It’s been over a year since we entered the first lockdown in the UK. During this challenging period, there have been many changes to our lives, including how we work. Tech has played a crucial role in allowing companies and organisations to keep going. However, this has resulted in changes that will have a long-lasting effect. Video Conferencing Many people had never head of Zoom before the start of the pandemic, where now the product has become a verb for the new way of communicating. Workers who had to give up the office for their homes had to adapt quickly to videoconferencing. Now, even

The next wave of change in technology will involve more data crunching taking place closer to home, with the Internet of Things (IoT), 5G and innovations such as AI and self-driving cars. This move to process data closer to where it’s created or used is called Edge computing, and it’s going to become much more common. Over the last few years, we have seen cloud computing become the norm. A dwindling number of organisations run their email from an internal server, and most of us have become used to storing our data on cloud platforms such as OneDrive or Dropbox. Similarly, organisations are

I’ve been working with the TUC on the latest version of their digital healthcheck tool, with our third major release (version 3) seeing a significant revision. It has been several years since the last revamp, and so these latest changes reflect the fast-moving world of technology. For those who have never used this tool before, our digital healthcheck is a simple tool that allows unions to benchmark their digital and technical maturity. It is an interactive Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, providing ‘best match’ choices across a broad range of categories. Alongside the use of technology, it also

If there is a ‘no deal’ Brexit, what are the implications when working with IT and Digital? One of the first issues could be the effect on the workforce. If you or any of your team are EU nationals, the UK Government has committed to protecting rights, but EU nationals will need to register to do this. It could be that the workforce is affected as people choose to leave the UK, and EU applications for UK technology jobs dwindle. The full impact will remain to be seen. World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules mean that the sales and purchase of software and hardware in general shouldn’t face major

I’ve recently taken on a new role in addition to running the Infobo digital consultancy. I’ve been appointed as the first virtual Chief Information Officer at the Trades Union Congress (TUC). It’s ‘virtual’ as it’s a part time role. I’ll be dedicating a handful of days a month to the role, but it comes at an interesting time, as changes in technology are having a huge impact on organisations. One of the biggest changes in recent years is the rise of the ‘cloud’ and cloud services. The ‘cloud’ may be a buzzword for describing internet hosted applications, but a significant implication of these

Like most technologies, operating systems – the software that runs on computers and allows everything else to work - keeps on changing fast. Most of us will have heard of Microsoft Windows, Mac OS or even Linux. However, the old dominance of these familiar operating systems is changing. Cloud computing is being touted as the future by some, as demonstrated by the recent launch of Apple’s iCloud service that allows users to store data such as their MP3 music collection online. Cloud computing refers to the idea that people are storing more of their information “in the cloud” of the Internet

The web is huge, and it’s growing all the time. There’s a lot of useful information out there, as well as a lot of junk. But how can you find what you want? That’s where search engines come in. Internet search engines have been around since 1990, when ‘ Archie’ was first created by Alan Emtage. There had been a central list of webservers held at CERN, but it simply could not keep up with the number of new websites, and so the internet search engine was born. Archie was soon followed by other systems like Gopher and Web Wanderer. In the early days of the web there were also Search Directories