by Andrea Di Maio | January 30, 2013 | 2 Comments
Crowdsourcing can be an effective means to tap into the so-called “wisdom of the crowd” to solve complex problems, stimulate innovation, slash the cost of research, encourage collaboration across organizational boundaries. Examples like Innocentive or IdeaScalev come to mind, but there are plenty of areas where crowdsourcing can help. Usually it is applied ex-ante: when [...]
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
by Andrea Di Maio | January 28, 2013 | 2 Comments
For anybody who has been watching the evolution of consumer technology, it is quite clear how devices are becoming obsolescent much sooner than in past years. My parents used the same fridge for over 30 years and the same TV set for almost 20, and my hi-fi has been serving me well for over 20 [...]
Category: Uncategorized Tags: iPad
by Andrea Di Maio | July 23, 2012 | 3 Comments
A while ago I wrote about a research by Italian entrepreneur and contract university professor Marco Camisano Calzlari claiming that a substantial percentage of Twitter followers for some large corporation would be “bots”. There was quite some debate at the time about how founded his results were: looking at the metrics described in his paper, [...]
Category: Uncategorized Tags: Italy, social media, Twitter
by Andrea Di Maio | April 1, 2012 | 1 Comment
Last week I joined a few other Italian Gartner analysts for an Italy-only event where we addressed an audience of over 300 people with some of the key messages from Gartner research. At the end of the usual analyst keynote I was asked to talk for about ten minutes about the euro crisis. At the [...]
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
by Andrea Di Maio | January 30, 2012 | 1 Comment
Last Saturday a group of concerned and web-savvy Italian citizens met in Rome to give birth to a new political party (named “Insieme Italia”, i.e. “Italia Together”). The new party aims at “building shared strategies and actions to get out of the social and economic crisis that besiege the country” Associates have to accept a [...]
Category: Uncategorized Tags: Italy, politics
by Andrea Di Maio | October 31, 2011 | 3 Comments
On November 8th at the Gartner Symposium in Barcelona, my colleague Dave Aron and I will have the pleasure to interview on stage Gerry Pennell, who is the CIO of the London Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games. He certainly has quite an exciting and tough job, being responsible for timely delivery and glitchless execution [...]
Category: Uncategorized Tags: symposium
by Andrea Di Maio | June 17, 2011 | Comments Off
I had a client call fixed for today with a federal agency to discuss about the use of public cloud. The issues they were planning to discuss with me were all very interesting, looking into the pros and cons of private vs. public cloud, how to select vendors, how to assess risks, how to migrate. [...]
Comments Off
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
by Andrea Di Maio | January 17, 2011 | 1 Comment
I took a day off today to attend a round table held in the bilingual region of South Tyrol. The event was aimed at discussing the career prospects for engineers with undergraduates who are about to choose which university to apply for. I was there with three distinguished engineers who made good careers as entrepreneurs [...]
Category: Uncategorized Tags: future of government, higher education
by Andrea Di Maio | January 6, 2011 | 1 Comment
There is nothing better, and indeed more sad, than starting my New Year’s blogging with yet another not too exciting example from my own country, but so be it. Less than one month after our Minister of Justice and his colleague responsible for Public Service and Innovation proudly announced the “Vivifacile Giustizia” project (it sounds [...]
Category: e-government Uncategorized Tags: cost cutting, Italy
by Andrea Di Maio | December 21, 2010 | 2 Comments
I still remember the first time I met Bryan Sivak, the CTO of Washington DC. It was February, few days after the major snowstorm. He made time to meet although logistics were challenging, and even apologized for not wearing a tie, as the dressing code had clearly being altered by snow plowing. I had only [...]
Category: e-government Uncategorized Tags: digital divide
