On this final episode of Digital Outliers Season 1, my dear friend Stowe Boyd joins to discuss the “humanities of it all.” Stowe is futurist and editor-in-chief at Work Futures. He believes (and my research shows) that companies are often missing the mark on digital transformation by thinking about it from an industrial approach instead of a humanities-based approach. In a wide-ranging discussion, Boyd shares his thoughts on the inherent bias in social media and how we have to do…
The Nexus of Digital, IT and Science Fiction in the Future of Work
I have to tell you, I am absolutely loving the Digital Outliers podcast series and I hope you are too. In this episode, I get to talk with Brenda Cooper who among many things, is the CIO for the city of Kirkland, Washington. She is also a futurist and the author of nine science fiction and fantasy books. Her most recent novels are POST (Espec Books, 2016) and Spear of Light (Pyr, 2016). Her other works include Edge of Dark (Pyr, 2015), The Creative Fire(Pyr, 2012), and The…
Employees Swipe Right to Personal Tech in the Workplace
The consumerization of IT has been long in the making. While it’s nothing new, the employee-driven trends of social media, BYOD (bring your own device) and BYOA (apps) in the workplace are only accelerating and proliferating. In addition to managing enterprise technology infrastructure and digital transformation roadmaps, IT must now balance the sanctioning and connectivity of new technologies while also managing and mitigating costs, compliance, security and data risks. At the same time, employees will say, and attentive organizations will…
Crossing Over to the Darkside of Digital and Seeing the Light
“Yesterday is not tomorrow; we can’t innovate, we can’t do new things by opening old doors.” Paul Miller spends a lot of time thinking about the future of work. In fact, he wrote a book on the subject, “The Digital Renaissance of Work: Delivering digital workplaces fit for the future.” I greatly respect Paul’s work and I’ve been lucky to know him for quite some time now. In fact, I was honored to write the foreword to his book. Following that, Paul…
Employees are as or More Important Than Customers: Why Ignoring Employee Engagement Hurts Business
In a late 2013 study, Gallup found that only 13% of workers actually feel engaged at their jobs. What’s worse is that 63% of the workforce is not engaged at all. But wait, the news gets even more disheartening. An astounding 24%, one-quarter of the global workforce, is actively disengaged right now. Essentially we have a significant number of workers doing their best impression of corporate zombies who go through the everyday motions to collect a paycheck. So are employees…
