Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: Innovation

  • Are executives out of touch with IT trends?

    Are executives out of touch with IT trends?

    Yesterday was media briefing day with a number of vendor events, including a very nice lunch with IBM, on the state of the technology industry.

    One thing that was particularly striking with IBM Truth Behind The Trends survey was just how out of touch many of the executives quoted in the report seem to be with responses on topics like malware and Bring Your Own Device being firmly behind the curve.

    This was borne out at the earlier media roundtable with online security company Websense where they described some of the challenges facing Chief Information Officers in making company boards and senior managers aware of technology security risks.

    What surprised most of the journalists in the earlier briefing was just how clueless many of the executives seem to be about online business risks, those who went along to the following IBM briefing realised why – managers genuinely don’t understand how the internet and business technology is evolving.

    That should worry investors as markets are changing rapidly and managers who don’t recognise, let alone understand, the shifts happening are jeopardizing the their business’ futures.

    Why exactly business leaders are so out of touch is something we look at tomorrow where we examine the background of Australia’s CEOs.

    Similar posts:

  • The Present is Unevenly Distributed

    The Present is Unevenly Distributed

    “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

    Similar posts:

  • Innovations customers don’t need

    Innovations customers don’t need

    The news that ESPN is closing down its 3D sports channel is the beginning of the end for an innovation that nobody really wanted.

    In the 1980s, telephone companies rolled out digital services under the name ISDN – Integrated Services Digital Networks – which were expensive and appealed to few businesses, gaving them the nickname Innovations Subscribers Don’t Need.

    3D TV fits that description of an innovation which customers never wanted. While the technology was seen being the great hope of stimulating sales in a moribund consumer electronics market, consumers were never really convinced.

    The 3D TV push of the last two years is typical of many technology products in that there isn’t an immediate need for them but manufacturers and retailers hope that they can hype a market into existence.

    Usually that model fails, but not always.

    Sometimes though, these technologies are subject to their own hype cycle and over time they come back in ways we don’t quite expect.

    It’s difficult to see how 3D TVs can make a comeback but who knows? What we do know though is they were expensive toys for the few who bought the hype.

    Similar posts:

  • How Green is the Internet?

    How Green is the Internet?

    Earlier this month Google hosted “How Green is the Internet?“, a summit which looked at the environmental costs of the connected society and technologies like cloud computing and Big Data.

    The environmental impact of the internet and related technologies is a subject worth exploring, like all industries there are real costs to the planet which usually aren’t bourne by those who make the profits or reap the benefits.

    In complex modern supply chains which often span the globe, the costs are not often apparent either. What appears to be a relatively clean, innocuous product to city consumers could have terrible environmental consequences for others.

    Google’s summit is a good example of overlooking many external costs in that most of the conversations looked at reducing energy usage, understandable given the company’s dependence on power hungry data centres which drive their cloud computing services.

    move-to-cloud-cost-savings-on-the-internet

    Energy usage is important in the discussion about digital technologies – the businesses of bits and bytes almost wholly relies upon having constant and reliable electricity supplies and power generation is one of the most environmentally damaging activities we engage in.

    Focusing on energy consumption though is not the only aspect we need to look at when examining how green the internet is, there’s many other costs in building the supply chain that enables us to watch funny cat videos in our homes or offices.

    The entire supply chain is complex and the session on infrastructure costs by Jon Koomey of Stanford University touched on this; there’s the environmental costs of building data centres, of manufacturing routers, of laying cables and – probably the most difficult question of all – what do we do with the e-waste generated by obsolete equipment.

    Little of this was touched on in the Google conference and it’s interesting that the tech industry is focusing on the energy costs while overlooking other effects of a global, complex industry.

    That isn’t to say the energy story isn’t valid. A number of the Google speakers emphasized the indirect energy saving costs as cloud computing and Big Data allows more intelligent business decisions that make industries and daily life more efficient.

    A favourite example is the use of car parking apps where drivers save energy and reduce pollution because they aren’t driving around looking for the parking spaces. This puts Google’s acquisition of traffic app Waze into perspective.

    Reducing driving times is just one area of where the internet is improving energy efficiency and these are important factors when considering the ‘greenness’ of the web.

    However without considering the full impact of building, maintaining and disposing the equipment that we need to operate the internet, we aren’t really looking at the entire impact the internet is having on the planet.

    Google’s conference though is a good starting point for that discussion which is one that every industry should be having.

    Similar posts:

  • Australia’s economic rigor mortis

    Australia’s economic rigor mortis

    This is worth watching, Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris and Australian Business Council chief Tony Shepherd spoke on Sunday with Alan Kohler on the ABC’s Inside Business.

    At 5.40 Andrew Liveris says Australia is suffering a state of economic rigor mortis – “we’ve lost the ability to innovate” – with no plans and a great complacency. It’s something all Aussies should reflect upon, although don’t expect these blokes to be any help.

     

     

     

    Similar posts: