Month: June 2010

The coming global race for talent

Assuming immigration can grow the nation and fill skill shortages might be flawed.

Yuan Yandong is a Guanzhou factory worker who is saving to open a hotel management company. The New York Times recently followed him through a night on the Foxconn hard drive assembly lines.

The New York Times article asked “is an unlimited supply of Chinese workers waiting to migrate from the poorer provinces”? Joseph F. Coughlin, Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology AgeLab, points out this isn’t the case and China has a demographic hump far bigger than our own baby boomers.

Recognising their workforce problems, China is beginning to move up the value chain as we see with Yuan’s ambitions and the recent strikes in Guangdong factories challenges our assumptions that China will just be the world’s centre for cheap T-shirts and electronics. These changes in countries like China and India were among the topics discussed by the speakers and attendees at last weekend’s X Media Lab in Sydney, in fact X Media Lab itself relocated from Sydney to Shanghai a few years ago.

China’s aging population though is tomorrow’s problem; Japan has this problem today and Western Europe isn’t far behind which means it’s going to get far harder to find workers anywhere in the near future.

For Australian businesses, this means we can’t rely on importing young workers to overcome skill shortages as we have since World War II. The Big Australia idea of using immigration from South Asia, Africa and the Middle East to fix our workforce shortages ignores the competition we’re going to be in with other nations and regions facing much bigger challenges than ours.

In that competition, we don’t offer a great package; traditionally we’ve ignored all non-British qualifications and expected new immigrants to drive our taxis regardless of their skills. Unless we recognise the contributions professional arrivals bring, we’ll struggle to attract those workers.

As businesses, this means we need to be investing and training and making sure our own workplaces and the nation’s workforce are as productive as possible. The first step on an individual business level is to understand what is happening in your sector and how technology is changing it. Regardless of what your industry is, technology is changing your supply chain, customer and supplier behaviour and you need to be understand those changes and how you can profit from them.

Your competition is no longer down the street, it’s around the world and there are millions of young, hard working people like Yuan Yandong looking at your industry right now and thinking how they can do it better. How is your business going to deal with competition like that?

X Media Lab: Global Media Ideas

How are the creative and media industries adapting to a changing world?

As part of the Vivid Festival, X Media Lab returned to Sydney in June 2010 to look at how the creative and media industries are adapting to a changing world where societies very different to the existing dominant cultures are rising and asserting their place in the global economy.

X Media Lab’s Global Media Ideas conference day was billed as exploring “cultural and commercial content in a global world; creative ideas and innovation in media and technology; international media business opportunities; new media and new geographies; and new platforms, applications, and content.” It didn’t disappoint.

The great thing about X Media Labs is how it brings disparate ideas together and exposes the audience to worldwide trends and developments. The June 2010 Sydney X Media Lab was no exception with a great range of diverse speakers. Here’s a brief rundown of their themes, more comprehensive coverage can be found at Brad Howarth’s Lagrange Point blog;

Ralph Simon
Dubbed “the father of the ring tone”, Ralph Simon took us on a tour of innovation that started with the Sex Pistols, through applications like Red Lazer and sites like TuneWiki, which uses crowdsourcing to translate music lyrics, to end with mHealth applications where diabetic children use their mobile phone games to test their blood sugar levels. A broad and exciting view of where the mobile Internet and gaming platforms are going.

Dana Al Salem
The founder of Fanshake, Dana showed us how her site is used to connect bands with their fans. Her view is that today’s Gen Ys are just like their hippy grandparents except today’s groovers are wealthier have more technology. An interesting take on “the more things change, the more they stay the same“.

Gotham Chopra
Gotham described his journey of setting up superhero cartoons for young Indians and intertwined it with a story of his travels through Pakistan as a journalist. His hope is to replace the influence people like Osama Bin Laden have on the youth of South Asia with more positive role models.

Parmesh Shahani
The divide between the richer cities and poorer rural areas in developing nations is often just characterised as a migration story as millions of poor agricultural workers migrate to the cities. Parmesh gave us a broader perspective on what is happening in India including some fascinating case studies of how comparatively older technologies such as satellite TV and SMS mobile messaging are changing rural India.

Joy Mountford
Among the geeks and developers, Joy was probably the most anticipated of the speakers having being a designer with Apple and vice president of design innovation at Yahoo! Joy showed us how designers are moving from the “look” of computer programs to “feel”. She also showed us how crowdsourcing has worked for other projects including the fantastic Johnny Cash Project which reworks his Ain’t No Grave into a group video.

Wayne Borg
The Chief Operating Officer of twofour54, a content creation hub in Abu Dhabi, Wayne took us through the opportunities of 340 million Arabic Speakers covering diverse cultures and where 200 million are under the age of 25. His presentation showed us much of the development plans of the United Arab Emirates and how the kingdoms are seeking to be the Arab world’s creative centre.

Nick Yang
The entrepreneur label is often too easily given away, but no-one could begrudge Nick Yang, founder of KongZhong, ChinaRen.com and Wukong.com for using the title. Nick walked us through his journey of being a young student of Stanford, his return to China and both his and China’s growth over the last decade. He also showed us how his latest venture, Wukong.com, aims to change how search engines work.

Rob Mason and Scott Halcom
Local flavour was provided by Rob Manson from Sydney’s MOB Innovation Lab and Scott Halcomb from from SystemK in Japan, who walked us through the worlds of augmented reality. Rob concluded their joint presentation with the view that object recognition is going to change the way we see the world.

Haidong Pan
Like Nick Yang, Haidong is the founder of a Chinese Internet service, this time Hudong.com which is a “knowledge media” run along the lines of wikipedia that acts as a news and fact service. His presentation on how social knowledge changes the world was thought provoking in how societies are reclaiming their culture and history back from mass media.

Anand Giridharadas
Technology Columnist with The New York Times and International Herald Tribune, Anand challenged us to think about the ethics of the digital world and how foreign cultures are now beginning to colonise the dominant anglo-US culture. Personally I struggled with some of Ananda points as our online ethics should be no different to our off line standards and the US domination of global media stems from it being the richest nation, as other countries catch up with US living standards their cultures will reassert themselves.

John Penny
Like Anand, John forced the audience to think; he invited us to consider the problem of the television producer where audience fragmentation has meant we’re approaching the point where the only profitable TV productions will be reality shows and advertorials. John as an Executive Vice President of Starz Entertainment was well placed to walk us through this dilemma. John finished with a call to consider how dis-intermediation will help rebuild the fortunes of those who want to provide well written screen productions.

Amin Zoufonoun
As corporate development manager at Google, Amin was probably almost as highly anticipated as Joy Mountford had been earlier. Unfortunately his speech on the development of technologies from the Internet’s “Big Bang” fell flat, largely because the audience know this topic. The talk probably would have worked better with an audience of financiers or CEOs who don’t live this topic the way the X Media Lab audience do.

Robert Tercek
To finish a long, stimulating and challenging day Robert Tercek walked us through why great minds like Lord Kelvin, Edison and Einstein had missed emerging technologies in their times and how we can avoid it. Robert sees great opportunities for innovators as successful, large companies entering new markets don’t know more than anyone else and in many cases are blind to the potential of these sectors.

Overall, X Media Labs was another stimulating and fascinating day. The entrepreneurs and artists who had the opportunity to be mentored over the next two days by the speakers were very lucky to be exposed to this sort of talent.

The key message from this X Media Labs came from Parmesh Shahani when he said “don’t just look at India as a market, look at it as a source of innovation and inspiration”. We shouldn’t be just looking for the obvious, easy markets but watching the bigger trends that are developing around us.

The bedrock of trust

Trust is the foundation of business; without trust you have no business

An article in last weekend’s New York Times described the problems of AXA Rosenberg; a quantitative funds manager owned by the French financial giant AXA. The role of quant funds is to use sophisticated share trading programs that maximise returns to large investors.

Sometime in mid 2009 an error was discovered in the software AXA Rosenberg used to trade on behalf of its clients. They didn’t tell their clients until April 2010, at least ten months later.

As a consequence, AXA Rosenberg are finding clients are fleeing them. This illustrates just how important trust is in business.

You don’t have to be a big corporation to fess up to mistakes; we all make them and the sooner we admit them the easier it is to rebuild or keep the trust of those around us.

Trust is the bedrock of business, as AXA Rosenberg has found without trust you have no business.

Choosing a content management system

There’s no such thing as a straight answer in technology, so you need to ask the right questions.

Last week I was asked by a business owner what is the best open source Content Management System for their website. Like many questions in technology, the answer was “it depends”.

Discussing open source and CMS in the one sentence is dangerous as you enter a world of religious geek wars were relationships and reputations are ruined over arguments concerning which product is best; think of the Mac versus PC war fought on a thousand fronts.

There’s also the danger of business owners misunderstanding what “open source” means; to many it means “free” because they don’t realise most of the implementation cost of technology is in the labour time of setting the systems up, not the initial purchase cost. Another risk lies in being blinded by the word “free” results in the business being locked into an inappropriate and ultimately more expensive solution.

This isn’t say the same thing can’t happen with a proprietary system either and often you’ll find being locked into one software vendor means you’re forced into expensive upgrades whenever it suits the vendor’s marketing plan.

Software licenses themselves are a source of risk, in the case of one major technology company I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that half their customers are in breach of their user agreements due to some obscure, arcane and contradictory clause buried deep in the legalese. Not that the software company itself would know, being just as befuddled by their own license conditions as their long suffering customers.

Of the open source Content Management Systems, three options stand out from a crowded field; Drupal, Joomla and WordPress. Each one has it’s own benefits;

WordPress

One of the features that marks WordPress out as the leader in the blogging world is its CMS functions. For most websites and business, WordPress combines ease of use with a vast range of plugins, templates and features. Because of its popularity, there’s an army of consultants and webmasters who can get a professional, corporate looking WordPress based website up and running.

Joomla

Coming from website development roots, Joomla based sites don’t have a habit of looking like blogs that WordPress based sites sometimes do. Like WordPress, Joomla has a large base of developers and supporters and offers access to a wide range of extensions and templates. It offers more flexibility than WordPress if you want to customise your site’s look or feel.

Drupal

Drupal is the best if you want a technical solution. While it’s more expensive and time consuming to set up, it offers more flexibility and power for the business. Drupal is probably the best choice if you have a high traffic site with lots of often changing content.

The ultimate solution comes down to what is right for your business so it’s best to get an expert in to have a look at what your current needs and future plans are for your website. Both Smartcompany’s Aunty B and Craig Reardon have previously looked at how to find the right experts.

One thing to keep in mind when asking experts is that religious aspect; many websites designers are evangelists for one platform or another, so ask widely and remember to be firm about your budgets.

I’d be interested to hear from business owners what their experiences have been with the different platforms and in seeking advice, so please comment below on what you’ve found when shopping for a CMS. Religious geek flamewars on the topic are welcome as well.

Every business is a people business

Our businesses are all about people regardless of what we sell.

Facebook’s problems with privacy shows how all business are about people. When managers and business owners forget, their businesses are heading for trouble.

When you’re running a web based service, it’s easy to forget those valuable views and clicks are people. Facebook’s current problems are a reminder that it’s people that sit at the core of every business; as staff, management and customers.

Facebook satisfies a basic urge;  our desire to share our experiences, like party and baby photos, with our friends and relatives. We don’t want to share them with some sleazy tooth whitening advertiser and certainly don’t want them shown to the entire world.

Each time Facebook makes a change that opens more data to the world, it loses a little more of their customer’s trust and while the recent Quit Facebook Day only saw a tiny fraction of users leave the service there will be a point where most people stop trusting Facebook and look elsewhere.

It’s a classic case of a technology business not understanding the people aspect of their market.

There’s a wonderful scene in the Mad Men TV series where Kodak have a problem selling their new rotating slide projector, the advertising people fix it by telling the human story behind slide shows, that the pictures are about memory and belonging.

In a funny way Facebook is the modern slide night.

Even if you aren’t in technology, it’s easy to forget the human side of the business. For instance the excellent plumber who walks his dirty boots through the customer’s house doesn’t get invited back.

Mix technology with business and things get worse. We get so tied up in the shiny bells and cute whistles of our toys that we forget our staff don’t know how to use those tools and our customers don’t understand them.

Big businesses are probably the worst for this; over the weekend I came across one of the big telcos using an artificial intelligence web bot to bounce sales enquires between their equally uninformative website, Facebook page and Twitter feed. They were actually messing around potential customers who were looking to spend money.

Those managers responsible in that organisation probably think the system is working fine. Because they’ve been dazzled by the tech they’ve forgotten the whole point is to engage their customers and get them to buy something, not get them stuck in a continuous loop whichadds little value to the business or the client.

Understanding the human aspect of the technology you deploy gives you the advantage over those big telcos and the hottest Silicon Valley stars. So how are you dealing with the human side of your business?

The Outsourcing Revolution

Could your business be a victim of the outsourcing revolution?

Matt Barrie, CEO of freelancer.com proclaimed at The Insight Exchange’s Getting Results from Crowdsourcing that “outsourcing and crowdsourcing are revolutionising business”.

This is true and we need to keep in mind revolutions result in some eating brioche while others walk to the guillotine. The question for every business owner should be is their industry at risk when there’s a global supply of cheap labour at everyone’s fingertips.

Smart Company covered the pros and cons of crowdsourcing in an earlier article and the interesting thing is many people, including experts and business owners, still confuse crowdsourcing with outsourcing.

Outsourcing is hiring in labour to do the job, there’s nothing really new in this except the Internet now allows providers from around the world to bid for work through sites like Freelancer.com, elance and odesk.

Crowdsourcing is where groups of people volunteer their efforts either for free or in the hope they will be selected to do a job such as logo design. Many of these sites rely on free or marginal cost labour with a few exceptions like Yvonne Adele’s Ideas While You Sleep.

One of the points we need to keep in mind with both crowdsourcing and outsourcing is while there are massive savings to be made, there are risks as both require project management skills which are often underrated and undervalued, as anyone who’s built an extension to their house can attest. The big banks found through their outsourcing adventures in the last 15 years that managing your foreign service providers can be expensive, time consuming and not without elements of risk.

As low cost solutions for relatively simple tasks involving no intellectual property, Internet outsourcing and crowdsourcing are a good solution for big and small business. It also makes you fear for a lot of local skilled businesses like designers and programmers competing against these low cost countries.

It’s not the solution for everything though and many tasks are best outsourced locally or kept in house.

Another thought is that if we accept we’ve moved to an ideas based economy, what makes us assume an American, European or Australian idea is any more valuable than an Indian or Chinese idea? So the outsourcing revolution may have some surprises for those of us who think we’ll be untouched by this. Indeed many of the websites and local business advocating outsourcing programs could themselves have competitors from low cost locations.

Regardless of these thoughts the global market is now at your doorstep even if you don’t compete overseas. The question is will your industry be going to the guillotine or one of those eating cake as the global outsourcing revolution evolves?