Welcome

Welcome to my blog.  I’m using this to support my work as a lecturer at Cass Business School, so you should find that the entries refer either to topics that might be of interest to my students (usually connected with managing innovation and technology), or to teaching and learning in higher education.

Apart from this entry, all the entries appear in chronological order with the most recent at the top.  You can use the list of categories, which should appear to the right of the window, to search for entries relevant to particular subjects.

Please feel free to post comments, but note that these are moderated, so they won’t appear until I’ve read them, and I reserve the right not to post a comment without giving a reason.

Tweeting businesses

Sathnam Sanghera has some astute observations at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/sathnam_sanghera/article6908718.ece about why Twitter works better for individuals than for businesses.  I’m also interested to see somebody at Ford (their head of social media in the USA)among the examples cited of businesses using Twitter effectively – since I’ve sometimes cited the example of the motor industry, which tends to put glossy animated brochures on the web, as an example of a sector being unadventurous in its use of web technology.

A couple more to watch

Mentioned today by the BBC at http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/11/huddle_soundcloud_competing_in.html .  Incidentally I’d take issue with Rory Cellan Jones’s remarks about Shoreditch and Stuttgart: Shoreditch in particular has enough of the creative hub about it that it has to be the right sort of place for a technological start-up, given that venture capitalists can operate as globally as anybody else.

You could also make a case for adding Stockholm to the list of places where new ideas start.  Sweden’s the home country, not just of IKEA, Volvo, and H & M, but also of Spotify and the Pirate Bay: definitely the place to watch for innovations in the music business

An unexpected critic of smart phones

This comment from a former Motorola engineer at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/6509126/Inventor-of-mobile-phones-says-they-have-become-too-complicated.html .  Though I’d always understood that Hedy Lamarr was the true inventor of the mobile phone

A site being too clever?

I’ve just been browsing http://www.pecha-kucha.org/ ; although I haven’t witnessed it, I know that this presentation format has been used with some success by MBAs at Cass.  The site cleverly includes a Google map and tries to work out where I am, and tells me where I might find Pecha Kucha events near me – a location-based mashup, in fact.  It’s a pity that, while I’m in London, it concludes that I’m ’somewhere near Horsham’

An intellectual property fable

This has a tenuous connection with the previous post to the extent that both concern music.  Over the summer, in the French speaking part of Switzerland, I heard a recording from Claude Francois , who was a hugely successful French popular musician in the 1970s.  According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Fran%C3%A7ois (despite my reservations about Wikipedia as a scholarly resource, it’s great as a source of trivia) he died in 1978 trying to straighten a light bulb in a bathroom – hardly the most glamorous or dissolute of pop star deaths.

He tended to sing cover versions of well-known songs, many of which had originated in English.  in some cases, he adopted completely new words, so Les Filles et les Fleurs was sung to the tune more usually associated with You Can’t Hurry Love.  Sometimes he’d go for something closer to a direct translation, so I Can See Clearly Now became, in French, nous n’aurons plus jamais un jour de pluie/ tous les nuages se sont dissipes .

But one song in the Claude Francois repertoire is not what it seems.  Comme D’habitude is a number that he and another French musician, Jacques Revaux wrote themselves.  If the tune sounds familiar, it’s because a Canadian, Paul Anka, is said to have heard it in a hotel room in Paris.  He then wrote new English lyrics, which were recorded by Frank Sinatra as My Way.  (If you’re an undergraduate you might need to ask your grandparents about this one).

And why is it a fable?  Partly because, when I first heard Comme D’habitude, I assumed that Claude Francois had adapted a song made popular by Sinatra.  And partly because, although it doesn’t give a citation, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comme_d%27habitude suggests that Paul Anka paid nothing for the rights to the song.  So you never know what valuable intellectual property you might be giving away

Clarinets and WikiHow

My daughter is participating in a programme where everybody in her class gets to learn a musical instrument: in her case, they are all doing wind instruments and she’s learning the clarinet.  A clarinet divides into a number of pieces for storage and transport.  This has the advantage (especially for schoolchildren) that it’s very compact to transport and can fit into a hard, robust, case, but has the disadvantage that, if you have difficulties assembling the clarinet, you can get dispirited before you’ve played a note.  Incidentally, this is probably obvious to woodwind players, but you quickly learn that the cloth in the clarinet case isn’t there just because somebody else left their handkerchief there.

Anyway, we’ve had occasional problems assembling the clarinet, and unfortunately the only wind instrument that I’ve played was the recorder, when I was at primary school, and, as the excellent pay the piper website notes, that isn’t very effective at preparing you to play any other instrument.  The problem, incidentally, is that the ligature holding the reed in place tends to pop out when you try and tighten it, and I can’t figure out whether there’s actually something wrong with it, or whether we are just missing some important piece of technique.

It turns out that WikiHow has a potentially useful page about how to assemble the clarinet.  The bad news is that (1) it doesn’t quite answer the question of whether the ligature is really working as it should, and (2) the YouTube video that somebody helpfully embedded in the page has been removed.  It’s still an interesting application of Web 2.  And if you’re reading this and think you can improve the WikiHow page, don’t just tell me.  Edit the page: that’s the point of a wiki.

Employability and roles

Since I’m interested in how the use of technology by different generations is played out in the workplace, as well as in universities, I’ve been looking for opportunities to talk to the sort of people who might employ our graduates, about my framework for millennial students.  (If you’re an employer and you’re reading this, and interested in the framework, please get in touch)  One interesting, anecdotal, and constructive piece of feedback I got from an employer, was that my ideas are all very well for middle-class, graduate, knowledge workers, but might appear irrelevant to others.

Up to a point, I plead guilty.  I work in a business school, and our graduates might expect to become entrepreneurs, chief information officers, management consultants, even business gurus.  I don’t particularly expect them to become surgeons or train drivers, though I’ve no doubt that there are people with business or management degrees in all the jobs that I’ve mentioned.  Within universities, there’s an interest in employability, and that implies that we look at the sort of jobs that our graduates do.

But I’m not convinced that generational changes are only an issue for people who work in offices, and depend on knowledge which can be delivered down a broadband connection.  I think the millennial generation have a very different set of expectations from their predecessors on a load of issues, including work-life balance, which will affect the way they work in many different roles.

British Library findings on millennial researchers

The Times Higher reports at http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=408942&c=1 that, in contrast to what might be expected, people born after 1982 who are undertaking research in universities (we’re talking PhD students and active researchers) tend not to use Web 2 in their research.  My reading of this would be that the norms and conventions of academic research are long established, and perhaps impose rather traditional approaches to imformation navigation.  I would also speculate that some early career researchers are, if anything, more anxious than their older colleagues to go along with the established approaches to information searching.

So what do you call them?

We had the first information management session with our Management MSc students this week, and as part of this session introduced them to a couple of people with practical experience of working as Chief Information Officers (CIOSs).  At least that’s the job title that I’d favour for senior people with responsibility for information systems within an organisation.  But it’s clear that there isn’t universal agreement about this – the CIO in one business will do the same sort of thing as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) in another, whereas I’d tend to assume that a CTO’s responsibilities have more to do with infrastructure than information.  And it’s unclear how different a CIO’s role is from that of a more traditional IT manager or IT director (and go back a few decades, and you’ll find businesses where the predecessor of the IT director was called the chief programmer).  In fact this reflects a theme in the IT business: IT people are often uncertain as to how to describe themselves.  For software types, programmer is too specific, and I’m not unconvinced whether ’software engineer’, ‘designer’, or ‘analyst’ are really accurate descriptions for more senior role.  ‘I work with computers’ is evasive, and anyway, who doesn’t work with computers in the 21st century?

One other point that came up in the conversations: CIOs like to point out that a century or so ago, many businesses had a director of electricity, because at the time it was a scarce commodity and supplies were unreliable.  With the current interest in dwindling energy supplies and different sustainable sources of energy, I wonder if we’ll start to see the directors of electricity make a comeback?

Chocolate and creativity

Roger Neill, who is director of City University’s new creativity centre, has blogged at http://rogerneill.blogspot.com/2009_10_01_archive.html#4992535647144953491 about his contribution to confectionary.  That’s intriguing, because chocolate brands in particular are very durable.  When I was in my teens I enjoyed eating Crunchie bars (and I still do occasionally): http://www.cadbury.co.uk/CADBURYANDCHOCOLATE/OURSTORY/OURPRODUCTS/Pages/milktrayfudgecruch.aspx confirms something that I’d always understood, that Crunchie was introduced in the 1920s, but I’d never realised either that it was based on an earlier Australian chocolate bar, or that it had a reference in one of Enid Bagnold’s stories.  I wonder how which products being launched today will be around in a recognisable form in another eighty years.