Paul Wallbank | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

First we kill email, then Powerpoint

French company Atos intends to eliminate email, Powerpoint and meetings from their business. Few organisations are brave enough to follow them.

Two years ago French technology firm Atos raised eyebrows after announcing the company would go email free.

Atos CEO Thierry Breton said at the time,

We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives. At [Atos] we are taking action now to reverse this trend, just as organizations took measures to reduce environmental pollution after the industrial revolution.

Eighteen months on, the Financial Times reports Thierry is well on the way to eliminate the office pollution that is email. Lee Timmons, one of Atos’ Vice Presidents, tells the paper,

“At the 2012 London Olympics, we were able to zero-email certify some processes – a first – and (we) look set to be email-free internally by the end of 2013,”

Now Atos is looking at eliminating other business distractions, notably Powerpoint presentations and meetings.

Eliminating inboxes, Powerpoint and meetings from the workplace seems a noble cause. Few organisations would be prepared to even consider this.

For many staff and managers, spending hours sorting email, attending pointless meetings and futzing around with over-elaborate Powerpoint presentations is how they justify their time.

It’s going to be interesting to see how Atos goes with thier objective of streamlining the workplace and how many other companies are prepared to copy them.

Man sending an email image courtesy of Bruno-Free at SXC.hu

Are Small Businesses becoming Digital Roadkill?

We all agree that the internet is changing business, but how many smaller companies are prepared for the massive changes ahead?

Technology Spectator today discusses if fast broadband initiatives like the National Broadband Network will be good for all small businesses.

Andrew Twaites of Melbourne consultancy The Strategy Canvas posits that many businesses aren’t equipped to compete against global competitors.

The additional competitive pressures that the NBN rollout is likely place on segments of the small business sector that have to date enjoyed a degree of natural protection as a result of their customers’ inability to access super-fast broadband.

Once that natural protection falls away, many small businesses will for the first time be exposed to competition from interstate and overseas businesses

This is a very good point; many small businesses are transaction based service providers who can be easily replaced by lower cost overseas companies, particularly now foreign suppliers are easily accessible through services like O-Desk and Freelancer.com.

Every time I see Freelancer.com’s CEO Matt Barrie talk to a small business audience, I’m surprised the room doesn’t lynch him as he’s describing how their businesses are threatened species and many are living on borrowed time.

One of the reasons why small businesses are threatened is because they are under-capitalised, many simply can’t invest in the technology or training they need to compete.

There’s also a reluctance to embrace technology, that half of all small businesses – in the US, the UK or Australia – don’t have even a basic website.

On a recent holiday in Northern NSW, I checked dozens of tourism businesses’ online presences. Few had a website and almost none had bothered filling in their Google Places profiles, let alone set up social media presences.

Yet almost all of their new customers are looking for them on the web, increasingly through mobile devices or social media services where they are invisible.

Not having a website, local listing or Facebook page are trivial things; but the fact that most businesses haven’t done the basics doesn’t bode well as the speed of commerce accelerates over the rest of this decade.

That many small businesses will be put out of business by today’s changes isn’t unprecedented – blacksmiths were out of job shortly after the motor car rolled out and whale oil manufacturers by gas and then electric lighting.

As Andrew points out, we assume ‘creative destruction’ just disrupts big incumbent corporation. In reality it’s the little guys who feel more pain than insulated executives of big business.

Many of us little guys are going to have to start thinking about adapting to very changed times, the risks of being digital roadkill are real.

Doll roadkill image courtesy of Pethrus through WikiMedia

Beer and 3D printing lead a Belgian town into the future

One town in Belgium shows how new industrial hubs are developing around emerging technologies like 3D printing

While many cities and states are fighting to subsidise declining businesses others are becoming hubs of future industries. The story of Leuven and 3D printing is one of the latter.

A great article and accompanying presentation from Reuters illustrates some of the possibilities with 3D printing technologies.

Most of the article revolves around the Belgian company Materialise whose CEO, Wilfried Vancraen, has been a pioneer in 3D printing.

An interesting upshot of Materialise’s development is how the company’s hometown, Leuven, is promoted by the firm as the ‘world capital of beer and 3D printing.’

Calling yourself the ‘World Capital of Beer’ is a big – and one suspects risky – call in Belgium so it’s not surprising that the town itself doesn’t use the tagline.

Being the world capital of 3D printing though does have some allure of Leuven being able to build itself into one of the world’s hub for the new technology.

Those hubs are a feature of every industrial revolution – whether it’s Silicon Valley and the manufacturing centres of South East China today or the English ironworking and cotton milling hubs of the 18th Century.

For governments looking at attracting job creating industries, instead of desperately trying to attract the old industries of the 20th Century it might be worthwhile to consider what the community has to offer the business leaders of this millennium.

Leuven may or may not become one of the world hubs of 3D printing, but at least the city has a chance – those bidding for car factories, movie productions or prisons are destined to decline even if their bids succeed.

Beer pouring image courtesy of dyet and sxc.hu

Microsoft’s China crisis

Microsoft’s Chinese partner is blocking Skype messages and possibly passing user details onto PRC authorities. This security concern could damage both Microsoft and Skype.

That the Chinese Public Security Bureau is blocking your messages – and may even be reading them – would make anyone pause before they used a service.

Bloomberg Businessweek reports Microsoft Skype is doing exactly this with its Chinese customers. Anything deemed inappropriate is censored and referred to servers belonging to TOM Online, the company that runs the Skype service on behalf on Microsoft in China.

The Bloomberg story goes onto detail how one Canadian researcher is reverse engineering the Chinese blacklists, giving us a wonderful insight into the petty and touchy minds of China’s censors and political leaders.

What raises eyebrows about this story is how nonchalant Microsoft is about this issue, in a wonderful piece of corporate speak the software giant answered Bloomberg’s question with the following bland statement;

“Skype’s mission is to break down barriers to communications and enable conversations worldwide,” the statement said. “Skype is committed to continued improvement of end user transparency wherever our software is used.”

Microsoft’s statement also said that “in China, the Skype software is made available through a joint venture with TOM Online. As majority partner in the joint venture, TOM has established procedures to meet its obligations under local laws.”

Microsoft have to fix this problem quickly, glibly saying the Chinese government eavesdropping on conversations is a matter for partners is not going to be accepted by most customers.

It would be a shame should Microsoft’s Skype investment fail – Skype is a very good fit for Microsoft, particularly when the technology is coupled with the Linc corporate messaging platform, so squandering goodwill over protecting users’ conversation seems counterproductive.

One of the great business issues of this decade is the battle to protect users’ privacy. Those who don’t do this, or don’t understand the imperatives of doing so, are going to lose the trust of the marketplace.

Twenty years ago, Microsoft could have risked this. Today they can’t as they struggle with a poor response to their Windows 8 operating system and their mobile phone product.

Losing the trust of their customers may be the final straw.

Australia welcomes the multi generational mortgage

Australia starts to repeat Japan’s experience with multi generational mortgages. With a twist that might be more debilitating than the Japanese lost decades.

At the height of the Japanese property boom in the 1980s, the hundred year mortgage came into being.

Pushing payments onto children and grand-children was the only way home prices could continue to rise once they hit levels which the average Japanese worker could ever afford with a more traditional twenty or thirty year mortgage.

Twenty five years later Australia finds itself in a similar position as parents guarantee their childrens’ mortgages.

Repeating the Japanese mistake

While the Japanese looked to sticking their mortgages onto their kids and grandkids, Down Under the kids are fighting back and getting mum and dad to underwrite their unaffordable loans.

This weekend’s Sydney Morning Herald features in its property section the story of how Sharon and Graeme Bruce guaranteed their son’s and his fiance’s mortgage in Sydney’s inner suburbs.

While the story isn’t clear on the size of the deposit (which isn’t surprising given the SMH’s shoddy editing), it appears the Bruces’ have guaranteed around $300,000 so his son and future daughter-in-law can grab a five bedroom, 1.45 million dollar mansion.

One wonders what great businesses Matt and Hannah could build if mum and dad were prepared to stump up a similar amount to invest in a start up?

Australia’s property obsession

Sadly we’ll never know – in Australia, the smart money gets a job, pays off a mortgage and accumulates wealth through investment properties. What cows are to African tribesmen, negatively geared units are to the Australian middle class.

The hundred year strategy hasn’t worked too well for Japan, with a declining population those mortgages entered into a boom level 1980s values now don’t look so attractive and are one large reason for the nation’s lost decades.

In Australia, things aren’t likely to work so well either. The Baby Boomers and Lucky Generationals – those born from 1930 to 1945 – guaranteeing their kids’ and grandkids’ mortgages are relying on ever increasing property prices.

This is understandable given that few of them have any experience of long term stagnation, let alone decline, of property values but it leaves them incredibly exposed should the Aussie housing market slump.

Can an Aussie property decline happen?

Many Australians, particularly those with vested interests, maintain such a decline can’t happen but the prospects aren’t good as the SMH story shows;

The couple had attempted to buy a small terrace in Newtown but kept getting pipped at the post by other young professional couples. At a higher price point they had no competition.

Despite his parents’ generosity he said he would still need to rent out a few of the rooms to help pay for the mortgage.

So Matt can’t afford the mortgage. That’s not good starting point and one that could cost his parents dearly, which they don’t seem to care about much.

”Obviously my dad guaranteeing the loan was the only way we were going to purchase this,” Mr Bruce said. ”You need to have a 20 per cent deposit otherwise the banks want you to pay insurance … it’s a bit of a rort really.”

It’s fair to call mortgage insurance a rort – as it certainly is – but its purpose is to protect the banks should a mortgagee default and the financiers find themselves out of pocket.

With Matt’s parents getting him out of paying that insurance his bank has much better default protection, equity in his parents’ property.

Guaranteeing risk and misery

I’m not privy to the finances of Sharon and Bruce, but most of their contemporaries can ill afford to lose several hundred thousand dollars in home equity in their later years.

That is where Australia’s multi-generational mortgages could turn very nasty, very quickly as older Australians find themselves having to deliver on the guarantees they gave on behalf of their over committed offspring.

In Japan, it’s taken a long time for the population to realise their national wealth has been squandered on twenty years of propping up unsustainable property prices and economic policies.

One wonders how long it will takes Australians to realise the same has happened to them and what the political reaction will be.

Risky business – is crowd funding too rich for investors and innovators

Do recent kickstarter failures show that crowd funding is too risky for most entrepreneurs and investors?

It’s sad when a Kickstarter project fails to meet its promises and the story of the Collusion Pen, a stylus designed for iPads, is a salutary lesson of how many people don’t understand when they buy into or set up a crowdfunding proposal.

The idea behind crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter is that artists, designers and inventors can publicise their projects, interested supporters can pledge funds in return for benefits like advanced previews, a signed book or an early version of version of the product.

For the Collusion pen, it’s the early version that’s upset supporters who’ve complained that the device is unusable in its current form.

Not getting the product when it was promised is standard for Kickstarter projects, late last year CNN Money reported how 84% of the site’s top listed ventures missed their target delivery dates.

The reason for Kickstarter’s apparent failures is that ideas are risky. Often, entrepreneurs and artists overestimate their skills and underestimate the scale of the task they’ve given themselves.

Added to this, Kickstarter is an expensive way to raise capital. When another Australian startup Moore’s Cloud went onto Kickstarter to fund their internet connected light, they found that to cover the $285,000 development costs they had to win pledges worth $700,000.

Moore’s Cloud missed their target and have gone on to raising money independently.

Apart from the those risks we set our expectations too high – we believe the first versions will be perfect out of the box and every idea will make the founder a billion.

In his article The Fake Church of Entrepreneurship, US business founder Francisco Dao discussed how much of the start up community is based up on religious beliefs about the sanctity of founders and that everyone can become rich by selling their idea to a greater fool.

The sad thing is that ideas are like armpits – most of us have a couple and almost all of them stink.

Not that people shouldn’t have a go; having a hare brained idea and making it a reality is the foundation of human progress. It’s just that most ideas don’t work out.

Making matters worse is our inability to evaluate risk; notable in the Sydney Morning Herald story are the consumer and investor protection angles.

If someone isn’t getting what they thought they had been promised, then “the government aught to do something.”

The biggest risk of all to Kickstarter and other crowdfunding sites is that governments will regulate them either as stores or as investments.

As investments crowdfunding projects will be hiring lawyers and bankers to draft densely worded product disclosure statements which will see ventures like Moore’s cloud having to raise a couple of million more to cover their legal costs.

Should crowdfunding be considered as a consumer issue, then projects will have be expected to deliver or face action from consumer protection agencies which would make most nonviable.

The stories of crowdfunding successes have to be considered in the same way as most artistic and entrepreneurial ventures; we hear about the winners, but we don’t hear so much about those who didn’t ‘succeed’.

While we – as consumers, investors and entrepreneurs – don’t think through those risks, we’ll be disappointed in tools like crowdsourcing which would be a shame as its a good way for some ideas to get a healthy start.

Failure image courtesy of cobrasoft on sxc.hu

Door to door blues

How short term management thinking caught energy suppliers and telecommunications providers short.

The news that energy companies have decided to drop direct door to door selling in the face of prosecution is the latest example of poor thought out performance metrics and managers unsuccessfully trying to shift risks out of their business.

Electricity and gas distributors Energy Australia and AGL embarked on a door-to-door sales campaign to gain more customers. Like most modern corporations, they don’t do this stuff themselves and engaged outsourcing companies who in turn took on commission salespeople to do the ground level selling selling.

It didn’t work well and in face of complaints, both companies had to back away from their campaigns after suffering legal and reputational damage.

The sad thing this has happened before, at the time of telecoms deregulation in the 1990s telcos did the same thing to grow their market share. Door to door sales teams fanned out across the suburbs to sign households up to telephone plans.

In one example, a company hired dozens of backpackers, bussed them to outlying suburbs and sent them out on the streets to sign up as many households as possible.

Initially the campaigns were a success with providers reporting increased signups, greater market share, fat executive bonuses and happy commission earning salespeople.

Then the complaints began.

Customers discovered they’d been lied to, or in some cases falsely signed up, as hungry salespeople did everything they could to get a commission.

At first the telcos thought they could throw the problem over the fence so they blamed the contractors. Eventually the damage became so great the telcos had to back down on their door to door selling as problems multiplied and consumer protection agencies expressed their irritation.

At the heart of the problems with this type of door to door selling is the mismatch of incentives – for managers, contractors and the teams going door to door in the suburbs.

Door to Door Blues

At the coalface are the salesteams trudging around suburbs. In the 1990s telco boom they were largely made up of backpackers whose interests were to sign up as many customers as possible in order to fund the next stage of their travels.

Often, the telco or its contractor would only discover a sign up was the family dog or toddler long after the traveller was sunning themselves at Koh Phi Phi.

Using Indian students as the energy contractors were doing largely fixed some of the worst excesses of the 1990s but it didn’t address all of the problems

Management misalignment

Driving the rush for sign ups are usually poorly designed management Key Perfomance Indicators – a dumb set of executive benchmarks rewards poor behaviour and creates unforeseen risks. Particularly when those KPIs are focused on short term metrics.

Very quickly the risks in the short term focus become apparent and managers back off from these programs.

In this case it appears Energy Australia’s managers heeded the early warnings and backed off before the problem became too great, unlike the telcos who let the sales teams run rampant before reigning them.

What’s saddening about Energy Australia’s and AGL’s problems is they were totally forseeable and those who warned of the risks in a door-to-door customers acquisition strategy – and there were almost certainly some in these organisations – were overuled by enthusiastic executives aiming to bust their sales and market share metrics.

Sometimes we are condemned to repeat history repeatedly in business.

Leadership in a connected world

How do managers and executives lead in a connected world?

Managing a business or government agency as information pours into organisations is one of the great challenges for modern executives.

As part of the Australian Cisco Live event, a panel looked at Public Sector Leadership in a Connected World, many of the issues discussed apply to private sector executives as they do to public sector managers.

Cisco’s Director of Global Public Sector Practice, Martin Stewart-Weeks, kicked off the panel with the observation that “we now live in a world where information has become completely unmanageable.”

Martin quoted from David Weinberg’s book Too Big To Know, Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room. The author has a good explanation of his book in this YouTube clip.

Trusting the community seems to be the biggest problem facing politicians and the public service, policy consultant Rod Glover puts the general distrust towards governments on the failure of leaders to consult over changes and decision.

Economist Nick Gruen and Australian Industry Group adviser Kate Pound echoed this problem in that a change of culture is needed among leaders towards the way information is controlled and managed.

Nick sees that culture changing while Rod thinks there will need to be demonstrated successes before risk adverse public service leaders will be prepared to adopt new ways of managing.

Kate’s view is that culture change will require a realignment of incentives which will make managers accountable for the delivery of services. She cites a situation where businesses are obligated to register online but the agency’s website doesn’t work.

So the problem is as much gathering the right data along with processing the information inside an agency. Both are challenges for organisations with rigid hierarchies and information flows.

Information is no longer power — it’s how you use it. But the structures are still based around access and control of knowledge.

The big culture shift for politicians, public servants and corporate executives is we can no longer hoard information.

For managers in both the public and private sectors, the task is now to share information and trust the right people will use it well.

Paul travelled to Cisco Live courtesy of Cisco Systems

Dealing with the data explosion

Supply the mobile base stations for data hungry customers is one of the great challenges for telcos. How they resolve this will create some unusual alliances.

“Last year’s mobile data traffic was nearly twelve times the size of the entire global Internet in 2000.”

That little factoid from Cisco’s 2013 Virtual Networking Index illustrates how the business world is evolving as various wireless, fibre and satellite communications technologies are delivering faster access to businesses and households.

Mobile data growth isn’t slowing; Cisco estimate global mobile data traffic was estimated at 885 petabytes a month and Cisco estimate it will grow fourteen fold over the next five years.

Speaking at the Australian Cisco Live Conference, Dr. Robert Pepper, Cisco Vice President of Global Technology Policy and Kevin Bloch, Chief Techincal Officer of Cisco Australia and New Zealand, walked the local media through some of the Asia-Pacific results of Virtual Networking Index.

Dealing with these sort of data loads is going to challenge Telcos who were hit badly by the introduction of the smartphone and the demands it put on their cellphone networks.

A way to deal with the data load are heterogeneous networks, or HetNets, where phones automatically switch from the telcos’ cellphone systems to local wireless networks without the caller noticing.

The challenge with that is what’s in it for the private property owners whose networks the telcos will need to access for the HetNets to work.

One of the solutions in Dr Pepper’s opinion is to give business owners access to the rich data the telcos will be gathering on the customers using the HetNets.

This Big Data idea ties into PayPal’s view of future commerce and shows just how powerful pulling together disparate strands of information is going to be for businesses in the near future.

But many landlords and wireless network owners are going to want more than just access to the some of the telco data — we can also be sure that the phone companies are going to be careful about what customer data they share with their partners.

It may well be that we’ll see telcos providing free high capacity fibre connections and wireless networks into shopping malls, football stadiums, hotels and other high traffic locations so they can capture high value smartphone users.

One thing is for sure and that’s fibre connections are necessary to carry the data load.

Anyone who thinks the future of broadband lies in wireless networks has to understand that the connections to the base stations doesn’t magically happen — high speed fibre is essential to carry the signals.

Getting both the fibre and the wireless base stations is going to be one of the challenges for telcos and their data hungry customers over the next decade.

Paul travelled to the Cisco Live event in Melbourne courtesy of Cisco Systems.

Retail and the internet of machines

Paypal and eBay are using the Internet of machines to put service station cashiers out of work.

Online retail and payment giants Ebay and PayPal hosted a media lunch in Sydney yesterday to publicise their Australian Business Update.

While eBay dominates the online selling market, PayPal’s position in the payment market place is extremely powerful with Internet monitoring company Comscore reporting in their Digital Wallet Roadmap how PayPal dominates the US market and does likewise in other markets like Australia.

Their update confirms the trends which have been obvious for some time, particularly in how mobile devices are now driving retail. eBay’s research indicates properly implemented multichannel strategies drives six times more sales than just having an online presence.

What was particularly notable with eBay’s presentation was how the Internet of Machines is changing the retail and logistics industries as smartphones and connected point of sales systems are cutting out jobs and middle men.

Paypal are particularly proud of their US partnership with cash register manufacturer NCR that integrates smartphone payments with the point of sales systems in restaurants, convenience stores and gas stations.

eBay illustrated this with their examples of coupon offers being tied to smartphone payment systems so people paying for gas with their smartphone get a voucher offer for various up sells.

Studies in the US have found a $10 offer can result in sales of up to $100. A pretty compelling deal for most merchants.

With these technologies, we’re seeing how connected machines are changing even the most mundane business tasks.

It may well be that the days of the service station cashier are numbered; it’s quite possible that in one generation we’ll have gone from full staffed gas stations to totally automated facilities.

The example of gas station attendants and cashiers is just one example of how automation is changing many retail and sales tasks. It would be a brave person to say their job isn’t safe.

Facebook’s struggle to stay relevant

Are Facebook’s advertising policies alienating users and leaving advertisers unimpressed?

Are we getting sick of Facebook? Tech magazine CNet stirred up the interwebs on the weekend with the claim that Teenagers are Tiring of Facebook a meme was pushed by the New York Times’ Nick Bilton dissecting his experience with the service.

It’s not just teenagers moving away from social media sites though, many adults are getting sick of intrusive adverts and promoted posts getting in the way of the news about family and friends.

As an example, here are the ads taken off the page of one fifty year old woman’s feed.

“I find these offensive” she says, “I’ve been posting my results from a fitness program and now my Facebook page is plastered with ugly weight loss advertisements.”

Clearly the targeted advertisements are working too well and clumsy marketers are destroying the user experience with ugly and offensive ads.

Not that those ads are working as Nick Bilton found when he decided to promote a post to his 400,000 followers.

From the four columns I shared in January, I have averaged 30 likes and two shares a post. Some attract as few as 11 likes. Photo interaction has plummeted, too. A year ago, pictures would receive thousands of likes each; now, they average 100. I checked the feeds of other tech bloggers, including MG Siegler of TechCrunch and reporters from The New York Times, and the same drop has occurred.

When he decided to advertise, his engagement went up by ten times. Leading Nick to conclude that Facebook were suppressing his unpaid posts while pushing the one’s he pays to promote.

Even for advertisers, a few hundred likes doesn’t translate into much of a return.

That suppression of useful posts is one of the reasons teenagers are moving, one 17 year old I asked about why he’s moved from Facebook said the ads cluttered up his feed.

Which leads us to the reason why people use Facebook – they use it to talk to friends and relatives; not to watch ads.

It took commercial radio and television a decade to figure out the right mix of advertisements and contents, a balance that is still tested today. Social media sites are going to have to get that mix right soon.

Facebook has the most at stake and their time is running out.

Using big data to find the cupboard is bare

Yahoo! Chief Executive Marissa Mayer is an example of how modern managers are diving into big data to figure out what is going on in their company

Last week this blog discussed whether telecommuting was dead in light of Marissa Mayer’s banning of the practice at Yahoo.

While I don’t think telecommuting is dead, Marissa Mayer has a big problem figuring out exactly who is doing what at the company and abolishing remote working is one short term way of addressing the issue.

If Business Insider is to be believed, Yahoo!’s absent staff problem is bad.

After spending months frustrated at how empty Yahoo parking lots were, Mayer consulted Yahoo’s VPN logs to see if remote employees were checking in enough.

Mayer discovered they were not — and her decision was made.

Business Insider’s contention is that Mayer makes her decisions based on data analysis. At Google she drove designers mad by insisting on reviewing user reactions to different layouts and deciding based on the most popular results.

If this is true, then Marissa Mayer is the prototype of tomorrow’s top executives – the leaders in business by the end of this decade will be the ones who manage data well and can sift what matters out of the information deluge.

For all of us this is going to be a challenge with the probably the biggest task of all being able to identify which signals are worth paying attention to and which should be ignored.

Of course, all this assumes the data is good quality in the first place.

An assumption we’ve all made when talking about Big Data is that it’s about marketing – we made the same assumption about social media.

While Big Data is a good marketing tool, it’s just as useful in areas like manufacturing, logistics, credit evaluations and human resources. The latter is what Yahoo!’s staff are finding out.

In age of Big Data it may not pay to a slacker, but it’s going to be handy if you want to know what’s going on your business.