Category: government

Transparent falsehoods

Openness is more than a buzzword and organisations have to do more than shutting down bloggers.

Transparency, openness, innovation and entrepreneurialism are all popular buzzwords, but do organisations really value these attributes?

At a cloud computing conference this week I sat in on an innovation presentation. Almost everyone in the room was wearing a dark suit.

Despite their dress, most of those folk desperately wanted to be ‘innovative’ and almost all of them worked in organisations that would really benefit with a dash of genuine creative thinking.

I thought of that conference when reading of the attempted shutting down of a primary school student’s food blog by her local education authority.

The saga of the Never Seconds food blog illustrated the classic responses of managers when faced with something they can’t control – shut it down on whatever grounds you can find.

In the case of Never Seconds it was because the food service staff feared they would lose their jobs. Bless the council for caring so much about their staff.

As always in these situations, it was an opportunity missed to promote the school district and improve the services they provide.

Never Seconds is also a great place where other school students shared their school lunches. It is a great idea to promote healthy eating for kids.

Thankfully the Argyll and Bute Council relented on their ban and the Never Seconds blog is back for lunch.

Educators around the world talk about promoting children’s curiosity and creativity yet when a child expresses them in a way that threatens staff or bureaucrat power, they are quickly slapped down.

The same happens in the workplace, most organisations will treat truly innovative and original thinkers like the naughty children they probably were.

For too many organisations – businesses, political parties and even schools – words like innovation, creativity, openness and transparency are just empty buzzwords.

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Can Sydney become a smart city?

What are the challenges facing building a down under entrepreneurial culture?

How does a city become smart? That seems to be the question of the moment as countries and cities around the world try to figure out how to catch a little bit of Silicon Valley’s magic.

As part of the 2012 City Talks series, the City of Sydney hosted a discussion on how the city can become a smart city;

Sydney is bursting with talented, creative and forward-thinking people. How can we harness the energy of government, education, businesses, media, and creative thinkers to create space for innovation?

While it’s questionable that a “creative space for innovation” is a worthy objective – albeit laden with buzzwords – it’s certainly true that Sydney, along with other Australian cities, has the components to be a entrepreneurial centre, the question is how does the city harness the various talents across the different sector.

Working to advantages

Rather than aping Silicon Valley, New York or Ireland all cities should be exploiting their natural advantages. Fast Company Magazine recently looked at how Oklahoma City has advantages over its bigger cousins in New York and California.

For Sydney, and Melbourne, those strengths include an educated, multi-cultural workforce with first world legal systems in a similar time zone to the world’s major growth markets.

One of the tragedies in Australia’s marketing over the last twenty five years has been the failure to mention the ethnic diversity of the nation. This is huge competitive advantage that is barely being discussed.

What can governments do?

At the Sydney City Talks event, Lord Mayor Clover Moore said that creating a smart city requires “the same incentive to be given to innovators and creatives as is given to property investors and mining companies.”

That change requires state and Federal governments to change laws and businesses, particularly banks, to pick up on those price and policy signals.

Education too needs reform although this needs real consultation or we’ll end falling for short term fads or copying the damaging anti-teacher jihad that has infected the US.

A welcome change for many Australian innovators would be changes in government procurement policies as currently all levels of government prefer to deal with the local offices of large multinationals. As the Queensland Health Department debacle shows, these organisations are often less competent than local providers.

Making those changes though will require major reforms to policies and laws, something that neither major Australian political party at any level has the courage or vision to do.

That the NSW Digital Action Plan is now in its thirty-first draft speaks volumes about the inertia among the city’s, state’s and country’s political and business leaders.

Ditch the Silicon

Probably the first failure of imagination is the “silicon” tag – US entrepreneur Brad Feld skewers this nicely in his blog post on The Tragedy Of Calling Things Silicon.

Sydney has already has a group called “Silicon Beach” which has spread out to Melbourne and the Gold Coast and it’s interesting that both Google Australia’s CEO and Engineering head want to co-opt the name.

On of the suggestions was “Silicon Banana” a tag which brings to mind the phrase “kill me now please?” to anyone already uncomfortable with the ‘Silicon’ label.

The “Silicon Banana” idea comes from the curved shape of Sydney’s ‘digital heartland’ which curves from Darling Island to the west of the city and curves around the edge of the city centre through Surry Hills across to the film and television facilities at Fox Studios.

Describing Sydney’s centre of innovation as lying within the ‘banana’ illustrates the lack of thinking outside the current app and web mania. It also neglects the bulk of Sydney, particularly those parts of the Western Suburbs where languages such as Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Vietnamese, Arabic or Hindi are spoken.

Once again we neglect those assets because they aren’t white, Anglo or living in the prettier parts of the city.

Does it have to be Sydney?

We should keep in mind that the Silicon Valleys of the past haven’t been the biggest cities – Silicon Valley itself is barely a city and San Francisco is not one of the US’ biggest cities.

It’s quite possible that an Australian centre of innovation could be any one of dozens of smaller towns such as Geelong, Wagga or Cairns.

The problem in Australia is, once again, property prices. Compared to the US or Europe, housing and office rents aren’t substantially cheaper outside the big cities unless you’re prepared to move to seriously blighted parts of the country.

Spinning the wheels

Probably the most disappointing thing of the ‘smart city’ discussion is just how bogged down we’ve become – there was little in the City Talk that wasn’t being spoken about five, or even ten, years ago. Things have not moved on.

Creating a smart city isn’t about picking winners among industries, suburbs or groups. To really be smart we have to give the opportunities for clever people to succeed.

Simply jumping onto today’s technology fad or mindlessly aping Silicon Valley is to squander our advantages and not learn from the mistakes of others.

The real worry though is just how little progress is being made in seizing today’s opportunities. It doesn’t bode well for tomorrow’s.

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Triangulating privacy out of our lives

Social media sites will have to deal with increased government regulation.

Lost among the noise of Facebook’s rumoured plans to launch a kids’ network, there’s quiet pressures developing as consumers start to realise the value of their data – the pressure to regulate social media.

In his Rethinking Privacy in an Era of Big Data, New York Times writer Quentin Hardy raises some of the issues about the data which is being collected about us.

One of the big areas is triangulation – building a picture of somebody based upon seemingly unrelated data. Quentin explains it in the example of somebody who might be looking for a job.

There other ways in which we can lose control of our privacy now. By triangulating different sets of data (you are suddenly asking lots of people on LinkedIn for endorsements on you as a worker, and on Foursquare you seem to be checking in at midday near a competitor’s location), people can now conclude things about you (you’re probably interviewing for a job there) that are radically different from either set of public information.

The key word of course is “conclude” – we base an assumption on what we think we know. It could turn out those LinkedIn endorsements could be part of a performance review and the competitor’s location could right next door to a hot new lunch spot.

We should also keep in mind the value of this data is asymmetric as the value of this data to a third party is low, if anything. But to the individual it could mean losing a job and other major consequences.

A good example of this is the story of how a UK hospital trust lost highly sensitive health records of thousands of patients, including those being treated for HIV.

The trust ended up being fined £325,000 but that fine is trivial compared to the massive individual cost from just one of those records being released.

Fines are a lousy way of enforcing privacy anyway, as the financial penalties are just passed onto shareholders or taxpayers.

The only meaningful sanction for failures like the Brighton General Hospital breach are holding individuals, particularly managers, personally responsible.

As we saw in the successive Sony security breaches last year, most organisations aren’t interested in holding their senior managers responsible for even the most egregious data failures.

This failure of the corporate sector to protect consumer data will almost certainly drive calls for government regulation and sanctions.

Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd  flags this regulation issue in Quentin Hardy’s New York Times piece, saying “Regulation is coming,” she says. “You may not like it, you may close your eyes and hold your nose, but it is coming.”

Danah also makes an important point that users – particularly kids – have developed tactics to obscure their ‘digital footprints’.

For Danah, and others trying to understand what is happening online, this causes a problem, “When I started doing my fieldwork I could tell you what people were talking about. Now I can’t.”

These tactics of creating dummy social media profiles and using euphemisms are a huge threat to the business plans of social media services and the “identity services” desired by Google’s Eric Schmidt.

As data becomes less reliable, or more difficult to triangulate, the value of it to advertisers falls.

It may well be that regulation of social media and web services ends up not being necessary as users become more net savvy. For medical and other personal data though, it’s clear we have to rethink the way we use and store it.

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Are the Olympics a curse for the host city?

Do the Olympics damage the hosting country’s businesses and economy?

With just over two months until the start of the London Olympics, the inevitable cold feet about the wisdom of the project have started. Vanity Fair details the convoluted bidding process while Business Insider gives the 32 reasons why they think the 2012 Olympics will be a disaster.

Conventional wisdom is the Olympics leaves the host city – and often the nation – in a collective emotional, if not economic, depression.

In the case of Athens it may even be an economic depression, although it would be drawing a long bow to suggest the 2004 Olympics are responsible for the economic predicament Greece finds itself in today.

But is true that the Olympics are “cursed”? Or is the truth more complex than that?

For cities hosting the Olympics, the core problem is the size of the event with the 2012 games expecting 10,000 athletes from 182 countries in over 300 competitions. The Olympics are several orders of magnitude bigger than any other comparable sporting event such as the FIFA World Cup.

Given the size, it’s not surprising host cities suffer an Olympic hangover – there is no way any country, even China, can sustain the frantic hyperactivity a host city goes through in the years of preparation.

China is a good example of an economy that didn’t suffer after the Olympics and the event was more a proclamation that the country had arrived as a global power.

This is common with successful Olympics – Spain in 1992, South Korea in 1988, Japan in 1960 and arguably Australia in 1956 – were all turning points for those countries and the games announced their new position in the world.

Australia though is an interesting case with the two Olymipcs they have hosted,while the 1956 Olympics did change Melbourne, and Australia’s, self image the story is different for the 2000 Sydney event.

In the run up to the 2000 Olympics Sydneysiders, like myself, were sceptical. The city couldn’t run a decent railway for crying out loud, so how could we expect to run a decent Olympic games?

All the scepticism vanished on the weekend of 20th August, 2000 when the blue line marking the marathon route appeared across the city. It was as if a switch had been flipped; the few remaining doubters skipped town and everyone else had a party.

The optimism in Sydney and Australia at the end of the games was clear; the country could pull off the world’s biggest event and the opportunities were boundless.

But Sydney and Australia squibbed it – rather than building on the Olympic success and the preceding decade of reform, the nation looked inwards, decided to invest in new kitchens and today the country is more dependent on mineral exports than any time since the 1850s gold rush.

Much of the blame for this can be put on Australia’s political establishment, specifically two men – Prime Minister John Howard and NSW Premier Bob Carr.

Both men were, or are, very effective tactical politicians who were good at winning elections but were by no means visionaries or nation builders was not their thing. So the opportunities presented to Australia in the early 2000s were squandered on Carr’s short term opportunism and Howard building his middle class welfare state.

There’s no reason why there should be an Olympic curse, for some cities it’s a timing issue. For Athens the economic cycle was against them while politics damaged the Olympics of the 1970s and 80s.

On the other hand for cities like Seoul, Tokyo and Barcelona the Olympics were a coming of age for a growing country.

The challenge for Boris Johnson and David Cameron is to translate London’s Olympics into building Britain’s confidence. While the economic tide seems to be against them, much of their political legacy will be judged against on how well they do.

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When taxpayers hearts sink

Outsourcing can be a good thing, but governments often get it wrong.

Nothing is sadder than a government or business that believes it will gain huge savings through outsourcing.

Part of the 1980s management mindset is that outsiders can do a job better and cheaper than existing staff. Almost always this is proved to be expensively wrong.

The announcement the New South Wales Government will outsource Sydney Ferries is a good example of this. Media reports claim the “government is hoping to save hundreds of millions of dollars over the next decade.”

Good luck with that. As the people of Melbourne found when the Victorian government outsourced operations of suburban trains and trams the levels of service remained poor, subsidies increased and new level of bureaucracy developed to manage the disconnect between a private operator running a service accountable to the public.

Advocates of outsourcing always overlook the cost, time and skills involved in supervising contractors.

This is something the banks found in the early days of offshoring services as the claimed massive labour cost savings by moving operations to the developing world were offset by higher supervision costs.

Governments have a bigger problem with outsourcing as the public service generally lacks the contractual and project management skills to effectively specify and supervise major service outsourcing contracts.

A good example of this is the Royal North Shore Cleaning contract where the hospital has seen a fall in hygiene levelsas the contractor attempt to meet their KPIs under an agreement that has been designed primarily to save the area health service money.

Focusing on cost savings when outsourcing is almost always a recipe for failure. In both business and government its rare that a function or operating unit is so badly managed that savings offset the increased management expenses.

This isn’t to say outsourcing isn’t always appropriate. Sometimes those savings are achievable – albeit not as often as proponents claim – and outsourcing can deliver skills that the parent organisation lacks.

Which is another concern about the Sydney Ferries outsourcing. The Sydney Morning Herald article referred to above says the following about the CEO of the winning consortium.

Mr Faurby, who has more than 20 years maritime experience, has never run a passenger service before. But he said he understood what it would take to improve Sydney’s ferries.

”It doesn’t really matter very much if it is a towage, tug company, or a container shipping company, or for that matter a ferry company … what matters is that you have the competencies to run it in an efficient, safe and effective manner.”

Um no. That’s 1980s management school thinking where every business – from airlines to software – can be reduced to selling soap.

Not having experience in running a passenger service with all the customer service issues that come when you’re dealing with the public is a concern. One hopes, prays even, that Mr Faurby and his employers have the wisdom to support the CEO with managers who do have a customer service ethos.

Then there’s the black hole of Australian public transport – ticketing.

While it’s impossible to quantify just how poor Australian governments have proved themselves to be with ticketing systems; Sydney’s convoluted, complex, siloed and passenger unfriendly public transport system adds another layer of complexity that the new management of Sydney Ferries is going to have to deal with.

There’s no doubt though that Sydney Ferries need reform; its management was incompetent and, beyond the usual cheerful deckhands, the staff were surly with little concept of customer service.

Done well, outsourcing Sydney Ferries could be for the better; but the emphasis on cost savings and what appears to be naive management expectations should make taxpayers’ hearts sink.

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Is the Paperless Office promise about to come true?

For twenty years abolishing paper has been promised. Is the promise about to be delivered?

For as long as personal computers have been around the paperless office one of the holy grails of the IT industry.

Paper is messy, difficult to file or store and cruel to the environment. So being able to move and save information electronically made sense.

Despite the promises of the last twenty years, the quest for the paperless office seemed lost.

While the networked PC gave us the ability to get rid of paper, its advanced word processing functions and graphic capabilities along with the data explosion of email tempted us into generating more paper.

To compound the problem, over the last thirty years paper manufacturers found cheaper ways to make their product which meant the price of paper dropped dramatically just as we found more ways to use it.

So rather than delivering on the promise of eliminating paper, computers generated more than ever before.

Just as it seemed all was lost in IT’s War On Paper, the tablet computer came along. Coupled with cloud computing services and accessible fast wireless Internet, suddenly it appears we might just be on the verge on delivering on those promises of the last twenty years.

At a suburban football game I saw this first hand as I watched the ground officials electronically filing match information with their league.

“This used to be a pile of paperwork that used to take until Tuesday to be filed and collated” the ground manager told me, “today it’s done within half an hour of the game ending with almost no paper involved.”

For amateur sports clubs, money isn’t so much the problem as time. There simply are never enough volunteers to meet the workload of getting a team on field.

This is true with almost any community based organisation – from volunteer firefighters to community kindergartens organisers struggle with rosters and finding helpers.

In business the same resource constraints exist except we know we can fix these problems by paying a worker to do it. The problem there is few businesses have unlimited funds to employ filing clerks and form fillers to handle the paperwork.

By killing paper in the office, we’re making business and the economy more efficient. We’re about to deliver on that promise.

Bill Gates once wrote that in the short term we overpromise what technology can deliver while in the long term we underestimate its effects.

This is true of the paperless office – now that promise is being delivered the effects on business and government will be profound.

Is your business prepared for these changes?

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Television rights and clouds

The challenge technology brings to information hoarders.

The Australian Federal Court today handed down their appeal decision in the latest twist in the Optus TV Now copyright case where the National Rugby League claimed the telco’s online recording service breaches the sporting body’s copyright.

Reversing their colleagues earlier decision, the judges found the TV Now service does breach the League’s copyright.

The Court’s reasoning is because the service plays a part in creating a recording the copies cannot be considered an individual’s personal copy to be watched at a later time – therefore they aren’t protected under the personal use provisions of the Copyright Act.

It’s going to be interesting to see where the line is drawn that a computer program or cloud service is infringing copyright.

Could be that copying a video of a football game to Dropbox, Google Drive or Evernote is a copyright breach by those services?

Perhaps online back up services like Carbonite or iCloud could infringe copyright as they automate the copying process?

Even if Optus doesn’t appeal the case to the Australian High Court, the decision will almost eventually tested there by someone else.

Many of the spokespeople – along with and their apologists in the sports and business media – have argued this is about the law falling behind technology.

The court covered this in paragraphs 18 to 25 of the judgement linked above and the judges are quite clear the law was written to be technology neutral.

Calls now to “reform” copyright law in light of the TV Now and AFACT – iiNet cases to “bring the law up to technology” are disingenuous.

While there’s no doubt legislation could be tweaked, there’s the real threat any “reforms” driven by the pleading of the copyright industries and their tame journalist friends will result in more restrictions and damage the take up of modern technologies.

One can’t blame the rights holders for trying to maximise their income, they have to feed the remorseless hungry beast that is modern professional sport – although one wishes they didn’t keep bleating “think of the children” to justify their actions.

We’ve previously seen how sports organisations have felt threatened by every new technology and the profits these new tools have delivered them.

The latest wave of change is no different, although the glory days of sports rights may be another symptom of a changing economy and 1980s thinking.

Hopefully the sports organisations and rights holders won’t be allowed to kill the potential of the these technologies before new business models are allowed to evolve.

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