Today, I'm mainly the VP tech advisor at L'Occitane Group, where tech advisors are the catalysts of IT mastery in our organization. We do internal consulting, architecting, teaching, software development, agile coaching, and… a lot of psychology. Every day, we stand on the shoulders of giants.
Beneath the surface, I am a scientist. I am eager to debate, learn, and be wrong. And to continuously discover new horizons. Yesterday, it was computational biology, and today, it is computational archeology. But beyond the technology, the fascinating part is the human adventure.
Are email phishing training campaigns efficient? Well, not as much as it is often claimed. We proposed to evaluate a “classic” setup with test/control populations. And then, to try another tool to see the differences.
Product data is key in a retailer information system. If structuring data and processes whithin in the Syndigo Product Information Management (PIM) system was a first move, we hit unexpected problems, either intrinsic to the tool or when integrating the application with the whole ecosystem. We will discuss the vendor’s PIM limitations we met and how we overcome them with a Restful API Proxy.
Words have meaning. They are not innocent. We use them daily without reflecting on their actual connotation, consequences on our daily lives, and professional culture. Words are not only the vector of our thoughts, but they also shape our ways of thinking – certainly more than what we first think.
Listening, talking, and observing, I came to pinpoint a few words detrimental to efficiency, collaboration, and the well-being inside organizations. Each company, each group of people of a decent size, has its own vocabulary, which is part of its culture – for example, the word people use for “meeting” varies from place to place. However, we found some of them recurring in several organizations and languages.
Let’s put a few of these locutions in the dock so that you can pronounce your sentence.
Are you fighting to really adopt an agile mindset in your company? The difficulties you are encountering might be going all the way back to the opposition between nomadism and sedentarism from humanity’s past. The bad news is that thousands of years of culture are piling against you. The good news is that you are not alone.