management | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Google’s alphabet soup

Google’s restructure into the Alphabet holding company will bring the glare of accountability onto the business’ managers and employees

“Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.” Writes Larry Page in his announcement the company he and Sergei Brin founded is to be renamed Alphabet with Google as one of its divisions.

The new company, which will continue to be listed as GOOG on the NASDAQ stock market, will have Page as CEO and Brin as Chairman with the various product lines and products split into discrete divisions under the umbrella holding company.

Page believes this will increase accountability and initiative within the divisions.

In general, our model is to have a strong CEO who runs each business, with Sergey and me in service to them as needed. We will rigorously handle capital allocation and work to make sure each business is executing well. We’ll also make sure we have a great CEO for each business, and we’ll determine their compensation.

How well this Japanese style Keiretsu model will work for Google will be interesting. The initial problem for the company is going to be the jockeying for positions within the restructured divisions.

Google’s management is well known for losing interest in projects and products that aren’t working out and those stranded in ‘orphan divisions’ without strong interest from Brin and Page’s team or big revenues are going to find life frugal and discouraging.

The plight of Google+

If you’re a Google employee you’d certainly be lobbying hard today to avoid being stuck in the division lumbered with the dying Google+ social media platform for instance.

The plight of Google+ may give us some clues to Page’s thinking. At the time of the 2008 financial crisis the company heeded the warnings of The Powerpoint of Doom and clamped down hard on costs. Since the crisis passed, Google has steadily become increasingly cumbersome and increased its headcount from 20,000 in 2009 to 54,000 four years later.

A restructure is an excellent opportunity to strip out a good deal of that fat.

For divisions like productivity apps, this sharpened focus may help the product and stir the teams into innovating. A Gartner report last week put Google Apps at a pathetic 2.1% of the global productivity while Microsoft maintains a 94% chokehold on the market. As an autonomous division, the Apps team is going to have to work a lot harder.

Protecting the core

Another question is how this will pan out for the core Google business. The combination of search and advertising remains a monstrous cash generator however its growth is slowing as the company struggles with the shift to mobile.

For the core Google employees, having profits sifted off their division for loss making moonshots may not be the most motivating thing and we may well see Sundar Pichai, the already announced CEO of the Google division, pushing back hard on the claims of other Divisional bosses for capital.

The restructure of Google is going to be an interesting experiment in how well the Japanese conglomerate model may work in the modern tech industry, if it does then we may see the modern equivalents of US Steel and AT&T develop.

For Google’s managers and employees however, having the harsh glare of shareholder accountability may not be the most comfortable experience.

Goodbye to the media buyers long lunch

Big data and analytics are changing roles in the media industry, managers in other sectors should worry about the changes.

Yesterday Decoding The New Economy posted an interview with Michael Rubenstein of AppNexus about the world of programmatic advertising and being part of a rapidly growing startup.

The whole concept of programmatic advertising is a good example of a business, and a set of jobs, being disrupted.

Media buying has been a cushy job for a generation of well fed advertising executives. David Sarnoff’s invention of the broadcast media model in the 1930s meant salespeople and brokers were needed to fill the constant supply of advertising spots.

Today the rise of the internet has disrupted the once safe world of broadcast media where incumbents were protected by government licenses and now the long lunching media buyers are finding their own jobs are being displaced by algorithms like those of AppNexus.

A thought worth dwelling on though is that media buyers are part of a wider group of white collar roles being disrupted by technology – the same Big Data algorithms driving AppNexus and other services is also being used to write and select news stories and increasingly we’ll see executive decisions being made by computers.

It’s highly likely the biggest casualties of the current data analytics driven wave won’t be truck drivers, shelf pickers or baristas but managers. The promise of a flat organisation may be coming sooner than many middle managers – and salespeople – think.

The three S’s of employee engagement

How do we engage with an always on, connected workforce?

We need to rethink how we measure performance in the workplace says Andrew Lafontaine, Senior Director Human Capital Managemet Strategy & Transformation at Oracle Australia.

As business adapts to a changing society and mobile technologies, one of the questions facing managers is the mismatch between the Millennial generation and those GenX and Boomers who make up most of the executive suite, Lafontaine sees this as been in how the younger cohort approaches authority.

“There certainly can be a disconnect between Millennials and boomers. Millennials don’t see hierarchy the way boomers see it as important,” says Lafontaine. “Boomers have ingrained view of the way they have come through the workforce.”

Breaking the old rules

Unfortunately for those older managers, their world was based on a formalised, ‘straight line’ hierarchy dating back to the days ships’ captains used flags and voice tubes to communicate.

That rigid military style worked well for nearly two hundred years of business with mail and then the telephone only reinforcing that management model. Now newer collaboration tools mean different ways of working becoming possible.

A problem with those different ways of working in teams is how performance is measured warns Lafontaine. “What they are not measuring at the moment are what I call ‘network performance’. How workers they helping their colleagues, collaborating and working together.”

Separating home and office

With mobile technologies becoming ubiquitous it becomes harder to separate work from home life, “we working now from home and on the tram. You don’t need a nine to five workforce nad companies have to deal with and embrace the technology,” says Lafontaine.

In the context of babyboomers and GenX workers, that technology meant longer hours in the office but Lafontaine suggests things are now changing. “There other areas to measure. How are they looking after themselves? The days of babyboomers working 12 or 14 hours a day and neglecting their health or outside life are over.”

For the future company, the key to success lies in engaging their employees Lafontaine says. “A more highly engaged workforce delivers better outcomes. Engagement is the three S’s: Stay, Say and Strive”

Those S’s come down to three questions for the worker; should I stay? What should I say? and How should I strive to do a better job?

For managers the challenge is engage all workers regardless of age, the task of finding what engages and motivates workers of the computer generation is only just beginning.

Twitter’s search for meaning

Twitter needs more relevant directors as it searches for a new CEO

New York Times writer Nick Bilton delves into Twitter’s search for a new CEO and comes up with a left of field conclusion – the company doesn’t actually know what it is.

Twitter has certainly been casting around to define itself, particularly after its stock market listing that saw it valued at over twenty billion dollars.

Bilton flags one reason why management is so uncertain about their company’s identity, that it’s directors don’t use the service themselves.

As I see it, the problems at Twitter come down to a lack of leadership and a micromanaging board.

And the churn is constant: many of its founders, chief executives, numerous product directors and other top brass have been fired or pushed out. Three of the eight positions on the current board belong to Mr. Dorsey and the former chief executives. About half of the board barely tweets.

The lack of social media credibility on the board raises another issue about how much direct industry expertise should a company’s directors have. While it’s almost certainly not desirable to have insiders dominate a board certainly some, if not the majority, of directors should have some experience in the industries the company operates in.

For Twitter though they desperately need to define the business and what its valuation really is. Even more pressing is to show how the platform differs from Facebook as the confusion of investors, users and advertisers isn’t helping.

Ultimately as Bilton suggests the direction of a business is determined by the board, it’s time Twitter found at least a few directors who at least use social media, if not have some understanding and experience in the business.

Shifting Microsoft’s culture

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella continues to grapple with changing the company’s culture

“What would be lost if we disappeared?” is the question Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella claims is driving the company’s direction in his latest memo to employees.

In the email obtained by website Geekwire, Nadella told his staff redefining the company’s culture is key to success, “we can do magical things when we come together with a shared mission, clear strategy, and a culture that brings out the best in us individually and collectively.”

That culture though is not static and Nadella is describes how the company needs to focus on helping its customers through its cloud and Windows based products.

For Microsoft this is not new, the change from a desktop and server based licensing business to one dependent upon cloud subscription services has been a huge change for the business since the iPhone was released nearly a decade ago.

The challenge for Nadella however is to keep revenues coming in as the river of gold that was Microsoft’s Windows licenses slowly dries up.

One of the biggest changes to Microsoft’s culture could be in coming to terms that it isn’t such a huge and powerful corporation any more.

A generation free of poverty and labor

Technology promises to free the next generation of poverty and labor but a new social compact will be needed.

How will the future workforce look? A report by Australia’s Committee for Economic Development seeks to give a picture of how employment might look at the end of next decade.

Australia’s Future Workforce is a weighty tome covering the current structure of the nation’s economy, its trends and the factors affecting employment over the next two decades.

The report makes it clear the economy will be very different observing 40 per cent of Australia’s workforce, more than five million people, is likely be replaced by automation over the next twenty years.

In the opening chapter, Reshaping Work for the Future, Professor Lynda Gratton of the London Business School describes the share of the future workforce where roles are more specialised and automation increasingly takes over less complex jobs.

An important aspect Professor Gratton also flags is the aging population which in a rapidly changing economy will require frequent retraining.

From a technology perspective Professor Hugh Bradlow, the Chief Scientist of Telstra, suggests the workforce will be more mobile and employed in fields less amenable to computerisation involving skills like social intelligence, creative talents and social intelligence.

Those without those skills are deeply at risk with Bradlow being the first in the report to cite the likelihood that two fifths of the workforce are at risk of losing their jobs.

Bradlow concludes his analysis with the observation that if we work to satisfy our basic needs then machines looking after these requirements free up the workforce to address higher intellectual pursuits.

Rethinking management

Belinda Tee and Jessica Xu, both of IBM, agree with Bradlow that technologies like IBM Watson will help skilled workers like doctors and teachers deliver their services more efficiently.

Xu and Tee suggest change in the workforce will need to start at the top with managers needing to enhance collaboration within the organisations and build diverse teams working on open data.

A two speed economy

How the effects are distributed across the workforce is probably one of the most important aspects of this report with a team from the soon to be abolished National ICT Australia mapping the regions that will be most affected by automation.

The news for many of the country’s regions is not good with the survey finding workers in most areas have more than a fifty percent chance of losing their jobs to automation.

NICTA’s bad news for the regions ties into a recent PwC report that found Australia’s economic power has been increasingly concentrated in the nation’s capital cities.

A mixed future

In many respects the CEDA report is disappointing, while it flags many of the issues facing today’s workforce and the forces shaping it, the survey doesn’t identify the industries and occupations likely to benefit.

Despite not stating the growth sectors, the report’s overall view of the future workplace is optimistic as Telstra’s Hugh Bradlow says: “The change could result in a new generation free of poverty and the burden of labor, thereby unleashing the next wave of human innovation and creativity in directions we can never imagine.”

This may be the case but the to achieve that will require, as the report later suggests, a new social compact.

It’s building that new social compact which could be the greatest task ahead of us.

Looking outwards to beat change

Outwards looking businesses are better suited to dealing with change a report claims.

Only one in four Australian businesses are prepared for change says a report released today by telco Optus.

The Future of Business report is based upon interviews with over 500 business leaders across twelve industries and exposes a disconnect between managers’ beliefs of how ready their businesses are to confront change and the reality.

Over four hundred of the respondents felt ‘confident or highly confident’ in their organisation’s readiness for change while the survey found only 23% of these organisations are actually ‘highly ready’.

Organisations that appeared to be highly ready tended to be outward focused with almost all of them citing the desire to meet customer needs as the top trigger for transformation while less change ready businesses are primarily driven to change in order to reduce costs.

“Change ready businesses are not only prepared for, but also anticipate and predict change. Disruption is happening everywhere and businesses of every size and in every industry need to be prepared to deal with rapid technological change and shifting consumer expectations,” says John Paitaridis, Optus Business’ Managing Director.

While the Optus survey doesn’t produce any great surprises it does emphasise how the dynamics of change work, organisations that are outward focused are more likely to identify and understand change than those looking inwards.

Listening to the marketplace and society almost always beats those counting paperclips.

Is your job really safe?

Even in industries that are safe individual jobs aren’t secure as technology changes most roles

Yesterday we looked at the PwC report on the value of science and engineering education to the economy.

The survey wasn’t good news for the workforce with the survey predicting over two in five workers’ jobs were at risk as digital technologies changed industry.

Notable in the list were the industries PwC believed to be safe over the next twenty years; largely being the medical, health and ‘people’ businesses like public relations.

While the industries themselves might be safe, specific jobs in those sectors may not be so with roles ranging from hospital porters being replaced by robots to surgeons carrying out remote operations.

Looking at the list of relatively unaffected industries, it’s hard not to see how digital technologies aren’t going to disrupt those occupations.

Redefining public relations

PR for instance is undergoing a radical change as the media industry is being totally disrupted requiring today’s public relations professionals to have a very different set of skills to those of twenty years ago.

Those skills include a much more adept use of technology itself and having to deal with a faster, more fragmented industry.

Public relations professionals brought up in the days of boozy lunches and far off deadlines struggle in a time of bloggers, social media and data journalism.

Evolving medicine

Similarly medical practitioners, the top position on the list, have seen their jobs dramatically transformed over the past twenty years by computers and those changes are far from over as medical equipment gets smarter, personal fitness devices become pervasive and the amount of data being collected on patients grows.

Across the medical industry the roles of almost every occupation is being redefined as technology changes the tools they have, along with the nature of ailments their patients present with.

Big Data and analytics

Some professions will grow but automation in those fields will grow exponentially faster, a good example being the fifth role on the list – database administrators and ICT security professionals.

Ensuring the reliability and security of servers and networks is going to become even more essential as the economy increasingly depends upon these systems however security and IT professionals are going to rely on algorithms and Big Data to manage the massive task they have – these are the opportunities for companies like Splunk and Microsoft Dynamics.

In all of these comparatively safe industries the jobs of tomorrow are going to need different skill sets to what they require today.

For workers in these ‘safe industries’ this means further education, training and reskilling to stay employed. Just being employed in a sector that’s expected to stay static or grow isn’t enough to keep your job.

Employers in these ‘safe industries’ also face a challenge in making sure their staff have the right skill sets to use the new technologies.

The airline analogy

If you were running an airline in 1965 it would be cold comfort to look at the explosive growth ahead for the industry in the jet airline era when all your staff are trained to keep propellor aircraft in the air.

So when we talk about digital disruption, it’s not just about industries being shut down and jobs being lost but about radically changing occupations.

It would be a brave person to assume that just because their industry is safe, their own job or business is secure.

How the cloud killed the CIO

Has the shift to cloud computing made the IT manager redundant?

In Technology Spectator today I have a piece on cloud services and how the promise of high reliability threatens the IT manager and Chief Information Officer.

This shift is the same change that’s affected the IT support industry, as technology becomes more standardised and a commodity the need for specialist support and management becomes unnecessary.

In many respects this is similar to a hundred years ago where most factories had their own power plants providing electricity, steam or bel power to drive the machinery.

As mains power became common and reliable, businesses no longer needed specialist staff to ensure the power flowed.

While much of today’s commentary focuses on the CIO role evolving, it may well be the position is redundant.

A small business makeover challenge

Microsoft’s Modernbiz technology makeover program is an interesting study on how small business computer usage has changed

One of the key factors in bringing the Personal Computer era of business to a close was the end of the upgrade cycle where users tended to buy new systems every three to five years.

For companies like Dell, Acer, IBM and Microsoft this cycle was an important and reliable income stream.

In the early 2000s though it stopped as customers decided that with most new innovations coming onto their computers through web browsers they didn’t need to buy new systems.

For the PC industry, particularly Microsoft, this presented a huge threat to their business models and all of them have been trying to find ways to refocus their businesses.

The ModernBiz Technology Make-Over

Late last year I was asked by Microsoft Australia to participate in their ModernBiz Technology Make-Over where a small business running Windows XP and Server 2003 was given a free tech upgrade to the latest equipment.

This was interesting as it was an opportunity to see how Microsoft and the market are adapting to a very changed industry.

As well I still carry the many scars – most psychological but some physical – from my years of running PC Rescue where upgrading companies’ old technology was a core part of the business.

Doing a tough job

The fallacy many managers and inexperienced companies fall for is that migration customers from old equipment to new systems is a simple matter of copying a few files. It is never that simple.

Upgrading company computers a tough field as every business is unique and in workplace where the technology has been in use for over a decade the learning curve onto new software is insanely steep for staff and management alike.

So watching the process from a relatively safe distance where I wasn’t worrying about losing customers’ data or trying to complete a complex task within a short deadline was quite attractive. Basically I wanted to see the other guys sweat.

Another attraction in participating was to see how Microsoft are managing the transition from supplying business servers to provisioning cloud services and how customers are managing that change in product offerings.

Dealing with a shifting market

For both Microsoft and their customers the shift from one off hardware and license purchases to cloud based monthly subscriptions is a major change in mindset, so seeing how small business users adapt to online services will be interesting.

Overall the technology makeover promises to be an interesting exercise on how the small business computer industry is changing.

For his participation in the Modern Biz Technology Makeover program, Microsoft gave Paul a Lenovo laptop which he hasn’t yet used.

Ethics and profitable business

Having a relatively clean society and ethical business cultures should be a massive advantage. It’s best not to squander it.

Does being an ethical business pay off? Transparency International found in 2014 that New Zealand come in only second to Denmark in being the least perceived corrupt country in the world, while Australia comes in as tenth out of 174 countries.

Suzanne Snively, chair of the New Zealand branch of Transparency International, believes this is an opportunity for both countries and their businesses as emerging nations deal with reforming their institutions and management cultures as she told me today at the Open Source, Open Society conference in Wellington.

“Companies do better when they are not corrupt,” Snidely states. “Energy can be used in much more productive way when you don’t have the overhead of corruption.”

Having a relatively clean society and ethical business cultures should be a massive advantage. It’s best not to squander it.

Management struggles with the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things is proving to be a management challenge reports Microsoft

Exactly what benefits does the Internet of Things offer businesses? A survey of Australian businesses by Microsoft claims there are benefits but few companies have deployed the IoT in their operations as managers struggle to understand the technologies.

In the survey “Cut through: How the Internet of Things is sharpening Australia’s competitive edge” carried out by research company Telsyte, Microsoft found two thirds of businesses that deployed IoT technologies have achieved an average cost saving of 28 percent while half the businesses have improved efficiencies of around the same amount.

A poor take up rate

The devil however is in the details and most notable only a quarter of the 306 companies surveyed admitting to using IoT applications.

While the sample size is small, and the Australian business community has been relatively slow in adopting the IoT, the survey indicates managers see the value but are struggling to see how they can adopt the technologies in their organisations.

Although fewer than one in 20 organisations said they could not foresee any business benefit from IoT, an alarmingly high 48 per cent still have no plans to implement the technology.

This reluctance comes largely from a lack of resources and expertise with the top five reasons for not adopting the IoT being technology challenges, affordability, security concerns, lack of skills and no management support.

Lack of management support

Management’s lack of understanding and support for IoT solutions presents a risk for businesses as the next generation of industrial machinery – from cars to tractors – will have some connectivity built into it. A failure to understand the technologies built into equipment opens a range of operational and security risks for an organisation.

Another aspect about the implementation of the IoT that comes from this survey is exactly what are we talking about? Microsoft’s emphasis in this report was clearly on the Big Data analytics, something else that might confuse the discussion with management.

What’s clear from the Microsoft’s survey is companies do realise there are benefits from the IoT but managements are struggling to understand the technologies and how to implement them into their operations. This is an opportunity for the savvy integrator or reseller.