Entries by Ross

Self storage can cut your business costs

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Self storage can cut your business costs Office rents have been rising and adding to business costs. One way to cut down the amount of space your business needs is to use self storage. You can rent a small space to keep office records that must be kept but are not in use every day. […]

Could a regular day of downtime make you more productive?

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Could a regular day of downtime make you more productive? Many UK adults spend an average of five hours a day looking at screens, sometimes more if they are at work. However, a new event, called the Offline Club carried out a a 24-hour digital detox. One participant, aged 33, had calculated that between working […]

Improving work meetings

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Improving work meetings No-one denies that work meetings whether in person or online are sometimes necessary. Elon Musk once said that “excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time”. One global study has found that 72% of work meetings are ineffective. Brain activity drops when in a Zoom […]

Back to planet Earth?

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Back-to-planet-EarthBack to planet Earth? There is a growing trend among businesses to leave cloud storage in favour of using locally based hardware data centres. The reason is chiefly the cost largely because the storage space is rented from a cloud storage provider. One US company quoted a boost in annual profits of £790,000 after leaving […]

Why doesn’t the construction industry make more use of technology?

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Building techniques have not changed much since the early 1900s. The actual construction of buildings still relies heavily on manual labour. However, there have been technological advances that the industry could benefit from. Among them are 3D printing. It can be used for extruding concrete or other materials to build up the walls of a […]

A voluntary AI safety code – is it enough?

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At least 16 companies have signed up to voluntary artificial intelligence safety standards introduced at the Bletchley Park summit. They include companies from China and the UAE. The signatories have committed to voluntarily “work toward” information sharing, “invest” in cybersecurity and “prioritise” research into societal risks. However, the standards have faced criticism for lacking teeth […]

The demand for data storage is increasing fast

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As museums and galleries among others collect ever more artefacts they need digital archives their ever-growing collection of pictures, audio and film. Making digital copies of those historical sources is vital as the original copies degrade over time, and will, one day, be lost forever, according to Ian Crawford of the Imperial War Museum. “When […]

Can AI remove the burden of tedious parts of accountancy?

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According to some one of the most tedious parts of the job is analysis of financial data, summarising documents, creating content, drafting documentation, advanced searching, analytics and insight and knowledge management. “When you look at some of the tasks that auditors were doing – some of the boring, mundane tasks around churning data and manipulating […]

Recruitment fraud

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Recruitment fraud affects not only job applicants, it can also impact your business. A particular target as reported by the BBC has been LinkedIn although it is not by any means the only victim. Primarily targeted at applicants it offered what turned out to be fake job interviews. The scams work by firstly posting a […]

Has the technological revolution improved productivity?

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Despite the hype there is apparently very little evidence of improved productivity, according to the BBC. “Between 1974 and 2008 the UK’s productivity – the amount of output you get per worker – grew at an annual rate of 2.3%. But between 2008 and 2020 the rate of productivity growth collapsed to around 0.5% per […]