Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: Australia

  • Telling the broadband story – the government makes its case

    Telling the broadband story – the government makes its case

    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

    NBNCo’s storytelling failure

    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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  • 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

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  • 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.

     

     

     

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  • Does closed government hurt business and the economy?

    Does closed government hurt business and the economy?

    Earlier this week I interviewed Vivek Kundra, the former US Chief Information Officer and now Salesforce executive, on innovation, technology and government with some of the Australian business perspectives run as a story in Business Spectator.

    Something that stood out for me from the interview were Vivek’s views on the effects of governments making both innovations and information freely available.

    “Two policy decisions that transformed the future of civilisation – GPS opening and human genome project through the Bermuda Principles.”

    While it’s probably too early to draw conclusions on how the opening of the human genome data will change business, it’s certainly true the Global Positioning System has allowed whole new industries to evolve and it’s an important lesson on making technology available to the masses.

    The Global Positioning System was, like the internet, a US military technology developed during the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

    After Korean Airlines flight 007 was shot down by Soviet fighters in 1983, President Reagan approved civilian use of the GPS – then named Navstar – to prevent similar tragedies.

    Such a decision was controversial, this was military technology being given over to the general population which could be used by enemy forces as well as airlines and truck drivers.

    No doubt if the GPS technology was developed in the UK or Australia, there would have been demands to monetize the service. It almost certainly would have been sold off to a merchant bank that would have charged for the service and stunted its adoption.

    By making GPS freely available, the US gained a competitive advantage which maintains the nation’s technological and economic lead over the rest of the world.

    This openness isn’t just an advantage for technology companies. While US governments are no means perfect, the relatively open nature of local, state and Federal administrations is an advantage for the United States economy and society. As Vivek says,

    Making data available provides three concrete functions; it allows citizens to fight corruption, it allows you to build the next billion dollar companies and it transforms government functions by breaking down silos.

    When the default position of government is to classify everything as secret or ‘commercial-in-confidence’, there’s little chance of an entrepreneurial culture growing in that society – instead you have a business culture that favours connected insiders who can trade off their privileged contacts within government.

    A culture of closed government reflects the business culture of a society and the reluctance of both the private and public sectors to openly share knowledge is why countries like Britain and Australia will struggle to emulate the United States.

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