Where Everybody Knows Your Name

The TV show, Cheers, ran for eleven seasons during the 80s and early 90s with a tagline that made everyone feel good…‘where everybody knows your name.’ A group of unlikely friends went through some good times and some bad times while making us laugh…and these characters became part of our lives, because we knew theirRead… Read more »

Doing away with social media officers

Andrea Di Maio reports on the US Defense department doing away with dedicated social media officers: No more specialized offices, no more social media silos, no more experts or consultants building new strategies. Social media is a tool, amongst many others, for public affairs professional to do their job more effectively and efficiently. The nextRead… Read more »

Is open goverment just about the data?

The latest social media phenom is Quora. A kind of question and answer forum. Its neatest trick is that it encourages you to re-produce your social graph from Twitter. Ready made followers and people you probably already ask questions of to follow. Anyhoo…there was a question on Quora I answered recently Does open government requireRead… Read more »

Coaching for Language, Communication, and Accent

Everyone who works in government who works with written materials knows that every sentence is supposed to have a period at the end. All of those people know (or do they?) that sentences in general are supposed to be short and to the point. KISS is an old writing thing that means ‘Keep It ShortRead… Read more »

GovReads: Little Bee

When I pick out books that I want to write about for this column, I try to pick interesting titles. Titles that will provoke, but will be a good read. Above all, if you take my recommendation I want to make sure that you like the book. It was with this in mind that IRead… Read more »

Australian IT Flood Relief Program

A group of people from the IT industry have set up “Queensland IT Flood Relief Program” to provide free second hand computers to organisations which lost equipment in the January 2011 Queensland floods. They are asking for donations of PCs, printers, servers, from across Australia. They will service and distribute them.This appears similar to theRead… Read more »

Super Sad True Love Story

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart starts off as a hilarious farce, an inventive look at the future gone wrong. All your paranoid fears about the Department of Homeland Security are well-represented as a bureaucratic error throws Lenny, the book’s narrator, into absurdist peril. But the novel is much deeper than that. It’sRead… Read more »

Focusing your Cloud Strategy

Recently we discussed the idea of how central to your cloud computing strategy’s success is having focus. You can garner that focus by communicating with your IT team and your business stakeholders to determine if you have any, or what your cloud computing key value drivers are. 1. Do we need to dramatically reduce ITRead… Read more »