I know it’s nearly the end of September now, but here’s my look back at what I got up to in August…

The two most significant events were:

• I had a fantastic couple of weeks travelling around Europe by train with my youngest son.
• After fifteen years, and over 70000 tweets/posts I walked away from my main Twitter/X account. It’s been a while coming but, as I explained in my last tweet before flouncing off, the engagement is not there and the place is full of hatred. The final straws for me were an attack on the BBC’s Technology Editor (who I don’t know personally but is a friend’s sister-in-law) combined with Elon Musk’s attempts to intervene in British politics and the reactions to the rioting that was, in part, fuelled by platforms like Twitter/X. Those two things tell me it’s not a place I want to be. X is right up there with the reasons I don’t buy the Daily Mail (or click on its links). The Drum goes further and suggests that brands should also be leaving “Musk’s binfire”.

This "digital town square" has lost everything that once made it good and is now full of hatred. I should have left a while back, but I stayed for the little bit of quality engagement that was left. This week it crossed a line. Thanks for all the support over the last 15 years ?

— Mark Wilson (@markwilsonit) August 7, 2024

Right. Rant over. What else did I get up to in August?

• Well, for starters, I actually wrote a blog post (not just the one about my holidays). Inspired by one of the challenges my team faces, I wrote about choosing between chats and channels in Microsoft Teams (and the types of channels that should be used). Spoiler: if you want to collaborate, or to communicate with more than a few users, choose a channel. Though, as one colleague pointed out, if the decision needs a flow chart, it’s probably too complicated…
• I needed to visit the Apple Store in Milton Keynes and found that it’s moved, expanded, and has a huge new screen across the entire back wall. My pictures don’t do it justice but it’s a big improvement on the old store…

• I found myself commenting on a former colleague’s LinkedIn post about Klarna replacing human employees with AI. There’s enough in there for a whole blog post… but I think it’s worth a look at Marcus’ post and the various replies…
• I also weighed in on my colleague Glenn Akester’s post about the Crowdstrike outage (not a “Microsoft outage”!) looking at what happened, and critically, some of the lessons we can learn to reduce the impact of similar problems in future.
• I also got involved in a discussion about Gartner Hype Cycles, after it seemed the whole world picked up on one article by the Economist that seemed (prematurely, in my opinion), to be suggesting that AI is through the hype now (and that not all technologies go through the hype cycle).
• Following on from the AI post, we move to the underlying data:
  • My colleague Julian Boneham flagged how data needs to be in good shape to exploit AI.
  • And, also on the topic of data, an image that shows how storytelling is a powerful tool.
• I’ve had a Bookings page on Microsoft 365 for a while but it doesn’t get much use. That was until I added it to my LinkedIn profile and posted about Node4’s partnership with Elastio for ransomware protection. The first contact came soon after. Admittedly, it wasn’t a customer but it was good to connect, understand someone else’s proposition and bear it in mind for the future!
• A colleague flagged a CIO post by Brian Solis about “the end of digital transformation and the rise of business model innovation”. He was asking if the digital transformation term is tired and if AI will make business leaders rethink their business models to make good use of it. Again, I think, given time, I could write a whole post on this topic but here’s the top line:
  • It’s an interesting article but predicated on the author’s view that much digital transformation missed the transformation part and digitised existing processes. I think that’s the key there – abuse of a term for marketing purposes… 
  • Many people skipped the business transformation part (what we used to call business process re-engineering). The author seems to be saying that we now need to do that, but using AI… and dreaming up a new term “business model innovation”.
  • I don’t think we need new terms to confuse the issue. What we need is to double down on Digital Transformation. AI is part of the toolset, but it’s also the latest shiny thing. I still think this post that I wrote five years ago has legs. 
• On that note, I’ve started to write a book… on digital transformation (to be co-authored with my colleague Bjoern Hirtenjohann). More on that as it starts to take shape.
• Diving into tech for a moment, this post explains why I’ve been receiving emails from Microsoft about a deleted Azure subscription. They were concerning but everything seemed to work, so I put them to the back of my mind. It turns out that it’s just really bad communication and, retiring outdated “Access to Azure Active Directory” subscriptions is removing a legacy method for integrating Azure AD (now Entra ID) with Office 365 (now Microsoft 365). There’s more on the Access to Azure Active Directory subscriptions in this post by Jason Fritts.
• Before I wrap up this month’s retrospective, here’s a couple more articles that piqued my interest:
  • Sonos’ CEO was forced to admit that S2 isn’t coming back, because the technical architecture has moved on and it can no longer work. Time will tell whether this becomes a really damaging point in the company’s history. They’ve ridden out controversy in the past (over technical obsolescence) but it really is important to listen to customer feedback on your app. Personally, I find it unusable and mostly rely on Spotify’s integration with my Sonos speakers…
  • High-end racing bikes are now vulnerable to hacking. Yep. You read that correctly. Wireless gears can be hacked… potentially to impede other riders’ progress.

Watching and listening

It seems I haven’t been posting any photos recently (not since my holiday), so in place of the normal section on photography, a couple of things I’ve been enjoying recently:

• Watching series 1 of Sherwood on BBC iPlayer. We haven’t got further than episode 1 of the second series yet (and season 3 has been commissioned), but I found series 1 fascinating from the perspective of someone who was only a child at the time of The Miners’ Strike but has seen the long term implications of the UK’s move from manufacturing to a services economy.
• Now that you can only pause an Audible subscription once a year, I’m trying to find things to spend my surplus credits on (and then cancel my subscription). Non-fiction can be a bit heavy sometimes (and I listen to a lot of podcasts) so I tried some fiction… KL Slater’s “Message Deleted” was quickly consumed via my AirPods as I went about my weekend activities!

That’s all for now – watch out for September’s retrospective in a week or two!

Featured image: author’s own