Articles by David Smith

  A bustling office has always been seen as a hive of activity. For many businesses it’s been the visual reassurance of having a hardworking culture. But now remote working has been forced upon all of us, businesses have had to accept that, actually, productivity is possible without having a hive. Managers... Read more

The office has been an institutionalized part of business for a long time in some industries. The confines of an office building have been deemed as safer for data protection. And for data-sensitive industries like finance and medicine this has always been a permanent barrier to transitioning to a more... Read more

I introduced the digital workplace session at Fujitsu World Tour 2017 by highlighting a paradox: We have more tech than ever to help solve problems and make things simpler, yet productivity is slowing down. Global gross domestic product (GDP) – i.e. the total value of everything produced by all the people... Read more

My wife and I recently decided that instead of moving home to get more living space, we would extend and modernise our current house. It’s been a rollercoaster ride tumbling from trade to trade, and it got me thinking once again about the gig economy and how we can scale... Read more

What’s your job really worth? Is it how much money you make for you and your organization? Or is it the contribution you make to the world around you? While traditionally our Western society has defined the value of work by the former (nurses, for example, are not highly paid, despite... Read more

The word ’digital’ is everywhere these days, with many referring to this as the ‘fourth industrial revolution’, and perhaps that’s the right analogy. The potential of improved productivity is once again being accompanied by the same fears of technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) displacing jobs and leaving sections of... Read more

Talk to someone who’s run a marathon, the last thing you expect them to say at the finishing line is, “I want to run another marathon” (they usually change their mind later!). But that’s exactly how a lot of IT leaders feel post-Windows 7 or 8 upgrade, when somebody... Read more

When you consider that the world is estimated to be around 4.5 billion years old, 10 years may not seem like such a long time. But in an increasingly digitized world, change moves at a new pace. Smartphones, social media, cloud computing, VR, and mapping, chatting and dating apps are... Read more