Part of the Process

Last week was the briefing webinar for the ThoughtWorks Technology Radar. Like many of us, this was the first time they had gone through a process remotely which appeared as the pun/theme "the elephant in the zoom". It is interesting to hear from experts in specific technology areas discuss the latest trends and techniques. This time I was struck by the story behind how the Tech Radar came about.  It didn't start as a external "thought leadership" or sales device, It was a reaction to business growth and internal knowledge management issues. I think it's the bi-directional process of the teams feeding in the ideas, the advisory board then collating and debating them to pull out patterns and asses the different maturity levels makes it powerful. Also this is based on actual experience from their projects, rather than desk analysis that you might get from a report like Gartners. They also offer advice on how to make your own , which is great to get people sha...

Some notes from this quarter's technology briefing from Thoughtworks. This session's topic was "Big Data". I was pleased that the topic was chosen as I am interest in Big Data and travel , especially how it can be used by my clients and to enhance the product that I work on. Caitlin McDonald from twitter has also created a Storify story from tweets during the event (with the added bonus is that I am in the background to someone's photo) Session The main speaker was David Elliman with Ashok Subramanian - David has also written a blog post called The Big in Big Data Misses the Point that presents some of the content covered or see the full presentation in English or German . The session started y looking at the origin of "information explosion" and how in the 1940s people were starting to get worried about the miles of shelf space would be needed by 2000 to store all the books produced. This was contrasted with the explosion of multimedia informat...

Some notes from last night’s ThoughtWorks' Quarterly Briefing on Mobile and the “shattered future” Session 1 : Giles Alexander Mobile Lead (Europe) at ThoughtWorks Talked about move from Clients -> Apps -> Products Clients are the old world desktop thick clients that started to get replaced but apps and everyone needed an app on their phone. But now increasingly the world is multi-screen and product is across devices, these are just ways of getting to product. It's not just a case of laptops, smartphones and tablets. Also have to consider other input types/devices like siri, Google glass. there are multiple channels and accessibility is important. Is Google glass just Segway for your face? e.g. Siri is a bit of a gimmick, not used for regular/serious use, is Google Glass the same? Couple of examples: realestate.com.au is a property listings site that started in print media. Business suited the internet well then along came mobile. While ...