A year ago, I was in a taxi heading to Heathrow for the long haul from London back to Sydney. Not a London black cab, mind you. Taking one of those down the motorway feels like riding a Dyson in Nascar. It was a Volkswagen minicab with a wily driver.
The new version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM has been available for a while now and I have had a chance to work with it with a couple of upgrading clients using the Microsoft Online version. The thing I like most is how smoothly the upgrade went for them.
I think everyone has seen and read the story about using drones to deliver your shopping. And it is not an April fool’s day prank. It looks real enough. The Jetsons have arrived.
Based on my discussions with administrators and managers within higher education, it is patently clear that student engagement, and retention, is of increasing importance to these educational institutions.
I read with interest a piece on the Jisc website called ‘Retaining students’. This piece reported that “according to a National Audit Office report, 20% of students in higher and 15% in further education do not complete their studies.”
I remember a friend at university. Sam* was a clever chap, studying astrophysics, and seemed to have some really interesting ideas about the nature of the Hubble Constant, the rate of expansion in the universe. Well beyond me, but impressive to his lecturers by all accounts.
During the last 12 months, I have spoken with student support and engagement professionals in universities across the UK. As a result, I have gleaned an insight into the challenges they face and what appears to be the three not so secret secrets of good student engagement.
The European Spreadsheet Risk Interest Group (EUSPRIG) (no, really!) maintains a list of spreadsheet horror stories and when you have plenty of time on your hands you might like to browse through their extensive list of corporate fails.
Last week I had a meeting with an IT management team and they introduced me to a lovely word. “This is currently a handraulic process,” said the CIO. Meaning of course, they do it by hand: manually, with ink and paper and spreadsheet and email.
I have posted a number of blogs exploring how to describe what XMPro is. But I tend to continue to be dissatisfied with my explanations. Sometimes the answers you are looking for are so close they could bite.
