About my Magma consulting activities

Having already written what I thought when Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer decided and announced in public that Yahoo employee's were invited to work from the office - and not from home anymore... I can't resist to come back to the recent declaration of HP CEO Meg Whitam (also banning home work for HP employees). First and foremost, I'm happy not to work for Yahoo or HP. Not that they don't have attractive products (I speak for HP here), but I seriously doubt about the vision and strategy those two ladies have for their group. Commuting, concentrating people in one working place means: waste of time, waste of energy (think on car engines, fuel etc.) and, in some cases, for long distance commuters, exhausted employees. On top of that, we could question the purpose of having people in a room when you have a full suite of tools for making online (video) conferences - and not only a cheap one-to-one model, but for plenty of participants. When you're supposed to lead technologi...

McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) published some months ago a report about Big data and where we really can expect to make significant gains (process improvement, doing more with better analyzed datasets, taking more efficient decisions within public or private sector etc.) The five key sectors MGI analyzed were: Healthcare in the US ; retail in the US ; personal location data (on Global level) ; manufacturing (Global level) and, my favorite one, public sector administration in Europe. The first question I would like to ask to our European institution is Have you read the paper and what’s your position regarding the drafted conclusions? A second (easy) one would be Do we have a similar institute that could extend the McKinsey research on Healthcare in the EU; retail in the EU? And final, but not least, are we coordinating some activities from the EU member states in order to win technology advantages compared to other continents? Where are we with Cloud computing legislation, lega...

As I'm currently reading Things that gain from disorder [Taleb's last book], I couldn't resist to write one or two reflections about the book. First and foremost, it's a nice and pleasant reading. Taleb has a concise style, avoiding boring scientific jargon (in a sense that this book is not a scientific article or academic demonstration) and he jumps quite straight-forward to the concept he wants to explain. But that being said, I'm always surprised how management guru's are referring to philosophy and to Socratic texts to support their views. Take Prusak for example, on knowledge management. He was referring to Aristotle and Plato. Taleb is here citing Seneca and Lao-Tseu as examples, being professional philosophers. But what is mind-boggling with reading Seneca or Confucianism in their historic contexts and then highlight what's still valid in our society? Dominating some passions, mitigating risks in personal life and in business, being able to prepare ...

It seems everybody is concerned about mobile security. Consumers are worried that all of their personal data that now resides on their smartphones – contacts, bank account numbers, emails and so on – will fall prey to identity thieves and crooks. The risk for corporations is higher still as mobile devices become integrated into the office environment and start to be used to access sensitive company information, customer records and valuable intellectual property. Click here to go to the article.

Microsoft has launched an excellent (improving) consulting program for their Lync2013 technologies. I personnally believe that this an excellent idea, for several reasons. 1. Lync2013 is an excellent, but complex, product suite. You need to know how to architect it properly if you want to take full advantage of the existing features (non mentioning the security issues; advanced features on video; advanced capabilities on federating services [means in human langage that you integrate devices that are not on your network] etc.); 2. Microsoft shows with that kind of approach that, even being a mature and dominant software house, they can learn and improve with listening to their users (or early adopters). This is, of course, a smart commercial tactic, but it doesn't really matter. If you want to deploy Lync2013, it implies that you made already your philosophical choices. Only the final results matter - a good, strong, cost effective project that brings value for money; 3. Continuous...

When it comes to the deployment of a new package, we always struggle with the same difficult part: the user. It's never easy to change working habits, to learn new processes and maybe abandon some tips and tricks you already follow for years. And this time, I have to admit that Microsoft anticipated that heavy change management piece with an interesting publication (via their Lync2013 community Blog) - with an extended Adoption Toolkit for Lync2013 users. The resource is great, well designed and, yes, cherry on the cake, free. You can get Lync RASK here: Lync 2013 Rollout and Adoption Success Kit . Oh! and BTW, you can also check the NextHop blog via TechNet portal: http://blogs.technet.com/b/nexthop/