Category: Disruption

Embracing business disruption

Pam Murphy, the Chief Operating Officer of software company Infor believes businesses have to embrace change in order to survive today’s period of disruption

“A lot of companies are trying to figure digital disruption out,” says the Chief Operating Office of Infor, Pam Murphy. “For many companies they are seeing all this stuff and thinking ‘oh my god, what on earth do I do?’. They know they need to evolve and they know they have to evolve.”

Murphy, who joined Infor in 2011 after over a decade at Oracle, has seen a lot of that change. Infor itself embraced the cloud and in the company’s has been on an acquisitions spree as it seeks to expand its product offerings.

Having dealt with so many acquisitions – eight since Murphy joined five years ago – the company has become adept at absorbing new businesses. “It does require a lot of thinking that you’re going to be respectful of that,” she says. “A lot of stuff is easy to standardise but culture is difficult.”

Another area that Murphy doesn’t see as being standardised is in developing talent. “You have to be open minded,” she says in answer to my question about encouraging women into senior roles and increasing the diversity of senior management.

Murphy’s main advice to business leaders is not to shy from the business world’s shifts, “embrace the change.” She says, “don’t think of it as being something that’s scary and threatening, get ahead of it. Embrace the fact we’re in a completely different era.”

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The dangers of hands free driving

The first death in a driverless car will raise questions about their safety and regulation

Last May 7 45-year-old Joshua Brown was killed when his car hit a truck just outside Willston, Florida. His Tesla was operating in ‘autopilot mode’ and he was the first death in a driverless car accident.

Now the investigation and the speculation into the Mr Brown’s unfortunate demise begin. It’s worth watching to see how the accident will change public perception and government regulation of autonomous vehicles.

What’s notable is Tesla are careful not to recommend leaving the car to its own devices, as The Verge reports.

Tesla reiterates that customers are required to agree that the system is in a “public beta phase” before they can use it, and that the system was designed with the expectation that drivers keep their hands on the wheel and that the driver is required to “maintain control and responsibility for your vehicle.” Safety-critical vehicle features rolled out in public betas are new territory for regulators, and rules haven’t been set.

Another aspect that should concern users and regulators is Tesla’s software industry attitude towards liability and safety in dismissing the car’s flaws as being an unfortunate consequence of imperfect beta software. That may cut it in the world of Microsoft Windows 3.11 but it doesn’t cut it when lives are at stake in the motor industry.

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Subverting the house rules

An Arab Spring seems to have come to the US Congress as members occupy the chamber and stream their own video footage.

It seems the Arab Spring has come to the US Congress where Democrat representatives protesting the house’s refusal to vote on gun control legislation have occupied the house.

House speaker Paul Ryan, a Republican, ordered the chamber’s TV cameras to be shut off but the occupying members responded by streaming their own media feeds through Facebook and Periscope.

Once again we’re seeing how new media channels are opening up with the internet. While they aren’t perfect, they do challenge the existing power structures and allow the old rules to be subverted.

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Employment and business in an era of ubiquitous robotics

McDonald’s former CEO inadvertently highlights the future of work in his comments about robot fast food kitchens

While robots threaten to take our jobs, they also promise to change the agricultural industry. That paradox describes how both the risks and opportunities in our increasingly automated word.

Brian Halweil, an ag-tech writer, describes how small farmers are using specialist robots to automate their operations. He lays out how the miniaturization of farm machinery will help encourage small, diverse farms.

The available of cheap, adaptable robots driven by almost ubiquitous and build in artificial intelligence is going to drive automation across most industries.

Ubiquitous robotics though means we have to rethink employment and social security as the workforce adjusts to new methods of working. Inadvertently former McDonalds chief executive Ed Rensi touched upon this in his somewhat hysterical response to the campaign to increase the minimum wage across the United States.

Rensi is right to point out that fast food restaurants will replace workers with robots where they can, indeed McDonalds led the way through the 1970s and 80s in introducing production line techniques to the food industry and the company will automate their kitchens and ordering systems regardless of minimum wage levels.

That relentless automation of existing jobs is why there is now a world wide push to explore the concept of a guaranteed minimum wage. We seem to be at the same point we were almost a century ago where the ravages of the Great Depression meant societies had to create a social security safety net.

As we saw with the Great Depression, the jobs eventually came back but in a very different form in a much changed economy. We’re almost certainly going to see the same process this century, hopefully without the massive dislocation and misery.

For businesses and industry, Halwell’s point about much smaller and adaptable robots giving rise to more nimble businesses is almost certainly true. For investors, managers and business owners adapting to that world will be key to avoiding being on the minimum wage themselves.

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A constancy of change

One constant about the technology sector is change, and a visit to Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum emphasises just how much the industry has changed over the years.

One constant about the technology sector is change, and a visit to Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum emphasises just how much the industry has changed over the years.

Notable are all the gone and forgotten brands that were in their day giants of the industry along with the efforts by various countries, Britain in particular, to compete with the US in computing.

But most striking are the old roles that rose and fell as technology evolved over the past century, from the Morse Code operators whose skills were essential for safe shipping and telegraph communications through to punch card operators and the ‘tape apes’ of the 1980s.

Most of those roles rose, became lucrative and then disappeared as technology evolved, just as the loom weavers’ jobs did in the eighteenth century.

Like the loom weavers and the companies that employed them, history and technology overtook them. Something that today’s business giants and high paid occupations need to keep in mind.

No industry is static and few jobs are safe in today’s rapidly changing world. It’s why we need to be making the investments in the skills and technologies that will define the future economy.

We can’t assume today’s jobs will be those of tomorrow.

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A lack of systems, process or even a working website

AirBnB had almost no working technology when it launched in 2007. But they proved their idea.

The first ever guest of AirBnB tells his story. At the time the site had no contact details and Amol Surve was desperate to attend the San Francisco’s Industrial Design Conference in 2007.

He tracked down AirBnB co-founder Joe Gebbia to get the air mattress and the business was born.

Which shows a good business idea doesn’t need all their processes and technology in order to prove it works. Something that anyone with a new business idea should consider.

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Confidence and open communications

Open communications is essential in a time of change, tech giant EMC finds

One of the big technology industry stories currently is the merger of Dell and data storage giant EMC, which at seventy billion dollars will be the biggest merger in the tech industry’s history.

With fifty thousand employees managing such a change presents a challenge for EMC’s managers and something noticeable attending the company’s EMC World conference in Las Vegas this week is how upbeat almost all the staffers about the impending merger.

In an interview with David Goulden, the CEO of EMC’s Infrastructure division, which is the company’s core business, I asked him how they were keeping staff morale up in the face of changes that will almost certainly cost jobs.

“Change creates uncertainty,” says Goulden. “One thing I’ve learned from this is you cannot over-communicate and that’s true internally and it’s true with our customers. We’ve put an incredible amount of effort in communications so our teams are engaged to go and speak to their customers.”

As change is now a constant in all industries Goulden’s lesson should be noted by all managers and business leaders – clear, honest and open communications with employees and customers is essential in keeping the trust of the markets and workforce.

The old model of restricting information and hoping no-one finds out is increasingly harder to sustain and from a business point of view unprofitable in the medium term as well.

Paul travelled to Las Vegas as a guest of EMC and Netsuite.

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