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Daniel W. Rasmus for Serious Insights

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By: Daniel W. Rasmus for Serious Insights

Dive into the world of strategic foresight with Daniel W. Rasmus, founder of Serious Insights and former Microsoft executive. In this episode, Rasmus reveals how scenario planning can revolutionize your business strategy and prepare you for multiple futures.

By: Daniel W. Rasmus for Serious Insights

Dan had the pleasure of the last couple of months to spend time with The Human Code’s Don Finely, discussing scenario planning and The Serendipty Economy.

By: Daniel W. Rasmus for Serious Insights

Generative AI is changing the way organizations build software and interact with technology. While Generative AI has the potential to revolutionize businesses, it can only deliver returns if implemented strategically and tactically.

By: Daniel W. Rasmus for Serious Insights

The personal computer market continues to evolve. Artificial intelligence is on the cusp of driving the next transformative shift, and that shift requires more processing power than a tablet or mobile phone can encompass, though they already leverage their own onboard AI processing and the cloud to incorporate AI into the fix.

By: Daniel W. Rasmus for Serious Insights

Deploying generative AI in business is more than a technical exercise; it’s a strategic imperative that requires thoughtful planning and execution. To ensure a successful implementation, companies must focus on several critical factors that bridge technology with business outcomes.

By: Daniel W. Rasmus for Serious Insights

Scenario planning isn’t about predicting the future; it’s about embracing the uncertainty that defines it. Too often, people misconstrue scenario planning as an exercise in clairvoyance, expecting it to reveal the precise contours of tomorrow.

By: Daniel W. Rasmus for Serious Insights

I ran an experiment recently that some public chatbots are more repressed than others. I prompted them with a realistic business prompt. I chose, however, a business that not all people like, one that some would rather see disappear from the economic landscape. 

By: Daniel W. Rasmus for Serious Insights

There is a growing tension between Big Tech’s pre-pandemic promotion of remote work and its current back-to-office efforts. The shift in workplace dynamics and management strategies forces buyers to question the tech industry’s credibility.

By: Daniel W. Rasmus for Serious Insights

At the Apple World-Wide Developers Conference today, the company showed a bevy of new features across its platforms following a commercial for its Apple TV+ streamer. I’m sure, like me, many of those watching the WWDC live stream from Tim Cook and the team kept waiting for AI.

By: Daniel W. Rasmus for Serious Insights

The 2024 Work Trend Index Annual Report from Microsoft and LinkedIn delivers some worrisome insights about the future of work. Most notably, it shines a bright light on the power of automation over common sense

By: Daniel W. Rasmus for Serious Insights

AI PCs are coming. AI PCs will include a key that invokes a Microsoft Copilot. Copilot, as it does on Microsoft Edge and Windows 11, will pop up, informing the person pushing the key that it is ready to be asked anything. But that isn’t really an AI PC. It is a PC that integrates a generative AI chatbot at the most rudimentary level.

By: Daniel W. Rasmus for Serious Insights

The future is complex. Scenario planners look for social, technological, economic, environmental, and political uncertainties to understand the variables that should be explored against a focal question such as “What will work look like in 2035?” Naming uncertainty is just a starting point. 

By: Daniel W. Rasmus for Serious Insights

Mobile devices have led to a growing demand for portable keyboards to accommodate an on-the-go lifestyle. Mobile keyboards have come a long way, from bulky and cumbersome to sleek and compact. 

By: Daniel W. Rasmus for Serious Insights

The new era of AI has made a mistake. Makers, users, marketers, critics, and academics have ascribed human attributes to AI, overloading understood terms. When we overload terms, we lose the ability to differentiate without context.

By: Daniel W. Rasmus for Serious Insights

Much of the discussion about generative AI and the future of work focuses on the potential for AI to displace workers. Often vague references suggest that AI will create new jobs as did all the automation of the past.

By: Daniel W. Rasmus for Serious Insights

Just after I finished my talk on AI and the 2024 U.S. Elections at the TechTalk Summits Impact event in St. Petersburg, Florida, I walked back to my room and flipped on the television to CNN, where Jake Tapper was about to discuss AI and the 2024 election

By: Daniel W. Rasmus for Serious Insights

Collaboration remains an essentially human task. Generative AI challenges notions of human-centricity. As I re-examined my 2024 Collaboration Portfolio: Features diagram, I found that it holds up to the injection of AI into collaborative workstreams. 

By: Daniel W. Rasmus for Serious Insights

Yes, AI will continue to dominate CES. AI is the new electricity. It will be embedded in most products, eventually becoming as expected and as non-differentiating as our power source of choice. But, like electricity, it will fade into the background as how it enables value comes to the fore.

By: Daniel W. Rasmus for Serious Insights

AI confusion. AI will be everywhere, but it won’t all be the same. As most enterprise software gains some level of AI functionality in 2024, organizations will realize that AIs from different vendors may represent different choices for sources and restrictions.

By: Daniel W. Rasmus for Serious Insights

I offer this  practical set of insights on specific ways KM will likely evolve with AI integrated into KM solutions, used to analyze data and prepare it for learning, and offer complementary structures for knowledge representation.

By Daniel W. Rasmus for Serious Insight 

An expansive list of potential gift items drawn from current reviews and products in our evaluation queue.

By Daniel W. Rasmus from Serious Insights 

All science fiction shows reflect their time more than they do the future they purport they depict. Star Trek has been a symbol of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, well, you get it. All the way to the 2020s. But read carefully—they offer lessons for today’s leaders who seek improved performance, a vision of quality, and new paths toward innovation.

By Daniel W. Rasmus for Serious Insight 

Apple announced several updates in its iPhone 15 line and some major changes for Apple Watch as well.

by Daniel W. Rasmus

Categorizing the CIO Role

Analysts like to categorize. As reported in a 2016 Wall Street Journal article, Korn/Ferry categorized CIOs into four groups:

• Commercial
• Transformational
• Innovative
• Technology-oriented

I think those categories have dated. But more importantly, CIOs are not defined as much by their traits as by their circumstances. In an ideal model, perhaps every role in every company perfectly aligns skills, proclivities, personality, and aspirations to the work. But ideal models don’t exist…

By Daniel W. Rasmus

Technology like generative AI generates hype. Because of its close affiliation with science fiction, the concept of AI has been front and center in many plots involving humanity’s extinction, but probably not as often as humanity has been its own worst enemy.

If we step back from the science fiction tropes, practical uses for generative AI exist, though they are hard to find even among the less existentially threatening use cases.

First, Rasmus outlines two different but similar use cases that focus on the summarization feature of generative AI, and then provides a list of other use cases, along with a brief analysis of each one.

By Daniel W. Rasmus, Serious Insights

Consider this analyst's breakdown before you make a purchase of your own… In this article, Dan W. Rasmus explores Apple's latest product, the Apple Vision Pro. Get Rasmus's take as he weighs the pros and cons of the newest headset to hit the shelves.

By Daniel W. Rasmus

A September 2021 New York Times article, When Chance Encounters at the Water Cooler Are Most Useful, documents the myth of the water cooler conversation as a driver of innovation. What is true about water cooler conversations is that they help establish new relationships or reinforce existing ones. These relationships may, as the article describes, lead to breakthroughs like the 1997 photocopier encounter between Professor Katalin Kariko and Dr. Drew Weissman, whose work led to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

By Daniel W. Rasmus, Serious Insights

VUCA is an acronym for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. It’s a phrase intended to place a conceptual wrapper around all the things facing us. It does an adequate job of serving that purpose. There are, however, moves to improve this forward-looking term. I think those efforts insert unnecessary complexity to futures thinking that should be better spent helping people confront their concerns than confusing them with a waft of acronyms that speak to inner secrets rather than generalized knowledge.

By Daniel W. Rasmus, Serious Insights

In this article, Dan W. Rasmus explores how business all over the world will use the new hot tool–generative AI– over the next year. Explore how organizations, large and small, will be getting ahead of the curve by harnessing this ‘new’ innovation.

In 2023, creating a list of the Ten Things Businesses Need to Get Right About IT may seem dated to some. But for many organizations, IT still plays a supporting role, much more than it should. All organizations need to recognize these ten realities or suffer the consequences of being unattractive to talent, maintaining inefficient processes, watching their value proposition erode, and finding themselves ill-prepared to implement innovations even when they come up with them. Ten Things Businesses Need to Get Right About IT is essential reading for business leaders who have not yet embraced IT as a strategic part of their organization.

– Daniel W. Rasmus, Serious Insights

The debate over the relationship between data, information, knowledge and wisdom continues to evolve as new forms of representation emerge. My personal perspective runs contrary to IT and philosophical definitions. I find for knowledge management, and many IT applications, my definitions provide a clarity that doesn’t exist in conflated definitions of data and information, knowledge and wisdom. This discussion will restrict itself to technology though extensions to include biology will become increasingly important.

– Daniel W. Rasmus, Serious Insights

The future of generative AI: early challenges for IT, and opportunities

I recently attended the annual scenario planning session for friend and colleague Rob Salkowitz’s ‘Future of Marketing’ class in the Communications Leadership program at the University of Washington. We introduced his students to scenario planning and asked them to think about how the technologies of the moment may play out against different social, technological, economic, environmental, and political backdrops over the next decade.

March 11, 2023 by Daniel W. Rasmus

Machine learning training sets focus on precise aspects of a domain. A machine learning algorithm trained on the identification of cancer cells does that job with accuracy and precision. The algorithm has seen so many cases that its ability to identify the next case proves uncanny to those not familiar with the underlying technology. Those who do understand the model are not amazed. The cancer identification algorithm reinforces their own learning that machine learning, or in some camps, artificial intelligence, can outpace a human’s ability to identify patterns among often subtle signals.

By Daniel W. Rasmus, Serious Insights

With the HP Elitebook 840 G9, HP delivers a relatively powerful computer in the prefered form factor for most business users. The wide-ranging options make it ideal for corporate purchases that want to buy in bulk but still meet the needs of varying use cases.

What we like

From its excellent 5-megapixel auto-framing camera to its 14-inch 16:10 aspect ratio 2920×1200 WUXGA display, the HP Elitebook 840 G9 elegantly states that it’s all business. The adoption of the 16:10 offers more workspace than the 16:9 EliteBook 840 Aero G8 which preceded this model. The list price shared during a briefing stated the device will cost between $1,100 and $1,600, depending on the configuration, though the HP website  shows several higher-priced configurations.

By Daniel Rasmus, Serious Insights

Several jobs and their associated skills face existential threats from automation. Conventional wisdom, and assertions from inventors, almost always focus on automating activities that detract from the human experience by removing physical burdens or eliminating mind-numbing tedium. Automation frees humans, it is argued; it unleashes them from subsistence and allows them to better create, to more effectively, and more freely, do those things that remain utterly and uniquely human.

The latest round of AI, however, overreaches its ambitions by impinging on very human activities such as art and writing. In the name of eliminating the burden of copywriting, commercial tools like Jasper suggest AI can write blogs and advertising copy with the same competency as a human being.

By Dan Rasmus, Serious Insights

By Dan Rasmus, Serious Insights

This list may change or grow slightly over the next couple of weeks as I continue to read through the press releases and review my notes. Keep in mind that most of these items are not yet shipping and that I had less than 30 minutes with most of them—and no time at all with others. CES is a show about the future. In the case of IT technology, it’s a future that reveals itself over the next several months, not years. 

I have put in pricing and availability estimates where they have been shared.

Best Windows Laptop

Lenovo Yoga Book 9i

The Yoga Book 9i, the first dual-screen OLED laptop impresses immediately. It is at the top of my list, and that top placement isn’t unique among CES list makers.

Haven't found the perfect gift yet? Look no further! The Serious Insights Holiday Gift Guide for 2022 focuses on our best-reviewed products. They fall into a wide range of prices, from stocking stuffers to “wow, you bought that instead of a diamond ring?” 

– Dan W. Rasmus, Serious Insights

Recession flags are waving heading into 2023. And technology continues to wriggle and shift regardless of economic slowdown or hope for stability.

Part 2 of a two-part series 

The following list outlines the key CIO Priorities for 2023. Any organization looking beyond six months without using scenarios to guide their visioning risks facing poor forecasts amid multi-vector volatility. Once you read the list, you’ll see these concerns will drive action far in the future and prove plenty to keep even the most adept CIO busy for the next six months.

– Daniel W. Rasmus, Serious Insights

Recession flags are waving heading into 2023. And technology continues to wriggle and shift regardless of economic slowdown or hope for stability.

Part 1 of a two-part series 

The following list outlines the key CIO Priorities for 2023. Any organization looking beyond six months without using scenarios to guide their visioning risks facing poor forecasts amid multi-vector volatility. Once you read the list, you’ll see these concerns will drive action far in the future and prove plenty to keep even the most adept CIO busy for the next six months.

– Daniel W. Rasmus, Serious Insights

The other day a colleague called and asked about the best way to find a concept within an enterprise document repository. 

After discussion, an enterprise repository was a bit of a stretch. What she meant was find the concept across the entire enterprise, regardless of where it was stored.

The target concept consisted of a set of management principles. In the current incarnation, the enterprise touted seven principles. After working with a number of consultants, it had honed its principles to five. The goal was to find all references to the seven principles and replace those references with the five.

By DanielW. Rasmus, Serious Insights

At the height of Covid, before we really knew how it was transmitted, many tech companies reacted with antimicrobial offerings. Global accessory maker Targus started a line that included the mouse and the keyboard reviewed here. While transmission of Covid from hard surfaces ended as a rare transmission method, other bacteria and viruses, however, do travel that way. Many times, I have come home with CES and Comic-Con “crud” long before Covid-19, mostly from a lapse in hygiene after a day of touching well-touched escalator handrails.

Regardless of how you arrived at an interest in Digital Transformation, this series has focused on fundamental issues facing those seeking to deliver digital solutions for customers and for the business. They maintain value no matter the name associated with the change. Holding too tightly to plans in a changing world, adopting cliches, and not realizing the value of story in selling an idea can be applied to many aspects of life because, in the end, we are all transforming all of the time, and these lessons can help make transitions from one state to another more enjoyable, more meaningful, and less stressful.

– Daniel W. Rasmus, Serious Insights

A workday easily fills with distractions. A week, a month. Add up the distractions, and a lot happens when you aren’t paying attention. If you are working on a digital transformation project, losing focus equates to delaying value realization. In this article, Dan Rasmus explores four topics that offer insight into common distractions that may result in the failure of a transformation initiative.

– Daniel W. Rasmus, Serious Insights

The rapid pace of change. Velocity. Many use those terms to describe what everything about business feels like today. Despite the global pandemic slowing down parts of the economy, the transformation to digital seems all the more obvious and more critical. The time to wait is over, and now is the time to act. While engaging in digital transformation quickly and with purpose is absolutely necessary for most businesses, doing so with overly rosy expectations of express returns and swift transformations might prove more the first step toward failure than the first step toward success.

– Daniel W. Rasmus, Serious Insights

Digital transformation is a business strategy. It is not innovative. Many organizations already operate as digital businesses. Most organizations migrating to a digital strategy do so to catch up with their peers. Businesses that do not adopt the latest technology will become less relevant over time as consumer and business-to-business markets move to digital engagement models.

– Daniel W. Rasmus, Serious Insights

Analysts like to categorize. As reported in a 2016 Wall Street Journal article, Korn/Ferry categorized CIOs into four groups: Commercial, Transformational, Innovative, and Technology-oriented. I think those categories have dated. But more importantly, CIOs are not defined as much by their traits as by their circumstances. In an ideal model, perhaps every role in every company perfectly aligns skills, proclivities, personality, and aspirations to the work. But ideal models don’t exist. 

Let's dive into what type of CIO you want to be…

– Dan Rasmus, Serious Insights

Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference, WWDC 2022 announced several updates to chips, devices, and all of the operating systems. We explore the more important announcements below and analyze their impact on users and the market.

– Daniel W. Rasmus, Serious Insights

I received an evaluation copy of TripIt Pro several months ago. Unfortunately, I had to cancel the first trip after that. And the one after that as well. But I have had time to explore the latest version of TripIt Pro, which now sits ready to support a trip in July 2022. Earlier versions of the service proved valuable in trips across the globe. TripIt offers value before trips and during them. The services insights help subscribers realize how many adventures they have shared. A free version will serve for most, while a Pro version at $49 will likely find more than one way to pay for itself.

– Dan W. Rasmus, Serious Insights

Want to show off with the coolest looking earbuds around? Read Serious Insights’ latest earbud review to see if the sound from these new GravaStar Sci-Fi-inspired earbuds lives up to their looks. 

– Daniel W. Rasmus, Serious Insights

The landscape of docking stations has changed significantly over the last several years. USB-C docks now predominate for laptops and desktop computers. This post from Serious Insights offers guidance on what features to look for and how to choose a USB-C dock.

– Daniel W. Rasmus, Serious Insights

Comic-Cons return in 2022 with a vengeance. In 2021 some cons wandered into the tepid social waters of a Covid world with their few celebrity guests sequestered behind negative test paywalls for photos and autographs. The large stages were dark, and the cheering crowds murmured behind masks as they wandered the greatly diminished show floors.

But the biggest of cons returns full steam on July 21-24, 2022, after its abbreviated Thanksgiving 2021 outing. Comic-Con International in San Diego is back, and with it, the opportunity for tech professionals to learn from the event in ways they might not consider.

– Daniel W. Rasmus, Serious Insights

Microsoft hasn’t cornered the PC business tablet market with it's Surface line. The Lenovo ThinkPad X12 Detachable combines Lenovo design excellence with several innovations and makes for a great computing experience. The thin, light, solid performer should be considered by anyone looking for a Windows computer, but who also wants the flexibility of a tablet that actually performs and behaves like a tablet.

– Daniel W. Rasmus, Serious Insights

Orlando, FL hosted Enterprise Connect March 21-24 as an in-person and hybrid experience. Dan talked with vendors and sat through sessions to come up with his The Top 5 Takeaways from Enterprise Connect 2022, which include too much innovation, shared canvases, employ control, AI, and the metaverse.

By Daniel W. Rasmus

The return to offices has forced many managers to confront new team dynamics in meetings with some staff joining in shared spaces while others remain virtual. That’s not the only fear created by returns to the office. Daniel W. Rasmus identified 12 Hybrid Work Fears Managers Must Face as the next reality. He looks at planning, motivation, finding time to reflect, how to innovate and other challenges that all of us will likely face at one time or another over the next several months.

– Daniel W. Rasmus, Serious Insights

TechTalk Summits is pleased to be working with Serious Insights to bring thought leadership content to our clients. Founder Daniel W. Rasmus is the former head of thought leadership marketing for Microsoft Office and was a Vice President of Research at Forrester Research.