Last Friday Cisco Systems presented their Internet of Everything index in Sydney looking at how connected machines are changing business and society.
Cisco Australia CEO Ken Boal gave the company’s vision of how a connected society might work in the near future with alarm clocks synchronising with calendars, traffic lights adapting to weather and road conditions while the local coffee shop has your favourite brew waiting for as the barista knows exactly when you will arrive.
While that vision is somewhat spooky, Boal had some important points for business, primarily that in Cisco’s view there is $14 trillion dollars in value to be realised from utilising the internet of machines.
Much of that value is “being left on the table” in Boal’s words with nearly 50% of businesses not taking advantage of the new technologies.
Boal was particularly worried about Australian businesses with Cisco lumping the country into ‘beginner’ status in adopting internet of everything technologies along with Mexico and Russia, with all three lagging far behind Germany, Japan and France.
In Boal’s view, Australian management’s failure is due to “the focus on streamlining costs has come at the cost of innovation.”
This something worth thinking about; in a business environment where most industries only have two dominant players and the corporate mindset is focused on maximising profits and staying a percentage point or two ahead of the other incumbent, being an innovator itsn’t a priority – it might even be a disadvantage.
For Australian business, and society, that complacency is a threat which leaves the nation exposed to the massive changes our world is undergoing.
Australia has been behind in technology and innovation since World War 2. It’s behind most developed countries and some of the emerging and developing nations for online retail, mobile payment, etc. It’s also behind for marketing technology including digital marketing including content & social media marketing. Marketing technology landscape involves not just digital marketing but also some parts of direct, etc. Also, marketing technology, creativity as well as writing skills are good though they are only small parts as the larger sides involves technical and analytical skills.
Also, under http://rohitthomas.wordpress.com/2013/07/28/why-australian-businesses-should-blog/, “Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN, blogging and Youtube are the five most commonly used social media platforms by marketers while Tumblr, WordPress and Blogger are few of the platforms provided for blogging by social media. On Tumblr and WordPress platforms itself, there were more than 150 million blogs read by people of different age groups. Also out of the 3000 marketers surveyed for the purpose of understanding how they had used social media for the growth and promotion of their businesses, 62% of them had said that they had wanted to master blogging the most.
US, Britain, Russia, Brazil, and France were few of the world leaders within social media while for blogging, few of the world leaders were US, UK, Japan, Brazil and Canada. Australian businesses, on the other hand, had been failing to keep up with social media. 50% of the top 100 Australian companies had no social media presence while many of the others preferred that their customers didn’t comment back. Also, amongst the small and medium businesses that represent 99.7% of the actively trading businesses within Australia, only 27% of the small businesses and 34% of the medium businesses had a social media presence where only 12% had been blogging.”
Lastly, under http://rohitthomas.wordpress.com/2013/07/27/technologies-changing-industries-business-models-and-lifestyles-completely-4/, technology and innovation have been changing everything for centuries. Australia is sadly a failure at both including digital marketing which includes social. Disruptive technologies would be changing the world and having an economic impact of about $14 trillion to $33 trillion per year by 2025 as shown in the above blog. This blog shows that an individual would need to adapt including with their line of work. And some of the dying careers would be traditional pharmacists, drivers, astronauts, soldiers, babysitters, sportswriters and other reporters, jobs within hospitality, entertainment and retail outlets as well as manufacturing assembly jobs, postal service workers, office and administrative workers, telemarketing and door-to-door sales. The thriving careers on the other hand would be like data scientists (statisticians), research and design managers, computer programmers and network administrators, medical assistants, etc. Individuals would also need to take into consideration that full-time jobs would be a dying trend.
In terms of having a better and faster internet connection, Australia is not falling behind in the race. By 2015 when all NBN infrastructures will be complete, there will be a dramatic shift among service providers to offer fibre broadband internet that aims to provide more reliable and faster internet connections.