Hi. I'm DWP Insider.

30 years in the digital workplace. Still learning. Still writing about it.

"I got into this field before anyone called it the digital workplace. I've watched it become one of the most interesting and underappreciated corners of the technology industry."

Three decades. That's how long I've been living inside the intersection of technology, work, and the messy human reality of getting people to actually use the tools you put in front of them.

I've seen the rise of the intranet, the fall of the intranet, and the reinvention of the intranet. I've lived through SharePoint versions I'd prefer to forget. I've watched the death of the desktop get predicted approximately fourteen times. And now I'm watching AI either transform everything or become the most expensive screensaver in corporate history. Probably both, depending on the organization.

This site is my way of making sense of all of it. No corporate filter. No vendor agenda. Just honest takes from someone who's been around long enough to know what actually matters and what's just noise. Why is the site named Center of the Sandwich? Every sandwich has bread on the outside and the good stuff in the middle. That's this site. Cut straight to the center — skip the fluff, get to the part worth reading.

30 years in the digital workplace

Early 1990s: The beginning

Started when "digital workplace" meant a shared network drive

Email was new. The web was newer. Most workplace tech meant managing file servers and convincing executives that PCs weren't a fad. The fundamentals I learned then still hold: meet people where they are, make technology invisible, and focus on outcomes rather than features.

Late 1990s through 2000s: The intranet era

Built intranets when intranets were the future of work

Content management systems, knowledge bases, collaboration portals. We built them all with enormous optimism and watched most of them slowly become digital graveyards. The hard lesson: technology adoption is a people problem, not a technology problem.

2010s: The platform wars

Survived SharePoint, Yammer, Jive, and the Great Collaboration Wars

Every year brought a new platform that was going to replace email. None of them replaced email. But Slack came closer than anyone expected, and the combination of mobile-first design and consumer UX expectations permanently changed what enterprise software had to look like.

2020s: The transformation decade

COVID, hybrid work, and now AI. The most interesting era yet.

The pandemic compressed ten years of digital workplace evolution into eighteen months. AI is doing it again. I've never been more energized by this field, or more aware of how much gets lost when technology moves faster than people can adapt to it.

Now: This site

Writing it all down so it's actually useful to someone

Center of the Sandwich is where I'm putting everything I know, think, and believe about digital workplace technology. Thirty years of pattern recognition, filtered into something worth reading. More to come.

What I believe

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Technology is never the problem

Every failed rollout I've ever seen was a change management failure, not a technology failure. The tools almost always work. Getting people to actually use them is the hard part.

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Get to the center, skip the crust

Most content about digital workplace tech is filler. Vendor press releases dressed up as journalism. I'm only interested in the substance: what actually works, what doesn't, and why.

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Hype cycles are real, but so is progress

I've lived through enough technology hype cycles to be appropriately skeptical. But I've also seen genuinely transformative shifts. The trick is telling them apart early. AI is the real thing.

🤝

The human side is always the story

Thirty years in, the most interesting questions are never about features. They're about how people work, how organizations change, and what it means to do good work in a world that keeps shifting.

Recent writing

New articles publish automatically every morning — covering AI adoption, digital workplace tools, strategy, and the occasional opinion nobody asked for.

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