Only Dead Fish

Post of the Month - February 2020 - The Winner

There was plentiful voting in this month's poll and a strong showing for Nicola Kemp's excellent piece: Enough. But in the end it was Jed Hallam's powerful post on finding belonging that won through. Well done to Jed - you join the hall of fame. My thanks to all those that took part.

Post of the Month - February 2020 - The Vote

Thanks all for the nominations. So our vote this month is between:

Calling for a More-Than-Human Politics by Anab Jain

Enough: The death of Caroline Flack raises urgent questions for our industry by Nicola Kemp

Finding belonging: imposter syndrome, adland, and culture by Jed Hallam

From loyalty to membership by Ana Andjelic

Internet Amnesia: Clive James and his website by Richard MacManus

Why going 'niche' is a duff steer for your agency by Robin Bonn

It’s impossible to live in a state of error-free perfection: the trick is to make the right mistakes by Ian Leslie

And you can vote below:

Post of the Month - February 2020 - Nominations

It's time to open up nominations for Post of the Month. If you've read something over the past month that you think is particularly good, do nominate it by sending me the link or leaving a comment below. As always I've listed a few starters below but please do add to these. My starting four are:

Calling for a More-Than-Human Politics by Anab Jain

Enough: The death of Caroline Flack raises urgent questions for our industry by Nicola Kemp

Finding belonging: imposter syndrome, adland, and culture by Jed Hallam

From loyalty to membership by Ana Andjelic

Do add to these nominations.

Data-as-a-Service

I've been writing a new report on marketing structures and resourcing and in the research process came across the concept of 'Data-as-a-Service' (DaaS) via Ashley Friedlein's annual trends post which I think is a useful way of thinking about how to set up data services to underpin a business. The idea of DaaS is that it can deliver to the varied needs of functions and stakeholders across a business  simultaneously, perhaps through the creation of modular systems. In Econsultancy’s Digital Transformation and the Role of Data report author Laura Chaibi describes it thus:

“Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) is a data framework that essentially splits data access and usage from where the data is stored, freeing the data for multiple uses with speed and ease of access and the ability to scale usage. DaaS data agility is a substructure of digital transformation acting as a reinforcement to solutions enabled through digital transformation. DaaS data can permeate all corners of businesses and how they run with the aim to amplify capabilities and sustainably scale.”

The concept reminded me of Jeff Bezos' famous 2002 mandate about every team in Amazon needing to expose their data and functionality via service interfaces. These interfaces created critical ways in which teams communicated and accessed other capabilities but more than this it created a service-oriented architecture to successive capabilities in the business, effectively establishing separated parts of the company as individual platforms. Opening up these services to external access also opened them up to external competition, helping them to stay efficient and competitive. With data now so critical to organisational capability Data-as-a-Service makes complete sense.

Post of the Month - January 2020 - The Winner

Well we had some lively voting on this months and it there was something of a battle between Martin Wiegel's excellent post, the lovely writing of Gemma Higgins and the insightful piece from Marco Del Valle but in the end it was the latter that got there. So well done Marco - you get the props of your peers and are entered into the hall of fame. My thanks to all who took part.