Author Archives: mark

What makes a good headline?

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In this webtastic age of search optimisation, one answer is a lot of references to stuff that will get you a high Google ranking. The basic theory goes something like ‘never mind the quality of my story on service-oriented architecture, just check out how many times the headline mentions the recession, Angelina Jolie and Twitter’. Goal.

Or is that an own goal? Back in the world of ink, paper-based headlines are usually short. There’s often a pun involved, too. I worked with a sub who thought song titles by The Smiths made the best headlines. The theory works well to some extent, such as in the case of ‘How Soon is Now?’, ‘What Difference Does it Make?’ and ‘This Charming Man’. But ‘Girlfriend in a Coma’ and ‘The Queen is Dead’ have a more limited applicability.

And of course, there’s the online problem. ‘This Charming Man’ is a nice title for a magazine article on a friendly CIO. But most paper-based articles end up on the web and would you click on the article if you weren’t a fan of The Smiths? More importantly, would you be able to find it?

The end result is that puntastic magazine headlines get rewritten for the age of webtastic search optimisation. In fact, stories start to exist simply because people know they will get hits, such as ‘Top 10 tips’ articles. As journalist Andy McCue said to me the other day: “I’ll go mad if I see another ‘Top 10 tips for beating the recession’ article.” Check out Google News, my friend – there are plenty to push you over the edge.

Still, the headline and the content are no guarantee of attention anyway. I heard a woman on the train say to her friend the other day: “So, what was that story about a plane landing on a river? I missed that.”

It is difficult to understand how she could have missed the story of the US Airways plane landing on the Hudson River. Well, unless she’d sold her TV, refused to read, smashed up her radio, disconnected the computer, refused to talk to another human being and moved to Venus.

Which, I assume, she hadn’t. In short, you just can’t grab some people’s attention – even when the headline is great and the content of the story is even better. But good luck trying.

Football reading group

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I have only ever been in one reading group. It was several years ago and the group only read books on one theme: football. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it was a select group – just me and a couple of mates. The premise was fairly standard; read a different book about football each month.

It wasn’t as difficult to find books as you might expect. It wasn’t as boring as some of you might expect, either. Beyond the ghostwritten autobiographies and first person accounts of hardcore hooliganism, there’s a surprisingly excellent range of football books.

Saying that, however, the first book we read was Steve Claridge’s autobiography – a tedious tale of gambling, crap cars and rubbish performances for rubbish clubs. I refused to read the chapter on Birmingham City, which other members of the group said was ridiculous. But I have my standards.

The group lasted for a year-or-so before we ran out of ideas. There are only so many socio-economic accounts about the history of German football worth reading. Well one, actually: ‘tor!’.

In fact, the group split for good when one member suggested branching into cricket. I was vehement that I hadn’t joined a football reading group to read books about cricket. And that was that. But maybe it’s time for a re-start?

Top five games for a little girl

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My daughter is 25 months old. She has a bunch of favourite games but the following five are probably the most popular:

  • Shop – Soft toys take various roles in the shop, such as shopkeeper, shop assistant, customer and ‘stand back’ (the security guard, basically). The shop usually sells make believe food (cake, ice cream, toast), or various items from around the house (metal frog, little ball, Daddy’s keys). ‘Shop’ is an all-time favourite game.
  • Doctor’s – Soft toys take on various role in the surgery. One toy normally takes on the role of main doctor and other toys usually fulfil a range of health professional positions. My daugther sometimes like to be the nurse. Other toys act as patients and are put to bed. Illnesses normally include spots, coughs, sneezes and ear complaints (such as a snail, or a spider, in the ear).
  • Cave – The duvet on the bed becomes a cave. Sometimes the cave monster vists, sometimes it’s the ghost. Both cause my daughter to become hysterical – the cave monster makes her laugh, the ghost makes her scream. Variations include ‘Shop in the Cave’ – which is like Shop, but in the cave – and ‘Who is it?’ – where she guesses which toy has come to visit the cave.
  • Hide and Seeks – As you might expect, someone hides – either Mummy, Daddy or a soft toy – and my daughter goes a-hunting. There’s a stairs-based variation, too – which no one understands and makes her tense because we forget the rules. Luckily, stairs-based ‘Hide and Seeks’ has fallen out of favour recently.
  • Little Spider – A new game, where a small toy spider climbs the stairs and goes looking for food. He normally eats pretend flies or dragonflies. The latter make little spider cough and sneeze, for some reason.

Look who I have been speaking to

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The sparkling new edition of CIO Connect magazine is out. Thanks to all those who participated and to those that helped sort out the interviews. Here is a list of featured CIOs and business experts:

  • Gordon Hextall, COO of NHS Connecting for Health
  • Paul Jones, NHS CTO
  • Mykolas Rambus, head of IT and special projects at Forbes
  • Ken Narvey, group chief technology and services officer at HSBC
  • Tony Mather, CIO at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office 
  • Paul Woobey, CIO at the Office of National Statistics
  • Ben Booth, global CIO at Ipsos MORI
  • Anne Weatherston, Bank of Ireland CIO
  • Mark Leonard, Colt CIO
  • Martin Thompson, Tradefair CTO
  • Steve Pikett, head of IT at Rothschild
  • Mark Greenlaw, Cognizant CIO
  • Jan Durant, director of IT at Lewis Silkin LLP
  • Ray Johnston, group IT operations manager at Aspen Insurance
  • Dean Branton, group director of business transformation at KCOM
  • Nathan Hayes, head of infrastructure and technology at Osborne Clarke
  • Mary Hensher, Deloitte CIO
  • Dave Williams, IT director at Confused.com
  • Robin Osmond, Tradefair CEO
  • Sharm Manwani, associate professor at Henley Management College
  • James Urquhart Stewart, media commentator
  • Duncan Aitchison, partner at TPI
  • Joe McDonagh, executive development expert at Trinity College Dublin
  • David Head, director at La Fosse Associates
  • Jo Alexander-Jones, organisational development manager at BG Group
  • Guy Hains, president of CSC’s European Operations
  • Patrick O’Connell, president of BT Global Service and MD of BT Health
  • David Bodanis, scenario planning expert
  • Rohit Talwar, futurologist

PRs looking to feature CIOs or business experts in forthcoming issues can ping me an email. Thanks in advance.

Defining innovation

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CIOs talk a lot about innovation. Actually, it’s often all they talk about – along with a bunch of related concepts, such as value, efficiency, globalisation, leadership and partnership. But what is innovation?

It’s a question that’s being analysed in a number of ways by CIO Connect and I’m putting together a special feature, speaking to CIOs and senior researchers at blue-chip businesses. Early conclusions? CIOs – and other business executives, more generally – often wrongly focus on the ‘blue sky’ element of innovation.

‘Blue sky thinking’, as well as being a bloody awful phrase, is only one tenet of innovation. It covers the research and development part, the creativity. But there’s another area of innovation that is probably more important, especially in the current economic climate.

Innovation is not just about developing something ‘new’, it is also about the re-use of existing assets in different and exciting combinations. Basically, it’s about regeneration and making good with something bad – ‘brown-field site thinking’, if you will (to borrow and manipulate the phrasing of geography).

Now, which is better – ‘blue sky thinking’ or ‘brown-field site thinking’?

I’m looking for CIO comment

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I’ll be starting to work on the following features for CIO Connect magazine in the next week-or-so. As usual, I’m looking for one-on-one interviews with IT leaders (CIOs, CTOs and IT directors) of big name organisations. The briefs cover the following areas:

  • Environmental responsibility and carbon neutrality – We will look at how corporate social responsibility and carbon neutrality can help drive increased value and operational efficiency.
  • Migration strategies – How should enterprise software be deployed? Potential areas include bespoke development, legacy retirement, porting applications and SOA.
  • Next generation leaders – What strategies can help CIOs create top class, next generation leaders? And how can IT leaders create a strong framework for succession planning?
  • C-Suite executives – I’ll also be looking for one-on-one interviews with CxOs (CEO, FD, HR director, etc.).

Mail me if you have any pitches. Thanks in advance.

Tracklist One: January Sales

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What’s on my jukebox? Here’s my ‘January Sales’ tracklist – a lovely blend of post-rock, electronica and shoegaze:

  1. Cradle (Kyte Remix) – The Joy Formidable: Shouty indie pop turned all fuzzy and layered by nu-gazers Kyte. 
  2. Michael A Grammar – Broadcast: Angular pop by Brummie chaps Broadcast. My feet are dancing so much. 
  3. Everything With You – The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart: So infectious, the sound of C86 and shoegaze in a blender. 
  4. My Own Strange Path – M83: French shoegazers go all electronic and produce a futuristic movie score.
  5. Fire Flies And Empty Skies – God Is An Astronaut: Post-rock on a poppy jaunt, via a Jonny Marr-like suspended fourth.
  6. I Know You So Well – Immanu El: Slow and lovely; belting post-rock from your new Scandinavian friends. 
  7. Paint A Rainbow – My Bloody Valentine: Fast, choppy and poppy from the pre-’Isn’t Anything’ Valentines.
  8. Linus And Lucy – Vince Guaraldi: Charlie Brown and the jazzy sound of summer holidays with my little sister.
  9. A Year Without Summer – Epic45: The sad sound of autumn in the grey West Midlands.
  10. Flood Out – Televise: Ex-Slowdive stalwart takes shoegaze to its post-rock coda.

Carbon cost of electronic Christmas cards

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There’s been a lot of guff about the carbon cost of Google searching during the last couple of days, with the debate prompted by research from a Harvard academic, which suggests two Google searches produces the equivalent C02 as boiling a kettle. If you’ve found this post through a Google search, I hope you’re enjoying your ‘equivalent’ of half a cup of tea.

The research doesn’t really tell us anything we don’t already know – in short, searching for stuff, using energy-hungry computers and data centres, eats a lot of power. So, I started thinking about stuff we’re doing that eats power – especially the stuff that is meant to be green.

Take Christmas cards, for example. No one posts Christmas cards anymore (except my wife and her Mum). People send emails, Facebook pokes and electronic cards – it’s meant to convey the same message and can be sent with a cheery: ‘I am saving the environment by not posting a paper card’.

Except you’re not, because all this electronic stuff eats carbon, too. And it’s rubbish anyway – cards are much nicer and much more personal. And I bet posting a card causes less of a drag on resources that all those tweets, emails and pokes. Long live the Christmas card!

You never forget your first interactive giraffe

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Copyrighters and marketing dudes love to find a sales gimmick and flog it within an inch of its life. Take the seemingly straightforward ‘my first’ concept, which allows companies to tag products that are intrinsically linked to childhood, such as dolls and toy cars. The result should be a tug at parents’ heart strings and a consequential tug on the purse strings.

Except it’s not always as simple as that. M&S is tagging everything ‘my first’, from model steering wheels to polar bears. But perhaps the oddest is ‘My First Interactive Giraffe’:

Great, eh? I mean one thing’s for sure – you never forget your first interactive giraffe, do you? It’s like a rite of passage.

Sorry? What was that? You never had an interactive giraffe and, worse, you don’t even understand what an interactive giraffe is. Well, if the picture above doesn’t help, take a squizz at the description below from mydeco.com: “An exciting introduction to the world of playtime, this interactive toy will have them entertained for hours of fun”

Which – apart from the rubbish English and lack of clarity – explains absolutely everything. Ah, no. It doesn’t, actually. Apologies.

Ten New Year resolutions

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Hope you had a nice Christmas. Here are my ten New Year resolutions. I can’t keep number 10 – I just have to hope it is realised. Have a good one:

  1. Tidy the house regularly. Rather than just when visitors are coming.
  2. Stop using the internet so much. I spend a lot of time looking at rubbish.
  3. And actually phone people.
  4. Eat less yeast.
  5. Try and enjoy fruit.
  6. Keep my beard trim. Perhaps.
  7. Encourage my daughter to wear a coat. And prepare to admit defeat.
  8. Get fit, or something.
  9. Complete Mario Galaxy.
  10. Mid-May, celebrate the Villa winning the League.