Tag: Cisco

Leadership in a connected world

How do managers and executives lead in a connected world?

Managing a business or government agency as information pours into organisations is one of the great challenges for modern executives.

As part of the Australian Cisco Live event, a panel looked  at Public Sector Leadership in a Connected World, many of the issues discussed apply to private sector executives as they do to public sector managers.

Cisco’s Director of Global Public Sector Practice, Martin Stewart-Weeks, kicked off the panel with the observation that “we now live in a world where information has become completely unmanageable.”

Martin quoted from David Weinberg’s book Too Big To Know, Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room. The author has a good explanation of his book in this YouTube clip.

Trusting the community seems to be the biggest problem facing politicians and the public service, policy consultant Rod Glover puts the general distrust towards governments on the failure of leaders to consult over changes and decision.

Economist Nick Gruen and Australian Industry Group adviser Kate Pound echoed this problem in that a change of culture is needed among leaders towards the way information is controlled and managed.

Nick sees that culture changing while Rod thinks there will need to be demonstrated successes before risk adverse public service leaders will be prepared to adopt new ways of managing.

Kate’s view is that culture change will require a realignment of incentives which will make managers accountable for the delivery of services. She cites a situation where businesses are obligated to register online but the agency’s website doesn’t work.

So the problem is as much gathering the right data along with processing the information inside an agency. Both are challenges for organisations with rigid hierarchies and  information flows.

Information is no longer power — it’s how you use it. But the structures are still based around access and control of knowledge.

The big culture shift for politicians, public servants and corporate executives is we can no longer hoard information.

For managers in both the public and private sectors, the task is now to share information and trust the right people will use it well.

Paul travelled to Cisco Live courtesy of Cisco Systems

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Dealing with the data explosion

Supply the mobile base stations for data hungry customers is one of the great challenges for telcos. How they resolve this will create some unusual alliances.

“Last year’s mobile data traffic was nearly twelve times the size of the entire global Internet in 2000.”

That little factoid from Cisco’s 2013 Virtual Networking Index illustrates how the business world is evolving as various wireless, fibre and satellite communications technologies are delivering faster access to businesses and households.

Mobile data growth isn’t slowing; Cisco estimate global mobile data traffic was estimated at 885 petabytes a month and Cisco estimate it will grow fourteen fold over the next five years.

Speaking at the Australian Cisco Live Conference, Dr. Robert Pepper, Cisco Vice President of Global Technology Policy and Kevin Bloch, Chief Techincal Officer of  Cisco Australia and New Zealand, walked the local media through some of the Asia-Pacific results of Virtual Networking Index.

Dealing with these sort of data loads is going to challenge Telcos who were hit badly by the introduction of the smartphone and the demands it put on their cellphone networks.

A way to deal with the data load are heterogeneous networks, or HetNets, where phones automatically switch from the telcos’ cellphone systems to local wireless networks without the caller noticing.

The challenge with that is what’s in it for the private property owners whose networks the telcos will need to access for the HetNets to work.

One of the solutions in Dr Pepper’s opinion is to give business owners access to the rich data the telcos will be gathering on the customers using the HetNets.

This Big Data idea ties into PayPal’s view of future commerce and shows just how powerful pulling together disparate strands of information is going to be for businesses in the near future.

But many landlords and wireless network owners are going to want more than just access to the some of the telco data — we can also be sure that the phone companies are going to be careful about what customer data they share with their partners.

It may well be that we’ll see telcos providing free high capacity fibre connections and wireless networks into shopping malls, football stadiums, hotels and other high traffic locations so they can capture high value smartphone users.

One thing is for sure and that’s fibre connections are necessary to carry the data load.

Anyone who thinks the future of broadband lies in wireless networks has to understand that the connections to the base stations doesn’t magically happen — high speed fibre is essential to carry the signals.

Getting both the fibre and the wireless base stations is going to be one of the challenges for telcos and their data hungry customers over the next decade.

Paul travelled to the Cisco Live event in Melbourne courtesy of Cisco Systems.

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Towards the Zettabyte enterprise

 The data explosion is here, are you ready for it?

Toward the Zettabyte Enterprise originally appeared in Smart Company on May 31, 2012

Two hundred years ago, the idea of equivalent power of hundreds of horses in a single machine was unthinkable; then steam engine arrived with what seemed unlimited power and that, followed by electricity and the motor car, changed our society and the way we do business.

Back then it was inconceivable that the average person would have the equivalent of several hundred horses of power in their household, today most of us have that sitting in our driveway.

The same thing is happening with the explosion in data, it’s changing how we work in ways as profound as the steam engine, electricity or the motor car.

A couple of surveys released this week illustrate the how business is changing. The Yellow Social Media Report 2012 and the Cisco VisualNetworking Index both show how business and our customers are adapting to having high speed internet at their fingertips.

The Cisco index illustrates the explosive growth of data across the Internet as more people in Asia and Africa connect to the net while users in developed countries like Australia increase their already heavy usage.

In Australia, Cisco see a sixfold growth in traffic between now and 2016. As the National Broadband Network is rolled out, they see speeds increasing substantially as well, with Australia moving from the back of global speed tables up to the front.

Many people are still struggling with the Megabyte or Gigabyte, but very soon we’re going to have to deal with the Zettabyte – a trillion Gigabytes.

For businesses, this means we’re going to have to deal with even more data, it’s clear our hardware and office equipment aren’t going to deal with the massive traffic increases we’re going to see in the next few years.

Even if we have that equipment, it’s another question whether we have the systems, or intellectual capacity to use it effectively.

The Sensis social media report shows consumers are expecting not just rich data but also 24/7 online services.

A worrying part of the Sensis survey is that businesses aren’t keeping up with these demands; something that jumps out with the survey is that while 79% of big businesses have a social media presence, only 27% of small businesses have bothered setting one up.

Australian small businesses have basically given the turf away to the big end of town.

The real worry with these statistics is that small business just isn’t taking advantage of the tools available to them — not only are they leaving the field open to bigger competitors, but there’s a whole new generation of lean new startups about to grab markets off slow incumbents.

While the big companies are vulnerable, it’s the smaller businesses who are the low hanging, easy to pick fruit. If you’re in a profitable niche segment this is something you’ll need to keep in mind.

In the near future we’ll be dealing with inconceivable amounts of data, the businesses that understand this will thrive while those who don’t probably won’t even understand what has hit them.

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