Tag: management

A tale of managerial hubris

The failure of Australia’s 2016 Census is due to arrogant management, not bad technology

Twenty-four hours after the 2016 Census website collapsed, the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ reputation is in tatters as the organisation blames hackers, denial of service attacks and failed routers for the debacle.

While there’s many lessons to be learned from this tale, not least the importance of getting your social media team on board, the key takeaway from this embarrassing saga is to show some public humility and not dismiss informed critics.

Technology was not the problem at the ABS, an arrogant management is what caused the Census collapse.

Given the poor accountability of Australian management it’s unlikely anyone’s career is going to suffer as a consequence of this debacle but it’s a further dent to the reputations of both IBM and the ABS. Quite frankly they deserve it, if only for their failure to listen to the community.

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Forget eliminating risk

We can’t eliminate risk, but we should manage it recommends Huawei’s chief security officer

“How are you going to manage, not stop, risk?” Asked John Suffolk, the Global Cyber Security & Privacy Officer of Huawei Technologies at the company’s ICT roadshow in Sydney today.

Suffolk’s message is one that should be heeded by all business owners, managers and executives in areas more than just IT security.

One of the conceits of the late Twentieth Century management philosophies is that risk could be managed out of business, partly through technology but mainly through legalisms that attempted to push liabilities onto suppliers, contractors, resellers and customers.

That philosophy still holds true in many organisations today, particularly government agencies, and it costs them dearly.

In truth, business is risky and trying to eliminate risk is a fool’s errand. How it’s managed is the real test for leaders.

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Creating alternatives to the NASDAQ

Is the NASDAQ still the place for tech companies to list? Nuix’s Eddie Sheehy doesn’t believe so.

Does it really matter what stock market a company lists on? In my interview with Nuix CEO, Eddie Sheehy for the Australian Financial Review, the question arose about where the company will list for its expected IPO next year.

Sheehy’s response was clear, “I suspect we’d get just as good a float out of Australia now as we would anywhere else. In fact better, because I think our shareholders are better known, respected and trusted, there’s nothing that I’ve seen in London or Nasdaq that makes me believe we’d get a better outing.”

Until recently most tech startups aspired to listing on the US NASDAQ exchange and the reasons were compelling as the bourse has a strong technology focus meaning deeper pools of funds, more liquidity along with a community of investors and analysts who had a strong understanding of technology stocks.

The case for other exchanges

Now other exchanges are making their case for tech companies listing with them. The London Stock Exchange making a strong argument for prospective IPOs. Singapore, Sydney and many others have similar pitches for the business.

The problem in those exchanges is the lack of depth in the marketplace. Having a small selection of tech companies listed means limited focus from investors and analysts, it also risks having one or two successful companies dominating the index, as has happened with Xero’s listing on the New Zealand Exchange.

Xero also illustrates another problem with a listing on an exchange not familiar with the peculiarities of tech stocks at the company’s Sydney AGM a few weeks ago where an investor asked ‘when are you guys going to make a profit?’

Rod Drury, Xero’s CEO, was able to deflect the question but it showed how companies listed on exchanges where the the high growth, low yield model of tech startups are unusual. On the Australian exchange, this problem is exacerbated by the investor base being dominated by big, dumb institutions.

Changing perspectives

Nuix, among Xero and a host of other tech companies, are slowly changing the perspectives of those investors but the focus on yield and safety from both retail and institutional investors will remain an obstacle for ventures launching in more conservative jurisdictions.

Other factors are the stability, legal and taxation consideration of those jurisdictions. If stockholders are facing barriers realising their investors or the the domicile puts companies at a disadvantage then that country’s stock market won’t be preferred.

Ultimately though a company’s listing is about access to capital and liquidity. If companies like Xero and Nuix can get both at a reasonable cost by listing on the Australian, Singaporean or London markets, then that’s a choice for their boards.

It’s hard though to see the NASDAQ being knocked off its perch for moment, although it the US tech bubble does pop things may change.

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Burning the boxes

Employing technology staff may be a matter of burning, not ticking, the boxes.

“I cater to their crazy and the results are tremendous. Hire the crazy, because you need them. Those are the ones that don’t think outside the box, they burn the box and stomp on the ashes,” says Chris Pogue, Chief Information Security Officer at Nuix who I interviewed at the Black Hat conference at Las Vegas last week.

Chris was talking about hiring information security people and, as the attendees at the Black Hat and DefCon conferences show, show that philosophy is important in hiring good technology people who tend to be people who don’t recognise the boxes, let alone tick them.

That point though could be made for many occupations, many businesses that claim they value ‘creative thinking” should be thinking about burning the boxes.

In a much more competitive environment having management ‘thinking within the box’ may be one of the greatest disadvantages facing an organisation, not just in recruitment but also in identifying threats and opportunities.

Burning the boxes may well be one of the best things business leaders could do for their organisation in finding and cultivating the talent to compete in tomorrow’s economy.

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Embracing business disruption

Pam Murphy, the Chief Operating Officer of software company Infor believes businesses have to embrace change in order to survive today’s period of disruption

“A lot of companies are trying to figure digital disruption out,” says the Chief Operating Office of Infor, Pam Murphy. “For many companies they are seeing all this stuff and thinking ‘oh my god, what on earth do I do?’. They know they need to evolve and they know they have to evolve.”

Murphy, who joined Infor in 2011 after over a decade at Oracle, has seen a lot of that change. Infor itself embraced the cloud and in the company’s has been on an acquisitions spree as it seeks to expand its product offerings.

Having dealt with so many acquisitions – eight since Murphy joined five years ago – the company has become adept at absorbing new businesses. “It does require a lot of thinking that you’re going to be respectful of that,” she says. “A lot of stuff is easy to standardise but culture is difficult.”

Another area that Murphy doesn’t see as being standardised is in developing talent. “You have to be open minded,” she says in answer to my question about encouraging women into senior roles and increasing the diversity of senior management.

Murphy’s main advice to business leaders is not to shy from the business world’s shifts, “embrace the change.” She says, “don’t think of it as being something that’s scary and threatening, get ahead of it. Embrace the fact we’re in a completely different era.”

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Five technologies likely to change business

Brian Blau, Vice President of Gartner, discusses the five technologies likely to change business including VR, AR and wearables.

What are the technologies that will change business over the coming years? During Gartner’s Business Transformation & Process Management Summit in Sydney on Tuesday, we had the opportunity to talk to Brian Blau, the company’s Vice President of Research, about what he sees as the five technologies that are most likely to change business.

Brian himself brings a lot of experience with emerging technologies, while he’s currently Gartner’s leading Apple analyst and specialises in consumer and mobile & Wireless technologies he spent the previous twenty years working in the virtual reality field which gives him an informed perspective on the many of the current popular tech buzzwords.

Talking to Blau in the busy analysts room at the Sydney Hilton, he kept reaching into his bad to show off his collection of the latest gizmos ranging from VR headsets through to smartwatches and fitness trackers, showing his enthusiasm for the field he covers.

Augmented and Virtual Reality

“It’s been a long time coming, I had twenty years in AR/VR and I’ve been an analyst for six and I’m glad I have that background,” says Blau.

Blau sees augmented and virtual reality tools altering the workplace dramatically as they change the experience for workers. The industries he sees being affected in the near future are sectors like field service, training and design.

Wearables

“Wearables are interesting devices,” Blau says. “You can almost think about them as transitory technologies so today there may be lightweight analytics about what employees do at work or what consumers do in public is kind of a stepping stone. If that device has a screen or some sort of interface on it, it becomes interactive.”

Blau cautions though that much of the data gathered from consumer wearable devices is far from reliable and while the quality of information improves there is still a way to go until we can depend upon these devices for life or mission critical tasks.

Virtual Personal Assistants

“These are combinations of hardware and software – Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana or Amazon Alexa,” Blau states. “These Virtual Personal Assistants are having a big transformation, today they answer simple questions based on rules but in the future they are going to be hyper-smart.”

“Facebook, Apple and the rest of them have opened up their platforms to developers, we think this has applicability to all sorts of consumers and in the business domain we’re going to see these devices used in workplaces.”

Cameras and computer vision devices

“There are two advances that are happening, there are multi lens camera devices and the algorithms behind them are starting to decode what’s behind the image,” says Blau. “I think this is exciting technology as it’s an input that’s never been digital before.”

Blau sees the increasing sophistication of cameras and the software processing the images as finding important applications within the workplace, “there’s a lot of tasks around vision that are manually processed at the moment and computer vision is going to automate those.”

Personal IoT devices

“These are more about the workforce, the sensors that are in the work environment are those that people could bring to work, it overlaps with wearables.” Blau says, “the next generation of IoT devices are going to be much more personal.”

“Almost every business I talk to is very interested in virtual reality and wearables,” states Blau. “There is a high amount of interest because there’s a firm belief these devices will change workplace and consumer behaviours.”

For these devices to be adopted on a large scale, they will have to become more reliable Blau believes with the barriers currently being that most devices and their software are still at Minimum Viable Product stage.

Tips for the future

Blau advises businesses looking at these technologies should start with a basic belief that the specific technology will benefit their business, then they have to experiment and identify what the return on investment will be. “My main advice is to experiment with the technology, run a series of pilot programs, make sure you’re diverse in what you are looking and keep an open mind,” he says.

“The goal with these devices is to change behaviour,” Blau states. “The real challenge will be to get it right over time. You’ll have to reiterate time upon time.”

With these new technologies entering the business world, companies are going to face changes both within their workforces and in their markets. Being across the potential of these technologies is going to be essential for managers.

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The challenges of an open organisation

Social media management service Buffer has been open about its management journey. Their latest story illustrates a common business challenge.

“We moved into a house we couldn’t afford” writes Buffer founder and CEO Joel Gascoigne on his company’s decision to fire ten of their 94 staff as revenues miss targets and the venture’s cash burn accelerates.

A few years ago we wrote about Gascoigne’s commitment to being an open company and his post today is a brutal, but honest, reflection of that.

Buffer’s problem is one familiar to many business owners when revenue projections aren’t being met and the tough reality of making unexpected cuts becomes apparent.

Making Buffer even more unusual among tech and social media startups is how the company doesn’t depend up venture capital funding – an advantage for its owners but also a downside in situations like this where being able to raise more money for equity would give the business room to move.

At present however companies following the VC model are in trouble as they are finding investors aren’t so willing to write cheques to loss making ventures unless there’s a clear path to profits.

That reluctance to fund businesses is going to see more layoffs for companies dependent upon VC funding, some startups will fail because of it. The really fascinating part is how many of the tech unicorns will be amongst the failed business.

One hopes though Buffer won’t be among the casualties, Gascoigne and his team deserve to be rewarded for their candour.

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