The thirty-fifth episode of the podcast that you know and love as "We Love Ugly Data!" is out; available in audio form everywhere you get your podcasts from and additionally in video form via YouTube (which we've embedded below). It's a new year and the beginning of series 5 (despite what Matt says in the intro to this episode, because he lost count) and with Matt and Alan in the chairs, they catch-up on some recent blog posts on the need for specificity, not to ignore paper, how there's no new cash in IT and how to make your Information Management skill invaluable in AI projects.

In this month’s episode:

Specificity & Elephants

Alan's kicked off the new year with a blog post "Navigating 2026: The Demand for Hyper-Specificity and the Persistent Paper Elephant", which is a result of him pondering about 2025 over the festive period. First is the need to continue to focus on the specifics of the outcomes from technology, rather that the technology horizontal markets that might provide them. Focus on the fixes, the bottlenecks in the real world. Second is that there remains a lot more paper in the world that technologists. Our own quantitative research data points not only to a lot of paper being used in processes but also to that amount of paper likely to increase (you can read about this in MMI reports that are available here and here). Matt reminds us that the sole superpower that analysts have is the ability to talk to people.

Beyond the walled gardens

Matt's published a pair of blog posts; at the tail end of last year "Beyond the walled gardens; can business applications break out to be the ultimate agentic orchestrators?" and just this month a follow-up "The lengthy hikes awaiting AI and automation in 2026". As he starts to update the data model for the 2026 edition of the Work Intelligence Market Analysis, he's pondering how AI-native, business application vendors and existing automation vendors are looking to develop their businesses against an tiny inflation in IT budgets (and big renewal numbers being demanded by the core suppliers). The pair also discuss maybe why there's been a lot of big M&A for security software firms lately.

How to not lose the AI opportunity

Finally, Alan wrote an Information Management focused blog post in December "How to not lose the opportunity that AI offers Information Management". Here he discusses the ways in which IM needs to inveigle itself into AI projects to be the good stewards of data; "own the data, own the data sourcing, the cleansing pipeline, and the metadata framework for the vector store".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZKtMA72r5A

Related Links for Series 5 Episode 1

Alan's blog post "Navigating 2026: The Demand for Hyper-Specificity and the Persistent Paper Elephant" on the need for extreme specificity and that paper isn't going away.
There a couple of MMI reports that talk about the amount of paper in contemporary processes;
Market Momentum Index: Intelligent Document

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