In days of old, towns used to build walls behind which they gathered their family, friends, and business partners to stand against the onslaught of attackers from afar. The landscape we operate in today is much the same. However it is digital, not physical forts that we need to build. And in the same way that you wouldn’t leave the drawbridge over your moat down, so too do you need to seal off potential avenues...
Read moreOrganizations partner daily with external parties in the form of consultants, software developers and creative agencies to turn ideas into marketable products and services. If the question of ownership is not addressed at the start of the relationship, it has the potential to hinder the beneficiation that should occur as a result of the engagement. The question that needs to be addressed before any work begins is “when a third party helps develop your idea,...
Read moreHow many of you in the Information Technology industry are happy with the municipalities in which you live and work? The media seldom heralds their good news. Instead, the loudest voices bemoan the lack of communications, efficient record-keeping, and the crumbling infrastructure. Amid the cacophony of voices, there are few who suggest solutions to improve the outlook of municipal service delivery for the 10 to 20 years ahead of us. However, if we hope to...
Read more
Early adopters of crypto-currency are those that bought into the concept when there were only a handful of coins available to choose from. They invested their pocket money before the value of crypto went up and may be found somewhere around the world where the weather is warm, having left their former colleagues shopping for padded jackets and boots once winter started. From an organizational perspective, those who embraced this technology early leveraged its capacity Read more
When you tap your room key card to access the ocean view at the start of your holiday, data and information security is probably the last thing you want to think about. Yet hotels are responsible for holding all types of private information. Your contact details, address, and credit card details are all gleefully handed over when your step up to the check-in counter, if not before. A lot of times, this data is not Read more
I like to tinker about. There have been times when this tinkering has resulted in a ‘broken’ website. At those times, my favorite word to throw at the server support staff is ‘roll-back’. This means that they should kindly please restore the website to the last version. The version that looked good before I broke it. Thank goodness for back-up, right? But what happens when back-ups fail? When the versions that you have on hand Read more
Fires, freight, and phishing. Your potential exposure to risk is often closer than imagined. The inability to adequately deal with a disaster when it happens could result in a domino effect that heralds the closure of your business. To avoid such a drastic outcome taking place develop a disaster recovery plan. Once finalized, this plan should be stress tested to determine whether it will indeed hold water should the organization start to flounder. To clearly Read more
The more I consider it, the more I appreciate the ways that good supplier management takes project management and moves it into overdrive. While project managers engage with groups that focus on solving specific business challenges, good supplier managers approach their work from a perspective whose outcomes benefit the entire organization. These benefits need to be embedded into contracts, SLAs, and dashboards. Failure to adopt an organization-wide perspective can lead to situations whereby supplier management Read more
War, earthquakes, civil unrest, and global pandemics. These are the makings of a Force Majeure event. The 2021 Covid epidemic has been the largest Force Majeure event of the century. It taught us to prepare for workplace disruptions in a way that has entrenched remote working, online storage, and automation of our daily activities to the extent that it hastened the adoption of AI into our technological landscape. Remote work and its associated infrastructure allowed Read more
When Generation X transitioned from analog to digital phones, they bravely embraced a handful of cellular phone providers. Over the years they continued to embrace new features and device capacity as they were developed, all the while educating the older and younger generations on how to use these magnificent devices. Many of the developers of the mobile phone that we have used over the years have since transitioned from what was once their main product Read more