Christopher Noble

 

Career snapshot


Director of Research at The 451 Group

The 451 is analyst group comprising some of the finest minds dedicated to unpicking and predicting the driving forces in the IT industry. I edited its large-scale research reports for quality, ensuring each a compelling thesis, was internally consistent and made the best use of diagrams to elucidate complex points. I also wrote the initial requirement specifications the back-end systems used to create The 451’s ‘industry taxonomy’ system now a central part of the business’s workflow and collaborative strategy. I previously headed the company’s networking and communications research.


Director of Information & Web Strategy at Band-X

Band-X was the first of the bandwidth trading exchanges. It allowed the trading of everything from from real-time IP-backbone capacity and voice minutes to colocation space.  Such trading had never been done before and I was central in devising the Web interfaces and service descriptions that were used for buying and selling these not-quite commodities.

This was not simply a question of creating a market place, however. There was also the question of devising strategies for turning the information that the exchanges captured into indices and saleable information. Oh, and I initially handled PR and marketing too.


Managing Editor & Executive Editor at Communications Week International and TotalTelecom. Apart from managing much of the the commissioning and editing of these news publications, I also managed some novel production issues. This included implementing a pre-WiFi system whereby laptop-toting journalists could write short news stories that would be pushed to a rolling news Web site and to the Palm devices of delegates roaming the show floor.

The solution involved running a Web server on each laptop, serving a structured form into which journalist would write their copy before transmitting it via a cellular modem to a central server. From here it was edited, approved and passed to ancillary servers each attached to 10 Palm docking stations. The most popular news items? Football score updates from outside of the show.


Editor Multimedia Futures, Online Reporter, Network Week, PowerPC News & Deputy Editor of Computerwire. I covered all manner of IT and edited what was probably the first commercial online magazine in the UK.

After 20+ years of writing about IT, managing magazine production and project managing sizeable Web products, three things fascinate me:

  1. ‣The level of misunderstanding that still commonly hampers communication between business units and IT departments.

  2. ‣The amount of information that businesses generate that could be used to the benefit of staff, customers, partners and the bottom-line.... but which isn’t.

  3. ‣How simple it can be to overcome these issues with relatively low cost technology and some tweaks to workflow, organisation and process.

2008

1991