Overview: Digital Transformation

"the “new mobility”... cities in which residents no longer rely on their cars but on public transport, shared cars and bikes and, above all, on real-time data on their smartphones. ... transform not just transport but the cities themselves ... rebalance the public space and create a city for people ... less pollution, less noise, less stress... a …

"In October 2010 ... Google's fleet of self-driving cars had already collectively traversed some 140,000 miles of California asphalt... Last year, a BMW drove itself down the Autobahn, from Munich to Ingolstadt ... Audi sent an autonomous vehicle up Pikes Peak...n November, Toyota unveiled its Prius AVOS (Automatic Vehicle Operation System), whi…

"Imagining a future without lights and stop signs.... driverless cars will make intersections much more efficient. Right now, you may wind up sitting at a red light for 45 seconds even though no one is passing through the green light in the opposite direction. But you don’t have to do that in a world where traffic flows according to computer comm…

" Top tasks are the small set of tasks ... that matter most to your customers. Make these tasks work well, and you’ll be on the right track. Get them wrong, and chances are you’ll lose the customer. Top Tasks Management is a model that says: “Focus on what really matters (the top tasks) and defocus on what matters less (the tiny tasks).” Tiny ta…

"In a time of unprecedented challenge, leaders don't just need to lead their companies. They also need to lead themselves. They need strategies for improving their effectiveness while sustaining a sense of professional well-being... In order to survive and thrive, leaders can't just go about business as usual. Business isn't "usual" anymore. It's …

"The problems that most resist solutions are system problems. In a system problem, if you’re part of the system, you’re part of the problem. This illusion of objectivity is often particularly acute in senior leaders, because there’s a tendency for people to tell them what they want to hear." - If you’re part of the system, you’re part of the pr…

While an excellent takedown of 'traditional' (group-focused) brainstorming techniques, this article should mention that individuals applying brainstorming techniques get good results. "In every case, four people working individually generated between 30 to 40 percent more ideas than four people working in a group. Their results were of a higher q…

"UBS ... are the latest of a string of banks to take a shot at incubating for the blockchain.... Despite the title this article's mainly about bitcoin, although it ends with "The possibilities and potential for blockchain technology are extraordinary at every level of business and society. If you’re not keeping up then you should" - It's not a…

"The excuse that tech companies make for their lack of gender diversity is that the pipeline of women studying engineering is shrinking. Sadly, this is a self-perpetuating cycle. Because there are few women in engineering, girls don’t perceive computing to be a friendly profession, so fewer are entering the field... This issue is important beca…

"the impact of IoT won’t be the Things, it will be the way the data can be analyzed to shape downstream innovation.... data from the highway department ,,, perfectly predicted the housing boom and bust, with an approximately six month lead time." - Trawling with Engines of Meaning — Work Futures — Medium

"many of us tend to sabotage creativity more than we cultivate it. Here are some of the self-sabotaging things you’re probably doing every day. "

"companies are hungry to build employee engagement. At the same time, managers struggle to figure out what works and are reluctant to hand over any autonomy...talent management processes often enforce conformity, legitimize mediocrity and penalize failed attempts at innovative thinking. four Deloitte LLP offices in India... initiated a contest. E…

"Stacy sits down with Google Ventures to share her perspectives on startup hiring, leadership, and more." Also a good example of video journalism, but a comparison between total Reads (as measured usign Medium's womderful metrics) vs number of views of the embedded videos - i.e., do people watch them, or just read the textual summaries? - Manage…

"The president's 2016 budget proposal includes a funding bump for the U.S. Digital Service and more than $100 million to expand its work to more agencies."

"Min-Soek Pang of Temple University found that for every dollar governments invested in technology, spending decreased by $3.50. ... It’s not just investing in gadgets that shrinks government, but investing in tech talent that makes things run better." - How Government Shrinks Itself—By Investing In Technology - ReadWrite

"If you’re embracing online collaboration as a necessary evil — the only way to work with an increasingly dispersed team of global or remote workers, for example — then you’re doing it wrong. Online collaboration is not a second-best substitute for face-to-face work: It’s a complement with its own perks and benefits." - Collaborating Online Is So…

"in the cause of wider employee participation... there’s more to success than just investing heavily in the latest Enterprise 2.0 technology platforms. Large-scale engagement of the workforce requires, first and foremost, a firm grasp of organizational culture and its social dynamics, a psychological understanding of what triggers new behavior, …

Stunning use of CSS & HTML5 to create an online exhibition exploring the stories of 30 endangered species. Best viewed in Chrome. - In Pieces - 30 Endangered Species, 30 Pieces.

"Generation Z (born starting in the mid-90s to the early ’00s... are poised to be somewhat different from the millennials... Filling the talent pipeline has never been so critical now that the United States is facing a skills gap in most industries. Even if you’re a small operation, you can still have a Gen Z internship program. These children ar…

“Bitcoin offers the prospect of necessary and important disruption in finance for the benefit of buyers and sellers rather than financiers and middlemen.” - U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers "... bitcoin’s potential lies more as a low-profile, back-office phenomenon than as mainstream medium of exchange" - Interest in Bitcoin Grows on …

"With mar­keters becom­ing increas­ingly more expe­ri­enced in dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing, we often find our­selves at the epi­cen­ter of enter­prise transformation — leading the way across our respec­tive organ­i­sa­tions to cham­pion customer-centric think­ing; to effec­tively mas­ter chal­lenges such as mobile and cross-channel mar­ket­ing; and to h…

"While traditional strategy calls for rigorous analysis and critical thinking, design thinking espouses ‘thinking by doing’. The key is to find the sweet spot between the two approaches." Nice exploration of overthinking vs. underthinking: "... overthinking — aka ‘death by analysis’. An obsession with minimizing risk leads to the inability to ma…

"There has been a strong increase in the proportion of workers that are disengaged in the past five years, perhaps doubling ... the costs of this disengagement can be very high... remote workers - those that work somewhere other than where their boss works - are more engaged.... when workers are remote, the leader's behaviors change, and that .…

" the 3D Workforce: Distributed, Decentralized, and Discontinuous... is really a 4D workforce, however, because these is a fourth factor: Disengagement." Good overview of some recent research, with some conclusions such as: "...as companies become more fast and loose with the transition to social business models of operations, employee engag…

"digital transformation... the application (or reapplication) of digital technologies and the restructuring of operations to better engage with customers, the company ecosystem, and the greater marketplace... We have rocketed into a new economy - a new era - where much of what we knew and relied upon ten years ago is being superseded by new ins…

"most digital transformation 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. ... paradigm shift is needed to go beyond just adopting social technologies towards creating a…

"today’s social collaboration tools ... are focused on the wrong things, or at least on the wrong scale.... enterprises do business, but people do work. We will see a shift away from tools designed around ‘business’ and instead see a swing to tools that help people accomplish their work... the mantra will be — people first, mobile first, cloud f…

"Companies on Fortune’s “100 best companies to work for” list returned 14%/year on their stock compared to 6% for the average company... The Workplace Fund ... investing only in companies that have outstanding workplaces. It’s had a 9.63% return since its inception in April 2005, compared with the S&P 5.58% over the same period... Gallup resea…

"to have technologies that work for all of us, we need to ensure that those who build and distribute those technologies have insights from a wide and diverse range of experiences... We all have a filter bubble, and if you try your best to listen to a diverse range of people, you might be able to pop it somewhat." - If software is eating the worl…

"Dogfooding is the golden rule of platforms. And currently, open government portals are flagrantly violating this golden rule... I can’t find a single example of a government entity consuming the data they publish... For the most part, inter-agency data sharing doesn’t happen ...when it does, the agencies set up non-public back channels to push a…