Ten Information Management Articles That Got Me Thinking (A.K.A., 10 Blogs I Wish I'd Written!)

Here are some articles that particularly inspired me during November that I think are worth your time reading.

1. How We Broke Democracy by Tobias Rose-Stockwell -- Our technology has changed this election, and is now undermining our ability to empathize with each other.

2. How Domino’s Pizza Reinvented Itself by Bill Taylor -- In a world of hyper-competition and nonstop disruption, playing it safe is the riskiest course of all. That’s a recipe for reinvention that makes for good pizza and big change.

3. How The Internet of Things Will Fight Climate Change by Diane Regas -- We need business models that incorporate and respond to the reality that electricity is more valuable at some times than at others. As the grid becomes more complex, it’s essential to add more information–about when renewables are available, where electricity can be stored or drawn from, and when demand can be delayed.

4. Six things the Digital Workplace Group has learnt about digital workplace maturity by Steve Bynghall -- One of the fascinating things about an emergent theme such as the digital workplace is that we’re all still collectively learning. Organizations and teams are continually trying out new approaches or applying innovative twists to more established practices around designing, delivering, and managing the digital workplace.

5. Robots and Automation May Not Take Your Desk Job After All by Dan Finnigan -- Despite talk of job automation in practically every industry, the question no longer seems to be whether jobs will be automated, but rather which jobs are at greatest risk and how concerned we should be about the changes. But is this anxiety actually based in reality?

6. How Predictive AI Will Change Shopping by Amit Sharma -- Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple are accelerating consumer expectations and what’s technologically possible, from same-day delivery to machine-powered image recognition. You can call an Uber with Siri and book a flight entirely through a Facebook Messenger bot.

7. Dropbox Is Reinventing Itself to Win More Love From IT by Virginia Backaitis -- It wasn't until I interviewed Dropbox's new CTO, Aditya Agarwal, that I came away with the idea that someone at the company might truly understand reality. Dropbox has some catching up to do, even if many at the company want to deny it.

8. An Airbnb mindset: Insight from a master of disruptive innovation by Maxine-Laurie Marshall-- From cars and accommodation to venture funding and petcare, the sharing economy is changing the way people source and offer goods and services, in the process challenging many established business models.

9. The Simple Economics of Machine Intelligence by Joshua Gans -- Technological revolutions tend to involve some important activity becoming cheap, like the cost of communication or finding information. Machine intelligence is, in its essence, a prediction technology, so the economic shift will center around a drop in the cost of prediction.

10. The Competitive Landscape for Machine Intelligence by Shivon Zilis -- If this year’s landscape shows anything, it’s that the impact of machine intelligence is already here. Almost every industry is already being affected, from agriculture to transportation. Every employee can use machine intelligence to become more productive with tools that exist today. Companies have at their disposal, for the first time, the full set of building blocks to begin embedding machine intelligence in their businesses.

As a sidebar, I usually save these in Evernote during the month and then go back and take a look at them when I have a chance to concentrate (my wife will laugh at that, scoffing at my pathetic inability to multi-task). I didn't even noticed until I wrote this that so many of these are from the Harvard Business Review. If you are on the technology side of the business -- or on the business side of technology -- they are a terrific resource. Their daily blog digest is well-worth subscribing to.