White Papers
The Decision Compass is a tool to help get clarity in decision making, particularly when that decision has to be made by more than one person. The strength of group decision making is in the breadth of perspective that many people bring. The primary challenges are:
- the length of time that a group will take to make a decision
- ensuring that the decision is not undermined afterwards by individuals that feel that they were not engaged properly.
The Decision Compass helps minimize both challenges, while helping to bring out the variety of perspectives needed for effective group decision making.
It also mitigates two of the major cultural issues relating to decision making in modern society; Black and White Decisions and False Certainty
I wrote the initial version of this document in 1997 while still working for ICL / Fujitsu. It is an introduction to Geoffrey Moore’s Chasm methodology that describes how new technologies are adopted. It also describes how business strategy should change as the market matures.
The key revelations for me in reading Moore for the first time were (and still are):-
- The strategy that makes you sucessful when a product is initially launched will lead to failure as a market takes off
- The roles of technology owner and service provider are fundamentally different and often in conflict with each other
- It explains why ICL VME, DEC VAX VMS, Wordperfect, Betamax, OS/2 and other great technologies lost out to technologically inferior products.
For me reading Moore’s books changed my career forever. What still amazes me is the number of people I meet in the UK that work in technology sectors that have not heard of Moore, let alone read his books.
Developing the UK ICT Industry
Click on the title above for this white paper which was written as a result of my work with SEEDA’s Clustering initiatives and was submitted to their latest regional economic strategy consultation
It proposes an economic development agenda to support UK SMEs in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry. It starts from the basic assumption that, in the 21st century, the UK needs a Knowledge Economy to ensure its future prosperity.
By definition, the foundation of the knowledge economy is ICT, as they are technologies that help transfer knowledge between people. ICT is a huge and diverse industry both worldwide and in the UK. Apart from line of business applications to support all organisations, ICT also provides the tools for other knowledge intensive industries both established e.g. financial services and emerging e.g. bioscience.