Category: government

Politics, business and leadership

Google’s hiring processes raise some important points about leadership.

I’ve covered the New York Times’ interview with Google’s senior vice president of people operations, Laszlo Bock previously in describing what the business has learned from its scientific method of hiring people.

One striking aspect of that story that deserves further discussion is Bock’s thoughts on leadership;

We found that, for leaders, it’s important that people know you are consistent and fair in how you think about making decisions and that there’s an element of predictability. If a leader is consistent, people on their teams experience tremendous freedom, because then they know that within certain parameters, they can do whatever they want. If your manager is all over the place, you’re never going to know what you can do, and you’re going to experience it as very restrictive.

This is something that applies in all walks of life — whether you’re coaching a kids’ football team, running a corporation or leading a nation.

Sadly in many of these fields we’re lacking the consistent leadership Laszlo Bock describes. That could turn out to be one of the greatest challenges for the 21st Century.

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Coming to your city – the internet of machines

A chart by sensor manufacturer Libelium illustrates how the internet of machines is growing

An intriguing infographic from Spanish sensor manufacturer Libelium – which to Australian ears sounds like a new age defamation law firm – illustrates how the internet of things is being used in all walks of life from shipping containers to park benches.

The notable thing about the diagram is pretty well all of the sensor applications have been available for years – in some cases decades – and its only with the arrival of cheap sensors and pervasive internet access that widespread monitoring has becoming possible.

Libelium smart world infographic

With affordable, even disposible, sensors coupled with internet projects like Google Loon and Australia’s National Broadband Network, these networks are now possible at a price that won’t sink a government’s budget.

In fact these sensor networks will probably improve councils’ and governments’ budgets as they promise to improve the efficiency of services like rubbish collection and street repairs.

The real challenge is managing all the data this equipment gathers, that’s going to be one of the big jobs of the next decade.

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Telling the broadband story – the government makes its case

The minister’s office replies to my NBN criticisms and illustrates how the broadband story isn’t being told

Further to yesterday’s post about NBNCo’s inability to tell a story, I received a polite message from the long suffering staff at the Minister’s office that pointed me to some of the resources that NBNCo and the Department of  Broadband, Communications and Digital economy have posted.

Here’s the list of case studies and videos;

http://www.nbn.gov.au/nbn-advertising/nbn-case-studies/

http://www.nbnco.com.au/nbn-for-business/case-studies.html

http://www.nbn.gov.au/case-study/noella-babui-business/

http://www.nbn.gov.au/case-study/seren-trump-small-home-based-business-owner/

All of these case studies are nice, but they illustrate the problem – they’re nice, standard government issue media releases. The original CNet story that triggered yesterday’s story tells real stories that are more than just sanitised government PR.

It also begs the question of where the hell are all these people successfully using the NBN when I ask around about them?

What’s even more frustrating is the Sydney Morning Herald seems to get spoon fed these type of stories.

The really irritating thing with stories like yesterday’s SMH piece is that it’s intended to promote the Digital Rural Futures Conference on the future of farming being held by the University of New England.

Now this is something I’d would have gone to had I known about it and I’d have paid my own fares and accommodation. Yet the first I know about this conference is an article on a Saturday four days out from the event. That’s not what you’d call good PR.

The poor public relations strategies of the Digital Rural Futures Conference is a symptom of the National Broadband’s Network’s proponents’ inability to get their message out the wider public.

When we look back at the debacle that was the debate about Australia’s role in the 21st Century, it’s hard not to think the failure to articulate the importance of modernising the nation’s communications systems will be one of the key studies in how we blew it.

Despite the best efforts of a few switched on people in Senator Conroy’s office, a lot more effort is needed to make the case for a national broadband and national investment in today’s technologies which are going to define the future.

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NBNCo’s storytelling failure

Why Australia’s National Broadband Network gets bad press

One of the baffling things in reporting the Australian tech and business scene is how the National Broadband Network project manages to get such bad press.

Part of the answer is in this story about Google Fiber sparking a startup scene in Kansas City.

Marguerite Reardon’s story for CNet is terrific – it covers the tech and looks at the human angles with some great anecdotes about some of the individuals using Google Fiber to build Kansas City’s startup community.

This is the story that should have been written in Australia about the National Broadband Network.

I’ve tried.

Failing to tell the story

Earlier this year I travelled to Tasmania to speak to the businesses using the NBN and came back empty handed.

In Melbourne, I finally made it to the Hungry Birds Cafe – vaunted by the government as the first cafe connected to the NBN – to find they do a delicious bacon roll and offer fast WiFi to customers but the owners don’t have a website and do nothing on the net that they couldn’t do with a 56k modem.

I’ve found the same thing when I’ve tried to find businesses connected to the NBN – nil, nothing, nada, nyet. The closest story you’ll find to Cnet’s article are a handful of lame-arsed stories like this Seven Sunrise segment which talks about families sending videos to each other, something which strengthens the critic’s arguments that high speed broadband is just a toy.

Businesses need not apply

This failure to articulate the real business benefits of high speed broadband after four years of rolling out the project is a symptom of a project that has gone off the rails.

It’s not surprising that businesses aren’t connecting to the new network as NBNCo and its resellers have continued the grand Australian tradition of ripping off small businesses. Fellow tech blogger Renai LeMay has quite rightly lambasted the overpriced business fibre broadband plans.

Even when small business want to connect, they find it’s difficult to do. The Public House blog describes how a country pub was told the cost of a business NBN account be so high, the sales consultant would be embarrassed to reveal the price.

“The cost for exactly the same connection (and exactly the same useage) is so much higher for a business that you wouldn’t be interested.”

The whole point of the National Broadband Network is to modernise Australia’s telecommunications infrastructure and give regional areas the same opportunities as well connected inner city suburbs.

Failing objectives

If businesses can’t connect, or find it too expensive, then the project is failing those objectives. So it’s no surprise that NBNCo’s communications team can’t tell a story like Kansas City’s because there are no stories to tell.

Apologists for the poor performance of NBNCo say it’s a huge project and we’re only in the early stages. In fact we’re now four years into a ten year project and we still aren’t hearing stories like those from Kansas City.

Telling the story should be the easy part for those charged with building the National Broadband Network, that they fail in this should mean it’s no surprise they are struggling with the really hard work of building the thing.

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We’re all Luddites now – Wage deflation and falling living standards

As the consumerist society runs out of credit, we have to find new ways to drive our economy

A post on today’s Macrobusiness describes how Australia’s General Motors workers being asked to take a pay cut is the harbinger for a general fall in the nation’s wages.

This is coupled with a post by Paul Krugman in the New York Times sympathising with the Luddites as technology takes away many middle class jobs that were not so long ago thought to be the safe knowledge jobs of the future.

Krugman points out that in the United States income inequality started accelerating in the year 2000, the stagnation of most Americans’ incomes started a decade or two before that.

For the last few decades, expanding credit allowed the consumerist society to continue growing, but the crisis of 2008 marked the end of that that economic model. Although governments around the world have tried to keep it alive by pumping money into their economy.

Now we have to face the reality that the Western world’s standard of living is falling for the first time in a century.

For some this is going to be really tough – although one suspects those who will really complain are those least affected.

What is clear is that many of our business and political leaders aren’t prepared to face this change. Dealing with that is going to be the biggest challenge of this decade.

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702 Sydney – Green computing and how we’re being watched online

On 702 SydneyLinda Mottram and I talk about Internet spying and green computing.

This morning on 702 Sydney I’m talking to Linda Mottram about Internet spying and green computing.

How Green is the internet looks at the claims from Google and other companies about cloud computing’s energy use.

The Internet snooping story broke two weeks ago with The Guardian NSA files.

An early part of the story was abot the use of the telephone company metadata – information about phone calls, not the actual content which intelligence agencies and law enforcement can use to draw a picture from.

For Australians, there’s additional cause for concern as the Telecommunications Act gives government agencies the powers to access anyone’s information.

If you’re worried about the way data is being collected about you online. Duck Duck Go is a secure, private browser and Box Free IT has some great suggestions on securing cloud computing services.

For those who want to seriously cover their online tracks, the Tor project and PGP encryption are more advanced privacy tools.

We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on 1300 222 702 or post a question on ABC702 Sydney’s Facebook page.

If you’re a social media users, you can also follow the show through twitter to @paulwallbank and @702Sydney.

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The Present is Unevenly Distributed

The global economy is changing faster than many business and political leaders realise. The future is here now.

“The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed” said author William Gibson in a quote often used by futurists and speakers.

A great example of this is the Australian Government’s National Digital Economy Strategy which was re-released last week.

The report itself was met with howls of indifference as the objectives were modest with little new really added since its first release in 2011. What’s notable though almost all the stated objectives for 2020 are achievable today. Here’s the list.

  • Government service delivery—by 2020, four out of five Australians will choose to engage with the Australian Government online.
  • Households—by 2020, Australia will rank as one of the top five OECD countries in terms of the proportion of households that connect to broadband.
  • Businesses and not-for-profit organisations—by 2020, Australia will rank as one of the top five OECD countries in the proportion of businesses and not-for-profit organisations using online opportunities to drive productivity improvements and expand their customer base.
  • Health and aged care—By 2015, 495,000 patients in rural, remote and outer metropolitan areas will have had virtual access to specialists and by 2020, 25 per cent of all specialists will be participating in delivering telehealth consultations to remote patients. By 2020, 90 per cent of high priority consumers such as older Australians, mothers with babies and those with a chronic disease, or their carers will be able to access individual electronic health records.
  • Education—by 2020, Australian schools, registered training organisations (RTOs), universities and higher education institutions will have the connectivity to develop and collaborate on innovative and flexible educational services and resources to extend online learning to the home and workplace and the facilities to offer students and learners the opportunity for online virtual learning.
  • Teleworking—by 2020, Australia will have doubled its level of telework to at least 12 per cent of Australian employees.
  • Environment and infrastructure—by 2020, the majority of Australian households, businesses and other organisations will have access to smart technology to better manage their energy use.
  • Regional Australia—by 2020, the gap in online participation and access between households and businesses in capital cities and those in regional areas will have narrowed significantly.

With the exception of the telehealth objective, where the barriers don’t lie in the technology, all of these laudable aims could have been achieved in the past 15 years.

Some of them already have but it’s been missed by the cossetted bureaucrats who write these reports.

For the businesses who aren’t already “using online opportunities to drive productivity improvements and expand their customer base”, these folk are digital roadkill anyway and may as well get jobs driving taxis today.

Probably the most depressing of the objectives is the first one focusing on government service delivery. Here’s Bill Gates’ comment about online government services while visiting Australia.

The Government itself needs to become a model user of information technology, literally seeing government will work with its citizens, with its businesses without paper exchange will be able to do in our taxes, licences, registrations, all these things, on a basis where you don’t have to know the organisation of government and its various departments, you don’t have to stand in line, you don’t have to work with paperwork.

Gates’ comments were made in September 2000.

That a vision for the future is so modest, mundane and achievable today is probably the most disappointing thing of all with reports like the Australian National Digital Economy strategy.

Not only is the future unevenly distributed but so too are the jobs and prosperity that will flow from it, if you’re going to have a vision. You better have a good one.

Image courtesy of pdekker3 on sxc.hu

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