Paul Miller

To be honest, I’ve never fully understood Higher Education’s penchant for building ‘institutional repositories.’ These frequently under-populated aggregations of academic papers produced by ‘research active’ employees of a particular university appear aligned almost exclusively to vaguely expressed institutional imperatives, and seem largely unrelated to either the selfish aspirations of the contributing authors or the tangible [...]

Google held a small event in London late last month, at which senior executives from a wide range of organisations gathered to discuss the impact of the Cloud. Presenters included luminaries such as Marc Benioff, Werner Vogels, Geoffrey Moore and Nick Carr, as well as CIOs at the coalface in adopting various Cloud (mainly SaaS) [...]

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Event organisers are feeling the squeeze as advertising, travel and ‘training’ budgets present easy targets to Finance Directors seeking to balance their books in the current economic climate.
Amidst announcement after announcement of cancelled and radically down-sized trade shows and conferences, one bright spot in the event management space appears to be anything related [...]

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A short post, sparked by two related items that arrived by Twitter and email almost simultaneously.
Via Twitter, TechnologyReview reports that it’s getting easier to visualise massive data sets without the traditional supercomputer.
Via email, the UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) announces its contribution of £200,000 to a joint funding call with the United [...]

I am increasingly concerned by the extent to which the tech sector’s current and future behemoths squander finite effort on reinventing ‘context’ at the expense of excelling in delivery of their ‘core’ proposition. The post explores some of the reasons for this reinvention of wheels, and asks whether previously sound reasoning is increasingly becoming a thinly disguised excuse for lack of change.