their accuracy and timeliness. The single most important factor influencing your voting decision is your social network… so you can bet that politi…

If we think closely about anger, we can begin to see why it is a stupid way to run one’s life... how a leader has to operate: forget about the strike-back mentality, and forge a future of warmth and partnership... He asks only, how shall I produce cooperation and friendship?

trillions of dollars are spent on making the world technologically ‘smarter’ ... but very little is spent on getting humans ready for that future... We will need to decide, very soon, where humans end and machines start, and vice-versa- and this is an ethical question NOT a technological challenge.

the root of our human frustration and daily anxiety is our tendency to live for the future, which is an abstraction... Writing more than half a century before our age of computers, touch-screens, and the quantified self, Watts admonishes ... "The working inhabitants of a modern city are people who live inside a machine to be batted around by its w…

Fernando Pereira, who leads Google’s projects in natural language understanding, is less excited about his company’s shiny new devices than he is about what will happen when people use them... how can a machine truly understand phrases... machine learning; specifically... neural networks... use sophisticated algorithms and tons of data to train t…

Score 1 “My management culture is fucked up” point for each of the following:... You know what costs a lot of time? When good people quit.... Defined levels and career paths take work to develop. But they’re a straightforward way to give people mastery goals and direction. Ever look at some company getting it right and think, “How did they hire …

Spectrm is one of the first ventures that allows publishers to create and manage so-called chatbots for delivering content to audiences over messaging platforms including Facebook Messenger, Slack and Telegram... niche articles, only available on certain publications, seem to be more popular than general news that’s widely available elsewhere... …

How organisations enshrine collective stupidity and employees are rewarded for checking their brains at the office door... Smart young things joining the workforce soon discover that, although they have been selected for their intelligence, they are not expected to use it. ... After a few years of experience, they will find that the people who g…

When her best friend died, she rebuilt him using artificial intelligence... Memorial bots ... seemed both inevitable and dangerous. ... is it really what’s beneficial for us? Is it letting go, by forcing you to actually feel everything? Or is it just having a dead person in your attic? ... Today’s bots remain imperfect mimics ... Any suggestion …

This updates both my earlier Taming the Firehose and Where is social media taking you in 2016? posts, and better aligns my productivity process with my personal content strategy.

Reaching consensus with groups larger than 5 people on any other platform or service is a pain. Discuto helps you get everyone on the same page.Discuto highlights controversies and suggests where to dive in the conversation, making the decision process easier to manage. What's more is that it only takes a few seconds to set up your first discussio…

it is very clear that ‘Digital Transformation’ is a difficult, ambiguous, misleading and even potentially dangerous term and we have to get better at explaining it... It’s not about digital or technology ... it does have everything to do with business models, people, culture, leadership and change... We should be aiming for nothing less than Hum…

A financial incentive and a paid coordinator were essential to the success of the project. The intangible that made the project really work, however, was the willingness on the part of Media Consortium members to work with each other... not have been possible without a trust-based network in place... At the beginning of the project, outlets asked…

This idea is counterintuitive for us bot-developers because it seems to go against the whole idea of natural language processing.But I quickly realized that suggesting questions was really important... who wants to physically type out an entire question?.. SelenaBot ... also does a quiz ... shows you tour dates, social media updates, lets you lis…

“We were keen to test on small niche audience... Bots will work better when they are more targeted.”... On the transfer deadline day ... 43 percent of chatbot subscribers clicked through ... On an average day ... closer to 23 percent. engagement is high because an individual is choosing to engage with it and the experience is ... personal... ca…

Within five years robots and so-called intelligent agents will eliminate many positions in customer service, trucking and taxi services, amounting to 6 percent of jobs... The bots of 2021 will be much better at understanding human language, and they will be better at learning from users and increasingly able to handle more complex scenarios.

This report is the first in a series to be issued at regular intervals as a part of the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100).