Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: management

  • Navigating the Internet of Things

    Navigating the Internet of Things

    The Navigating the Internet of Things Forum held in Sydney earlier today promised how businesses can navigate the technologies that promise to change society and – more specifically how can Australian enterprises use the IoT – sadly it didn’t quite deliver.

    On the panel, sponsored by Telstra and held in the telco’s Sydney Experience Centre were the Australian Computer Society’s CEO, Andrew Johnson; Uber’s Sydney’s city lead, Glenn O’Sullivan; ZappQ founder Naomi Henn and the man responsible for the entire Internet of Things label and creator of WeMo, Kevin Ashton.

    To start with the panel was very much consumer focused with talk around connected fish tanks, spa baths and discussion around the now defunct home automation service Ninja Blocks. It wasn’t until Ashton mentioned the use of autonomous vehicles in Rio Tinto’s Australian mines that the discussion of industrial uses really came into play.

    “The most powerful applications in the IoT are in manufacturing and logistics”, said Ashton who also noted during the privacy discussion how “government are conflicted when it comes to protecting our data.”

    Ashton’s point was well made given the audience questions were also largely about the privacy and security aspects of the IoT, an important issue highlighted by a story today on how police wearable cameras are being shipped with known spyware installed.

    One other key aspect was the skills shortage. Ashton noted that data scientists are going to be the profession most in demand in an age where almost every device is collecting information with the ACS’s Johnson flagged how it will be the consultants and IT support industry that will have the task of rolling out the IoT to the small business community.

    Ultimately though the Navigating The Internet of Things forum didn’t really hit its mark. Any manager or company owner hoping to understand how the IoT would help their business would have left the room as uncertain how these technologies were going to affect them as how they would have started the day.

    One of the things that’s missing at events like this are people actually using these services or supplying the products. During the introduction to the event, Telstra manager Mark Chapman described how Adelaide City Council is piloting the company’s Cumulocity platform using Libelium sensors.

    Libelium is one of the good stories on how the IoT is changing cities and businesses, something that founder Alicia Asin described to Decoding the New Economy three years ago.

    Describing how the Internet of Things will change businesses requires hearing more from people like Asin and those delivering the products and services driving the evolutions in today’s society.

    Sadly, those voices were missing on today’s panel. If the opportunities presented by the internet of things are going to be realised, then the people finding real results with the technologies today need to be heard.

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  • Killing the business of complexity

    Killing the business of complexity

    “The cardinal sin of the computing industry is the creation of complexity,” is quote attributed to Oracle founder Larry Ellison and often repeated at the company’s Open World forum which I’m attending at the moment in San Francisco.

    For the computer industry that complexity has been a very profitable profitable business with everything from the local computer shop through to the big technology vendors and integrators.

    One of the biggest beneficiaries of that complexity were the salespeople, big complex enterprise deals meant big commissions.

    With the shift to cloud services and apps, those fat margins and commissions have evaporated, leaving the lucrative old models of business stranded. IBM are probably the greatest victim of this while Microsoft are, once again, showing the company’s ability to evolve in the face of a fundamental market change.

    For the salespeople the days of fat commissions are over, with thinner margins it’s not possible to pay big lump sums for winning contracts.

    The simplification of the computer industry is changing the fortunes of many IT businesses, but that change isn’t limited to the tech sector or their salespeople as those fundamental changes are rippling into other sectors.

    A constant claim by Internet of Things evangelists is that the IoT will squeeze inefficiencies out of businesses and this is exactly what we’re seeing with cloud and mobile based services like Uber and AirBnB.

    If you’re in a business that profits from market inefficiencies then it might be time to figure out how to survive in a low margin environment. The challenge facing companies like Oracle is one whole industries are now having to face.

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  • Twitter’s chairman finds the service intimidating

    Twitter’s chairman finds the service intimidating

    Twitter’s new Executive Chairman finds the service intimidating to use reports the Wall Street Journal.

    With a distracted CEO juggling the Initial Public Offering of his other business, it’s hard to see how Twitter is going to get the focused management and supervision it desperately needs to maintain its valuation.

     

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  • Eric Schmidt on managing Google

    Eric Schmidt on managing Google

    “In all my issues at Google, I knew I had no idea what to do, but I knew that I had the best team ever assembled to figure out what to do,” says Google – and now Alphabet – chairman Eric Schmidt in an interview with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.

    Schmidt’s interview is a great insight into managing fast growth companies,”almost all small companies are full of energy and no process”. While he reflects on his early days at stricken companies like Sun (“tumultuous and political”) and Novell (“the books were cooked, and people were frauds”).

    Moving to Google he found all of his management skills exercised at a company with a unique culture and rapidly growing headcount.

    One notable anecdote is how Larry Page kept a 100k cheque from an early investor in his pocket for a month before cashing it.

    Compare and contrast that attitude with the current startup mania where by the end of that day a media release would be issued proclaiming the company to be a new unicorn on that valuation.

    Schmidt’s view, like many others, is that the real key to success in the company is the people. This echoes the interview with Meltwater’s CEO earlier this week where Jørn Lyseggen described how the key to starting a venture in a new country was the first five people hired.

    One great takeaway Schmidt has from his time at Google is how great companies are created through the Minimal Viable Product method, “the way you build great products is small teams with strong leaders who make tradeoffs and work all night to build a product that just barely works.Look at the iPod. Look at the iPhone. No apps. But now it’s 70% of the revenue of the world’s most valuable company.”

    Ultimately though Schmidt’s advice is to make decisions quickly, “do things sooner and make fewer mistakes. The question is, what causes me not to make those decisions quickly.”

    “Some people are quicker than others, and it’s not clear which actually need to be answered quickly. Hindsight is always that you make the important decisions more quickly.”

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  • Rethinking business IT

    Rethinking business IT

    Last week at the AWS:Reinvent conference in Las Vegas, I had the opportunity to interview the company’s Global Head of Enterprise Strategy, Stephen Orban about where he and Amazon see the direction of the cloud computing market and how business practices are being reinvented.

    Among the things we discussed was Orban’s seven best practices for a company’s journey to the cloud, gleaned from his own experiences in his AWS role of advising clients on adopting and his previous experiences as a technology officer at Dow Jones and Bloomberg.

    Orban laid out what he thinks are the keys to success in a company heading to the cloud in his own blog post and during our conversation he expanded on his ideas which also very much reflect the changing role of the CIO or IT manager.

    Supporting the C-suite

    The first point is the IT department has to understand the business and align technology with the organisation’s objectives.

    “Somebody who understands technology who can merge technology with the business needs” will be better able to win the confidence of management says Orban.

    Doing that is the key to winning support from the executive suite Orban believes. Once CIOs have that trust from senior management it gives their teams the space to experiment with new ways of delivering value to their companies.

    Education 

    “The second thing is to provide training and education,” Orban says. “People tend to get a bit anxious of what they don’t know, particularly when it affects their jobs.”

    In Orban’s experience, having informed staff makes them more open to change within the business, “with the transformation I went through at Dow Jones, most of what we accomplished was because of the people who’d been there a long term. They had the institutional memory but they were very open minded.”

    Foster a Culture of Experimentation

    One of the great benefits of cloud computing is how it lowers the costs of experimentation and development, “gone are the days when it cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, even millions, to try something.” Orban says.

    Learning what works and fails is essential, he believes. But as long as there is executive support then a tolerance towards unsuccessful experiments will develop in the organisation.

    Working with partners

    Outside parties are essential to most organisation’s IT systems and Orban believes partner ecosystems have changed with the advent of cloud computing. “There’s a whole new breed of partners that have been going through this,” he says in citing ‘born in the cloud’ software developers and systems integrators who are changing how projects are being delivered.

    Build a Center of Excellence

    “Creating a center of excellence is, I think, one of the key practices any organisation should invest in. You want a body of people who can institutionalise best practice within an organisation,” observes Orban.

    As cloud services take away the complexity of computer systems it becomes an opportunity for organizations to rethink boundaries between the IT department and business operations.

    Move to the cloud

    Given Orban’s employer it’s not surprising he sees cloud computing as key to a company’s transformation however he admits that few organisations will make the jump straight into cloud services.

    “Hybrid will be a part of every enterprise’s journey. Any company who’s been doing IT for any period of time will have existing investments,” he says. “Our view is that we will make it as easy as possible to create that bridge.”

    “We do believe in the long run that enterprises will find they become so much more effective over here (in the cloud) they will move in that direction.

    A Cloud-First Policy

    Once an organisation has its cloud strategy and experimentation culture in place then having a ‘cloud first’ policy, “it reverses the burden of proof away from ‘why would you use the cloud?’ to ‘why wouldn’t you?’”

    While Orban is emphasising the Amazon Web Services view of the world where ultimately all business computing will be done on the cloud – preferably their cloud – his views illustrates the change facing businesses as they implement online technologies.

    For most, the availability of easily accessible cloud computing services is an opportunity to rethink their business processes and how organisations can deliver the best products quickly to their customers.

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