Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

  • A tale of managerial hubris

    A tale of managerial hubris

    Twenty-four hours after the 2016 Census website collapsed, the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ reputation is in tatters as the organisation blames hackers, denial of service attacks and failed routers for the debacle.

    While there’s many lessons to be learned from this tale, not least the importance of getting your social media team on board, the key takeaway from this embarrassing saga is to show some public humility and not dismiss informed critics.

    Technology was not the problem at the ABS, an arrogant management is what caused the Census collapse.

    Given the poor accountability of Australian management it’s unlikely anyone’s career is going to suffer as a consequence of this debacle but it’s a further dent to the reputations of both IBM and the ABS. Quite frankly they deserve it, if only for their failure to listen to the community.

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  • Forget eliminating risk

    Forget eliminating risk

    “How are you going to manage, not stop, risk?” Asked John Suffolk, the Global Cyber Security & Privacy Officer of Huawei Technologies at the company’s ICT roadshow in Sydney today.

    Suffolk’s message is one that should be heeded by all business owners, managers and executives in areas more than just IT security.

    One of the conceits of the late Twentieth Century management philosophies is that risk could be managed out of business, partly through technology but mainly through legalisms that attempted to push liabilities onto suppliers, contractors, resellers and customers.

    That philosophy still holds true in many organisations today, particularly government agencies, and it costs them dearly.

    In truth, business is risky and trying to eliminate risk is a fool’s errand. How it’s managed is the real test for leaders.

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  • Creating alternatives to the NASDAQ

    Creating alternatives to the NASDAQ

    Does it really matter what stock market a company lists on? In my interview with Nuix CEO, Eddie Sheehy for the Australian Financial Review, the question arose about where the company will list for its expected IPO next year.

    Sheehy’s response was clear, “I suspect we’d get just as good a float out of Australia now as we would anywhere else. In fact better, because I think our shareholders are better known, respected and trusted, there’s nothing that I’ve seen in London or Nasdaq that makes me believe we’d get a better outing.”

    Until recently most tech startups aspired to listing on the US NASDAQ exchange and the reasons were compelling as the bourse has a strong technology focus meaning deeper pools of funds, more liquidity along with a community of investors and analysts who had a strong understanding of technology stocks.

    The case for other exchanges

    Now other exchanges are making their case for tech companies listing with them. The London Stock Exchange making a strong argument for prospective IPOs. Singapore, Sydney and many others have similar pitches for the business.

    The problem in those exchanges is the lack of depth in the marketplace. Having a small selection of tech companies listed means limited focus from investors and analysts, it also risks having one or two successful companies dominating the index, as has happened with Xero’s listing on the New Zealand Exchange.

    Xero also illustrates another problem with a listing on an exchange not familiar with the peculiarities of tech stocks at the company’s Sydney AGM a few weeks ago where an investor asked ‘when are you guys going to make a profit?’

    Rod Drury, Xero’s CEO, was able to deflect the question but it showed how companies listed on exchanges where the the high growth, low yield model of tech startups are unusual. On the Australian exchange, this problem is exacerbated by the investor base being dominated by big, dumb institutions.

    Changing perspectives

    Nuix, among Xero and a host of other tech companies, are slowly changing the perspectives of those investors but the focus on yield and safety from both retail and institutional investors will remain an obstacle for ventures launching in more conservative jurisdictions.

    Other factors are the stability, legal and taxation consideration of those jurisdictions. If stockholders are facing barriers realising their investors or the the domicile puts companies at a disadvantage then that country’s stock market won’t be preferred.

    Ultimately though a company’s listing is about access to capital and liquidity. If companies like Xero and Nuix can get both at a reasonable cost by listing on the Australian, Singaporean or London markets, then that’s a choice for their boards.

    It’s hard though to see the NASDAQ being knocked off its perch for moment, although it the US tech bubble does pop things may change.

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  • Burning the boxes

    Burning the boxes

    “I cater to their crazy and the results are tremendous. Hire the crazy, because you need them. Those are the ones that don’t think outside the box, they burn the box and stomp on the ashes,” says Chris Pogue, Chief Information Security Officer at Nuix who I interviewed at the Black Hat conference at Las Vegas last week.

    Chris was talking about hiring information security people and, as the attendees at the Black Hat and DefCon conferences show, show that philosophy is important in hiring good technology people who tend to be people who don’t recognise the boxes, let alone tick them.

    That point though could be made for many occupations, many businesses that claim they value ‘creative thinking” should be thinking about burning the boxes.

    In a much more competitive environment having management ‘thinking within the box’ may be one of the greatest disadvantages facing an organisation, not just in recruitment but also in identifying threats and opportunities.

    Burning the boxes may well be one of the best things business leaders could do for their organisation in finding and cultivating the talent to compete in tomorrow’s economy.

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  • Trust, security and the internet of things

    Trust, security and the internet of things

    I’ve spent the last week in Las Vegas attending the Black Hat and DefCon security conferences. Among much of the discussion about protecting oneself against the misuse of technology, one thing that stood out was the focus on the Internet of Things.

    Listening to some of the discussions and speaking to various people, it’s increasingly clear the consensus is the IoT is effectively unsecurable – the range of devices connected to the internet is just too great to be protected.

    Compounding the problem are the plethora of poorly designed devices where security is, at best, a vague afterthought along with an older generation of equipment that was never intended to be connected to the public facing internet.

    Given many of these devices are going to be critical to business and individual lifestyles, their reliability and quality of the data gathered by them is going to increasingly come into question and the systems that rely upon them are going to need ways to validate the information they receive.

    Perhaps this is where machine learning and artificial intelligence are going to be valuable in watching for anomalies in the information and flagging where problems are happening within networks.

    As those networks become more essential to society, we’re going to have build more  redundancy and robustness into our systems, the key component though may be trust.

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