Overview: Digital Transformation

Work management... the current state-of-the-practice in task management. Task management tools formerly were limited to a list of tasks... Nowadays, the most competitive tools incorporate social communications, like chat, @mentions, and messaging: these I consider work management tools, like Asana, Trello, and many others. I recently published a G…

Most bots today are a simple one and done... draw a crowd, people play with them temporarily only to disregard them minutes later... a huge opportunity for those of us who can create a remarkable experience... Here are a couple of insights:

Instead of pushing news, it’s going to gather news. ... It’s not only going to tell you funny, interesting, and insightful stuff. (Although it will.) It’s also going to ask questions... depending on whether you’re a conventiongoer, a protester, or watching along at home. And it will use those reactions and inbound information to inform BuzzFeed Ne…

to connect with protesters and delegates on the ground ... and to experiment with what it looks like to deploy a bot as a reporting assistant.Now we’re delighted to share the code behind it:

One of the most critical elements to creating a great bot is copywriting. The right words can keep your users engaged for hours while the wrong ones will leave them running for the hills... Your chatbot should have a single minded focus and anything that does not adhere to this focus should be stripped away.

so far, there has been no killer bot... we’re only four months into this... I believe we’ll look back on the early emphasis on “conversational commerce” as a mistake... natural language processing and artificial intelligence are not yet accomplished at managing human-like conversations... instant interactions are key.

some examples of a blended interface, bringing the best of the command line and GUI paradigms together... — notifications and quick input from the conversational side, along with a rich and intuitive experience from the GUI side... Each message has the potential to be a ,,, bite size applications like a photo carousel, media players, mini games, i…

This is the future of mobile news, as Quartz envisions it. In the app, which launches today and is Quartz’s first, you don’t read the news; you chat with it.

In response to "The Tyranny of Agile"... Don’t get me wrong — in theory it sounds great to release half-checked, bug-ridden websites for your users to check in the name of agile... But websites delivering actual governmental services really badly IRL can ruin people’s lives...

summary of Kevin Kelly’s Seminar “The Next 30 Digital Years”, ... part of The Long Now Foundation’s Seminars About Long-term Thinking. a dozen “inevitable” trends will drive the next 30 years of digital progress...

the company's newest tweak to its membership program is one that puts listeners in direct conversation with the company's staffers. The idea: Give Gimlet's members access to the company's Slack team

chatbots and other conversational services should be given the right to link to websites without the threat of legal action.

META Ventures provides venture capital fund management, entrepreneurial training and innovation consultancy to cities, regions and national governments in several countries, as well as EU Institutions.

we’re falling asleep at the wheel. Most people in charge of shaping cities ...  haven’t realized what is about to hit them and the speed at which it is coming...The advent of autonomous vehicles couldn’t have happened at a better time. Or a worse one. Here’s how to steer towards the better outcome.

enterprise software helps the user answer one or more of the following questions:What’s important? (Surface relevant information)What do I do next? (Support decision making)How do I do it? (Facilitate action)... the conversational interface answers all three of the above questions better than the software tools we have today... Dashboards today …

Here are some considerations if you are thinking of building a conversational product or weaponizing an existing product for the bot age.

Key takeaways from this post include knowing what’s needed to understand user activity, and seeing some pipeline architectures that support this analysis.

Salesforce’s Peter Coffee offers a singular analysis of the meaning of singularity and its key consequences.

Slack, already an indispensable tool within newsrooms, is becoming a surprisingly effective community tool for publishers as well... quickly become a source of stories, with members providing inspiration or even direct contributions.

How can project management help news outlets improve their workflow and manage their time and resources better?... the role of a product manager or developer will sometimes overlap with that of a project manager, Katharine Bailey, the outlet's head of news products, told Journalism.co.uk in a recent podcast.

the Post is employing a concept called “laddering,” converting unique visitors into paying customers by getting them to increase social engagement with its website.

We asked  respondents to share the different types of challenges they face... changing company culture lead with 63% of respondents stating that it is an extremely significant to successfully lead digital transformation efforts toward fruition... executive support is key to sanctioning change and investing in it

You’re losing valuable growth opportunities and have extreme difficulty building and effectively marketing ..., it could be the result of organizational silos sabotaging your brand and business strategy... what’s the better alternative? The collective insights and experiences of the 50 CMOs in the study resulted in two headlines.

While Slack is basically a chat room for your business (with private messaging functionality), Groups also lets users share common calendars, OneDrive-hosted files, and OneNote notebooks... With Groups threaded messages, however, anyone with access can dive in at any time and read back over all the entries without being distracted by other items i…

Every business, at some point, faces competition. But competition is not the same as disruptive competition — a new class of competitors created when technology enables new players to compete with incumbents on terms the incumbent isn’t used to... it’s all the digital forces that have faced the newspaper business — from blogs to aggregators to soc…

minor changes at the surface level do nothing to affect the fundamental operations of a company. Appointing a Chief Digital Officer, with no budget and no clear mandate, is not digital transformation. Increasing the social media marketing budget is not digital transformation... have a different approach to everything. Real digital transformation …

Jobs instructed the architect to design physical space that encouraged staff to get out of their offices and mingle, particularly with those with whom they normally wouldn’t interact. Jobs believed that serendipitous exchanges fueled innovation... The more diverse a person’s social network, the more likely that person is to be innovative... we use…

the most valuable tools make it easier for employees to collaborate—and could even transform the way organizations work... We asked executives about their companies’ use of social tools, digital technologies, and big data... using social begets better use of these other technologies. When organizations digitize a process’s work flow ... using soc…

developers should not only be included in design and usability work from the beginning, they should also meet the people who eventually use their product... Developers need to be more vocal about the need to be included at these early stages... Excluding the developer from the design process will do nothing but prevent the project from living up t…

Imagine that we have heard the sentence “The dog chases the cat” several times, but we haven’t ever heard the sentence “The cat chases the mouse”. As soon as we hear it, we infer that cats do some things similarly to dogs: at least they also chase. But we know even more: we also know that “cat” have the same syntactic behaviour in the latter sente…