I’m David Knott. I’ve been working in enterprise technology for over forty years and I’m still learning. This blog is based on mistakes, failures, lessons and some things I find interesting:
Use cloud to create focus
I feel slightly guilty as I write this article - but only slightly. I’m typing this on an old Macbook Air, and every now and then it reminds me that I haven’t backed up the hard drive for nearly a year. Whenever it does that, I feel a twinge of guilt - and then I dismiss the reminder.
The reason that I only feel slightly guilty is that it’s been a long time since that reminder mattered. I started making the shift from local storage to Cloud storage a few years back, and started making the shift from locally installed applications to Cloud based applications a year or so ago. While I’m typing this on a Macbook Air, I’m using Google Docs on a Chrome browser - and could be doing that on a range of devices.
To transform in isolation, create context
Imagine the experience of going to a meeting in a physical office, back when that was a normal thing to do (who knew a year ago that we would be nostalgic for featureless meeting rooms, grubby white boards, and markers that don’t work?). Don’t think about the content of the meeting: think about the context.
On your way to the meeting room, you walk past your colleagues and you catch glimpses of what they were working. You say hello to your friend who sits on this floor, but who you don’t see every day. You walk past the charts on the wall which show team performance and progress against the big project plan. You smile when you saw that the idea you sketched out on the whiteboard still hasn’t been wiped away.
Thinking differently about . . . collaboration
How often have you accidentally hit ‘reply all’ when sending an email? Or included someone on the cc: list that you didn’t intend to? I think that we all know the feeling of making that mistake.
I had a similar experience in my new job at Google last week - but it turned out to be a lesson about collaboration instead of a mistake.
I was editing a document using Google docs, and when I hit the share button, I was asked whether I wanted to share it with the same people as the document I had copied it from. I hit ‘yes’ - then realised that I had shared the document with about a hundred people, rather than the half dozen I had intended it for. I had a sinking feeling for a moment - then remembered that I needed to think differently about collaboration.