future | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Building an internet we’re not ashamed of

How do we build an internet we’re not ashamed of asks developer and writer Maciej Ceglowski

Late last month writer, painter and software developer Maciej Ceglowski spoke at the design and technology conference, Beyond Tallerand in Dusseldorf.

The Internet with a Human Face is his closing keynote for the conference – let’s try to kill that kill that awful term ‘locknote’ for closing presentations – and is a wonderful overview of the unintended consequences of the internet we’re now seeing emerge.

Maciej compares the internet’s effects with that of the motor car in the Twentieth Century – the rise of the automobile totally changed society in ways our great grandparents couldn’t have expected.

Unexpected consequences

In many respects the changes were positive; the age of the motor car saw massive increases in living standards through the second half of the century. However the immediate downside of those efficient supply chains were equally massive increases in obesity rates, suburban alienation and urban sprawl.

A similar thing is happening with this wave of technological changes; as Maciej describes in our presentation, our views of how the web was going to evolve is turning out to be very different to what we expected.

One great example is in small business advertising where we expected online channels would democratise marketing. Instead the exact opposite has happened.

Maciej’s view is far broader than just the relatively trivial problem of small business advertising, particularly with the ‘Internet never forgetting’ with the concentration of the industry in one of the world’s great earthquake zones as another major risk.

Building an internet we’re not ashamed of

Ultimately, though Maciej sees the problems facing the internet industry as a design problem.

“I have no idea how to fix it. I’m hoping you’ll tell me how to fix it. But we should do something to fix it. We can try a hundred different things. You people are designers; treat it as a design problem! How do we change this industry to make it wonderful again? How do we build an Internet we’re not ashamed of?”

While being ashamed is a big call, and probably unfair in that it’s like blaming Henry Ford for 2014 childhood obesity rates in Minnesota, Maciej has flagged that there are real adverse unintended consequences to the way the internet is evolving.

All of us involved in the industry need to recognise those adverse effects and start acting to fix these problems.

4D printing and the quest for elegance

Many of us are still getting comfortable with the idea of 3D printing, but MIT’s Skylar Tibbits is working on a fourth dimension.

Many of us are still getting comfortable with the idea of 3D printing, but MIT’s Skylar Tibbits is working on a fourth dimension that he hopes will move us into a more elegant era of design.

Ahead of Skylar’s visit to Sydney for the Vivid Festival in June, Decoding the New Economy had the opportunity to interview him about what 4D printing is and his quest to create materials that can build themselves.

What is 4D printing

“We called it 4D printing because we wanted to add the ability for things to change and transform over time,” explains Skylar. “Time is the fourth dimension.”

Skylar’s mission at MIT’s Self Assembly Lab is to create materials that assemble themselves. In a TED presentation he demonstrates how these materials may work and the philosophy behind them.

Part of that search involves developing techniques for building large and complex structures from small components. “People know and utilise this in biology, chemistry and material science domains and we’re trying to translate that into larger scale applications.”

Avoiding big machines

“We don’t want to build bigger machines than the things we want to build, we want to build distributed systems,” Skylar continues. “If you want to build a skyscraper, you don’t want to build a skyscraper sized machine.”

Not only does this philosphy offer benefits for manufacturing and building but it may also save energy, transport and labour costs as things can automatically build themselves once they’re delivered to a customer.

“Materials should be able to assemble themselves or at least error correct or respond to active energy. There’s a whole application of packaging and minimising volume after manufacturing and transforming on site.”

Over time they could also adapt to changed conditions Skylar believes: “There’s also how products themselves can transform and be smarter adapt to my demands or adapt to the environment as it’s fluctuating around.”

Redefining the makers’ movement

Worldwide we’ve seen the rise of the makers’ movement as affordable 3D printing and cheap electronics has made it possible to build new things; Skylar sees the Self Assembly Lab as being part of, but slightly apart from this group.

“We make machines that make things, we’re integrated into that theme. We’re arguing that people can collaborate with materials and materials can be collaborative. It’s not just us making stuff and forcing materials into place, it’s materials making themselves.

“A lot of methods are top down, big machines force materials into place and we’re trying to argue you can have bottom up applications in manufacturing.”

So more than just simply printing components, Skylar sees the opportunity for embedding the intelligence into components so they can assemble themselves; the real task lies in programming the materials.

The internet of elegant solutions

Similarly, Skylar sees the internet of things as being a far more passive, perhaps even friendlier, field than that dominated by machines and plastics.

“It’s not about the number of sensors and electronics and motor and things so that we can make these smart devices, we’re interested in how materials and fundamentally elegant solutions responding to external energy can have the same capabilities.”

“We certainly believe in a connected internet of things, but it’s more a material based internet of things.”

“I think that any solution in the beginning you throw a lot of money, technology and motors at it but over time you find more elegant solutions where materials can do more for you.”

“The wearable space is a good example where people don’t want to wear electronics all over their bodies, they don’t want bulky things that are expensive and hard to assemble and clunky to wear.”

“You want materials that you want your skin to touch, so we’re trying to find elegance in the solutions with smart devices.”

Seeding the forest

The challenge for Skylar, the Self Assembly Lab and those looking at changing the worlds of design and manufacturing is – like many other fields – funding.

Material sciences, particularly those being explored at the MIT, have long lead times that aren’t suited to the current Silicon Valley led model of innovation and Skylar believes we need a different model.

“We need to invest in super, long term radical innovation, to seed the economy and global technology development. We gained substantially in the Silicon Valley model with short term wins – with apps and simple technologies with incremental progress.”

“It’s sort of like we need to seed the forest, we can’t just keep taking all these things from the top like low hanging fruit we need to create a forest effect so that we create many new technologies.”

What comes out that forest of 4D printing and smart materials is anyone’s guess; but if Skylar Tibbits has his way, it will certainly be elegant.

A consumerist utopia – where does Australia go in the 21st Century?

A raft of reports and media stories highlight the threats to Australia’s continued prosperity but the nation’s business leaders aren’t listening.

Today has been a big day for Australian navel-gazing with a range of reports released on the country’s prospects on in the Twenty-First Century.

One of the reports was the Joined Up Innovation survey commissioned by Microsoft and written by PwC, I wrote a story for Business Spectator on the results.

While the Microsoft report focused on the small business sector, Startup Aus released their Crossroads report that warns Australia is falling behind the rest of the world. Smart Company’s Rose Powell has a more detailed summary of the report.

Alan Noble, head of Google’s Australian Engineering operations warns, “we still lag behind many other nations, with one of the lowest rates of startup formation in the world, and one of the lowest rates of venture capital investment.”

“If we fail to address this, we risk forfeiting over $100 billion in economic benefits from emerging tech companies, and an irreversible decline in Australia’s competitiveness.”

Looking in from the outside

Particularly notable from the two surveys is that the discussion about Australia’s tech competitiveness is the debate is being led by two local employees of US Multinationals.

For a local perspective, the Macrobusiness blog joins the day’s chorus with a long examination of the risks to Australia’s living standards by being too far down the global value chain.

In the Business Spectator piece, I compared some of PwC’s recommendations with the efforts of the UK and Singapore to rebuild their manufacturing industries.

Australia’s collective decision

For Australia, it’s probably way too late to worry about most of the manufacturing industry as in the 1980s the country made a collective – and almost unanimous – decision to shift the economy to being resources and high value added services.

The high value added services haven’t eventuated; mainly because the internet has shifted the global dynamics towards lower cost centres and partly because Australian business leaders decided it was easier to exploit their domestic market power rather than compete globally.

Mining proved to be a better bet, more by the accident of China’s turn of the century boom rather than any deliberate policy, however the industry employs less than ten percent of the workforce and the vast majority of Australians living in the South East corner of the country have little contact with the resources industry.

A consumerist utopia

For most Australians, employment and prosperity relies upon a growing population driving city GDP growth with domestic wealth supported by buoyant property prices. Australia truly is the consumerist utopia.

As a result of a booming, seemingly unstoppable, housing market and an expending resources sector, Australia’s exchange rate has soared while the nation’s productivity has slumped.

Making matters worse is that outside of mining and a few agricultural markets most of Australia’s industry is grossly expensive by global standards and suffering from chronic under-investment.

An unsustainable economic model

That model is not sustainable, it will take one shock to Australia’s housing market to see the good burghers of Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne impoverished so the nation’s continued prosperity requires something to drive the economy beyond low interest rates and Chinese commodity purchases.

Whether Australia’s business and political leadership are capable of hearing and reacting to these reports remains to be seen, but they will have no excuse to say they weren’t warned.

A life in photojournalism

Photographer Charles O’Rear talks about wine, Windows XP and the future of photography

The latest Decoding the New Economy video is an interview with wine photographer Charles O’Rear.

Charles was on tour with Microsoft to promote the end of Windows XP, it was his photo of a Napa Valley hillside that became the background feature the system’s default ‘Bliss’ theme.

The interview is a long ranging discussion on how photojournalism has changed over the last four decades along with the evolution of both the art and science of photography itself.

Contemplating a jobless future

Few industries are going to be untouched by the disruptions of the next decade and that’s going to present challenges for all of us.

Last October, ahead of the company’s Orlando Symposium, Gartner Research Director Kenneth Brant released a paper looking at the effects of technology on the workplace.

“Most business and thought leaders underestimate the potential of smart machines to take over millions of middle-class jobs in the coming decades,” Brant wrote. “Job destruction will happen at a faster pace, with machine-driven job elimination overwhelming the market’s ability to create valuable new ones.”

Brant’s view about middle class jobs is a sobering thought, many of the corporate ‘knowledge worker’ positions can be easily replaced by computers to make the decisions now being made by armies of mid level managers, bean counters and clerks.

Indeed the whole concept of ‘knowledge worker’ that was fashionable in the 1980s and early 90s in describing the post-industrial workforce of nations like the US, Britain and Australia is undermined by the rise of powerful computers and well crafted algorithms to do the jobs unemployed steel workers and seamstresses were going to do.

Twenty years later and the ‘knowledge workers’ had morphed into the ‘creative class’ and it appears the computers are coming for them, too.

Personally, I subscribe to the view in the medium to long term new jobs in new industries will evolve – a view shared by economists like GE’s chief economist, Marco Annunziata.

Over the next decade however there’s no doubt we’ll be seeing great disruption to established industries and the hostility to Google buses in San Francisco may be just an early taste of a greater antagonism to the technology community in general.

For managers, the problems are more complex; while their own departments, corporate power bases and even their own jobs are at risk, they are going to have to find ways to incorporate these changes into their own business. Gartner warns CIOs in its briefing paper;

The impact will be such that firms that have not begun to develop programs and policies for a “digital workforce” by 2015 will not perform in the top quartile for productivity and operating profit margin improvement in their industry by 2020. As a direct result, the careers of CIOs who do not begin to champion digital workforce initiatives with their peers in the C-suite by 2015 will be cut short by 2023.

Few industries are going to be untouched by the disruptions of the next decade and the resultant job losses are going to present challenges for all of us.

An era of exponential innovation

Deloitte Center for the Edge founder John Hagel talks about our era of exponential innovation.

“How do we move to an exponential approach to innovation” asks John Hagel, Director of Deloitte’s Centre for the Edge in the latest Decoding the New Economy video.

The Centre For The Edge is Deloitte’s Silicon Valley based think tank that identifies and explores emerging opportunities related to big shifts that are not yet on the senior management agenda.

John tells us how the cycles of change and innovation have varied over the last thirty years in the industry; “the biggest thing for me is that nothing is stabilising. I often go back into history and look at things like electricity, the steam engine and the telephone – all hugely disruptive to business practices.”

“But the interesting pattern is they all had a burst of innovation and then a levelling off,” says John . “You could stabilise and figure out how to use all this technology.”

“With digital technology there is no stabilisation.”

That lack of stabilisation leads to what John has termed ‘exponential innovation‘ where he sees business and education being rapidly transformed as technology upends established practices and methods.

Healthcare, financial services and “any industry that has a high degree of information content ” are the sectors currently facing the greatest challenges in John’s view.

John sees the solution for businesses and managers in looking at the current era not as a time of technology innovation but of institutional innovation. That institutions, like companies, have to reinvent how they are organised.

Reinventing well established companies or centuries old bureaucracies is a massive challenge, but if John Hagel’s view is right then that radical change to institutions is what is going to be needed to face a rapidly changing society.

Bank image by Ben Earwicker, Garrison Photography of Boise, ID through sxc.hu

A soonologist’s view of the future

BT Futurologist Nicola Millard on being a futurologist and the future of the workplace, the open plan office and customer service.

“I think my job title is a little bit misleading,” says Nicola Millard of her role as BT’s Customer Service Futurologist. “Most people would imagine futurologists have a crystal ball that works and maybe talking about twenty to twenty five years out about a future where intelligent robots have taken over the world.”

“My horizon tends to be a bit shorter,” Nicola explains. “My time tends to start in about three weeks time and tends to extend to five years, so I’m more of an industrial futurologist and CEOs tend not think beyond the next three weeks.” “I guess more of a ‘soonologist’ than a futurologist.”

Nicola was talking to the Decoding The New Economy YouTube channel at BT’s London Demonstration centre where the time frame is somewhat more than the next three weeks as the company shows off the technology and product lines it believes are going to change the communication industry.

For BT and Nicola, much of the near future is focused in how consumer and workplace behaviour is being changed by IT and communications technology.

Nicola sees an interesting relationship between technology and people – technology can radically change peoples’ behaviour but it also can amplify existing behaviours. “It can certainly influence the way we work, rest and play, in the ways we approach the office and how we consume,” says Nicola.

“Behaviour changes are really fascinating when we give people people access to technologies that give them more choice and more information than ever before. It untethers us. All of these thing present opportunities to change that way we do stuff.”

The untethered office

Technology has also untethered the office, says Nicola. “In the old days we had to go to the office at nine o’clock in the morning and leave at five in the afternoon. We didn’t have any other options – we had a desk, we had big technology and we had masses of paper.”

“That’s all changed.” Workplaces have always struggled with collaboration and Nicola sees the open plan office as being a 1970s attempt to get workers to talk and work with each other rather than hiding behind closed doors. “By forcing people into open plan we hoped that by breathing the same air they would start to collaborate.”

“Now we collaborate with people that aren’t necessarily in the same place as us. The office itself has become a collaboration tool,” Nicola says. “We’re seeing the evolution of the office.”

Today’s technology tools and remote working have changed the role of the workplace with the office becoming a place for workers to collaborate and work together, however that nature of work has changed.

Working beyond the office

With improved connectivity the home office and mobile workers have come into their own with BT having around ten percent of their workforce operating from their residences and the company finds they achieve around a twenty percent improvement in productivity from those staff.

However home working isn’t for everyone. “I’m a terrible home worker,” Nicola says. “I tend to go mad so if I want to collaborate I go to the office but I want to work quietly I go to the coffice’, which is generally a third place outside the office or home.”

“There’s only four things I need to work; good coffee, good cake – these first two are non-negotiable – good connectivity and then I need company. Not necessary office type company but just a buzz.“

The change to retailing

Today’s buzz extends to shopping, the shops are fuller on a Saturday afternoon than they have ever been before. The showrooming phenomenon – where customers use their smartphones to check prices and proudcts while in the shop – allows retailers to enhance their sales strategy as the same available to shoppers can also be used by sales assistants.

“Shopping is sometimes a contact sport,” Nicola observes. “the fact we are comparing and contrasting, the fact we are challenging the physical shop. Waving our mobile phone on the shopfloor.” “Retailers for a long time resisted showrooming, they split their online and physical spaces. We’re now seeing those physical lines blurring.”

Emerging trends

Nicola sees the biggest challenge facing business in the near future being agility – as cloud services expand, it’s easier for companies to scale which places pressure on many incumbent businesses.

Big Data also presents opportunities, “there’s always been big data, we’ve always had too much data, the analytics tools have changed.” For great challenge though for business is change and this is what will focus executive attention in the near future. “Businesses tend to be built to last rather than for change.”

Globalisation with Chinese Characteristics

What are the challenges facing Chinese businesses as they expand globally?

“eBay is a shark in ocean, Alibaba is a crocodile in the Yangtze” film maker Porter Erisman quotes the founder of Alibaba, Jack Ma, in comparing the two online trading sites.

In promoting his film Crocodile in the Yangtze, Porter spoke to Decoding the New Economy about the rise of the global Chinese internet giant.

A key part in Alibaba’s success is taking on eBay on it’s own turf, “if you’re David fighting Goliath you can’t play by the big guy’s rules,” Porter says.

This is exactly what the Chinese company did when eBay entered their market and today Alibaba and it’s subsidiary Taobao have sales exceeding eBay’s and Amazon’s.

“Back in about 2003 Jack Ma came to me and told me about a secret project to overtake eBay,” Porter says. “When we looked at them they looked like a Goliath, they’d never really been beaten in a market they’d entered first and they had a huge war chest with a $150 million committed to the China market.”

It turned out that eBay weren’t as powerful as they appeared, something other entrepreneurs have discovered when giants like Google have entered their markets.

The Chinese Leapfrog

Like many rapidly developing countries, China is leapfrogging various stages of development that Western economies went through with the retail industry and e-commerce being two examples.

“Some people say cellphones will leapfrog landlines, actually the same is due with entire systems,” says Porter. “In China coming from so many years of a command economy there wasn’t a very developed retail culture or even a consumer culture.”

“Taobao came along at a time when all of that was still in the early phases of development and the company basically leapfrogged that whole phase of building out shopfronts and building logistics.”

“E-commerce in China is revolutionary while in the US, or Australia, it is evolutionary.” Porter says.

Porter quotes Jack Ma as saying “e-commerce in the US would be a dessert, in China it is the main course.”

China’s Global Challenge

As companies like Lenovo computers, Hauwei telecommunications or Haier whitegoods have discovered, Chinese businesses face challenges when expanding overseas. Porter sees this as a matter of time and scale.

“Like Japan in the 1970s and 80s there’s a whole wave of companies that have started going global. China’s such a big market that there’s a lot of companies that get big and develop scale before going international.”

“I’d say the biggest challenge in the beginning is cultural,” states Porter. “China’s at a disadvantage because information and the media are so controlled that’s sometimes a rude awaking when a company goes global like a Hauwei and then faces a bunch of political issues it doesn’t understand.”

“One of the reasons I made the film,” Porter says. “I wanted entrepreneurs in China to see it and understand these are the issues Alibaba faced when they went global and hopefully you can learn from some of those successes and mistakes.”

Going to China

Porter’s advice to westerners going into China is to shut up, listen and learn, “don’t assume that just because things are done a certain way in the US or Australia that it’s superior.” The country’s culture and ways of doing business are different to those of North America, Europe or Australia.

“If you look at the way traffic moves in Shanghai it looks crazy. If you drove like that in Sydney it would be a disaster but there’s just different ways of through traffic, getting point A to B.”

“It’s better not to judge, but just step back.”

Regardless of our judgements, China’s move up the value chain means we will see more PRC founded companies going global.

Over the next decade we’re going to see the globalised economy start to take on some recognisably Chinese characteristics.

Rebuilding American Manufacturing

The US textile industry’s recovery is an economic story of our times, it’s also one of our future.

US manufacturing is undergoing a resurgence, just without the jobs reports the New York Times in its story on the textile mills of South Carolina.

The decline and recovery of US manufacturing is a story of our times – the industrialisation of Asia, trade treaties such as NAFTA and China’s joining the World Trade Organisation all saw Western producers move their operations overseas.

A weakness with that business model are the extended global supply chains as goods spend months on ships following long manufacturing and design lead times, the exact opposite of what modern consumers are looking for.

Coupled with domestic manufacturers’ increased investment in automated systems which makes labour costs a smaller factor and the sums start adding up for making things in the United States.

Unfortunately for the workforce, those automated plants don’t require anywhere near the staff older factories employed and the skills required in today’s mills are substantially different from those needed in those of earlier times.

Most industries are encountering the same change and new technologies make the modern factory very different to that of a few decades ago.

The jobs aren’t going to come back in the numbers that were once employed, as the New York Times story illustrates with the decline in the working population.

Despite the recovery in US manufacturing, today’s industry is very different to what it was last century, something that’s missed by those advocating a return 1950s style government policies to protect jobs in sectors like car manufacturing.

Even if they are successful in rejuvenating local car factories, cotton mills or coal mines, the days of these plants employing tens of thousands of grateful cloth capped workers are over.

Those politicians whose ideology is based on the old model, or businesspeople who want to work in the old ways, are going to find the modern economy very difficult and challenging.

Image of cotton threads on a weaving machine through jbeeby on sxc.hu

Evolving cities and Silicon Valley’s private buses

What do Silicon Valley’s corporate buses tell us about the way our cities are evolving?

One of the phenomenon of Silicon Valley’s development has been the rise of the ‘Google Buses’ – the private services run by the big tech companies to shuttle their workers between home and their workplaces.

The Bay Area’s private bus shuttles are a real time illustration of how regions evolve around industries and economies and how cities and communities are in many ways dynamic, living creatures themselves.

An effect of the Google Buses is that San Fransisco is experiencing a ‘reverse sprawl’ notes Eric Rodenbeck in his Wired Magazine story Mapping Silicon Valley’s Gentrification Problem Through Corporate Shuttle Routes

It’s about more than gentrification as we’ve experienced it thus far: It’s about an entirely reconfigured relationship between density and sprawl, and it’s going to need new maps to help us navigate this landscape.

Driving those buses is instructive as well and Buzzfeed has an interview with an anonymous driver employed by one of the bus companies. The driver’s tale shows the scale of the phenomenon.

This bus holds 52 people and that is 52 cars that are not on the road in one trip, and we have 70 routes in our system. That’s thousands of cars everyday.

Driving cars is fundamental to the American – and Australian – lifestyle. The modern American city developed around the motor car and that mobility is the defining feature of the Twentieth Century.

So maybe the Google Buses are an early part of the redefinition of our cities to meet the the needs of the 21st Century and cars are not the driving factor.

In this vein, Jarrett’s Walker’s Human Transit blog teases out some of the issues behind these developments.

Finally, this joke is on the lords of Silicon Valley itself. The industry that liberated millions from the tyranny of distance remains mired in its own desperately car-dependent world of corporate campuses, where being too-far-to-walk from a Caltrain station — and from anything else of interest — is almost a point of pride. But meanwhile, top employees are rejecting the lifestyle that that location implies.

While I don’t agree with Jarrett’s proposition that the geeks riding these buses want to mingle with strangers given the locations they live – I’d argue they’re attracted to those locations because their peers live there and downtown amenity to good restaurants and bars – he raises a very good point about the mismatch between where the workers and the jobs are.

Jarrett’s point touches on land use zoning and its effects on the evolution of cities. An excellent piece by Alexis Madrigal in The Atlantic tracked Silicon Valley’s iconic techonolgy sites, most of which have been demolished due to the pollution partly caused by zoning requirements for underground tanks.

The issue of zoning is also raised by Rodenbeck who points out that zoning issues with carparks are what has made employee buses more attractive to the giant tech employees.

Zoning different land uses makes sense on one level as no-one wants to live next door to a tannery, heavy metal waste dump or quarry, but there’s a risk with fixed ideas that our cities will become less responsive to economic developments, particularly in an era when people don’t want to, or can’t, dive across town to get to their jobs.

What Silicon Valley’s corporate buses really show is that our cities are evolving around the needs of today, not yesterday. It’s something governments, businesses, investors and communities should keep in mind.

Image of Google shuttle bus stop from David Orban through Flickr

Making way for Gen Y in the executive suite

A challenge for organisations is opening the career path for Gen Y managers as baby boomers hang around the executive suite.

One of the great challenges in today’s workplace is how organisations will manage Generation Y entering the boardroom.

Lazy, unfocused and high maintenance are some of the descriptions used by boomers when talking about younger workers, but how much truth is there really in that and how do organisations plan for this generation to take leadership positions?

As part of the recent Sydney EMC Forum, I had a chance to discuss the challenges of managing Gen Ys with social researcher Micheal McQueen and EMC Australia Managing Director Alister Dias.

Like many tech companies, EMC has a younger workforce with around 25% of staff being GenY and Diaz sees global thinking and a fresh, bright approach as some of the advantages younger people bring to the workplace.

“We want to see this grow,” says Diaz. “There’s two reasons for this; one is that energy level, quick learning and adaption to the new world but the other is the shortage of general talent in the market.”

That shortage is an early part of the global race for talent, with Diaz seeing the priority for EMC and other tech companies to develop home grown skills rather than importing skilled workers.

Offering a career

For Diaz’s, one of the great challenges in this race for talent is retaining skilled and motivated Gen Y and Gen X through offering more diverse career options.

Career progression is one of the big problems facing both GenY and X workers as, in McQueen’s view, the baby boomers have no intention of going anywhere as many define themselves by their work so they don’t plan to retire.

“For Baby Boomers their work ethic is their identity,” says McQueen. “Stepping back from a leadership position, or any position in general is a big deal.”

Not working huge hours which is a key difference between baby boomers and their GenY kids and grandkids who don’t wear long hours as a badge of honour.

Language barriers

An area that concerns McQueen is a lack of vocabulary as text and social media messaging has eroded the teenagers vocabulary with average 14 year old today only knowing 10,000 words as opposed to 25,000 in 1950.

“It started off as text speak and it’s gone beyond that now,” says McQueen. “If you have a Gen Y person operating with older workers there’s often a disconnect there.”

The effects of electronic gaming and communications also has created a climate where today’s teenagers have less empathy than those of twenty years ago — McQueen cites a University of Michigan study — this has consequences in fields as disparate as sales, technical support and nursing.

Organisations are going to have to learn to deal with these differences. “In our own organisation we talk about the need to adapt to Gen Y,” says EMC’s Diaz. “Personally I think we have to meet them half-way.”

“We’ve found it difficult to get talent. You really have to do your homework on it.”

Part of EMC’s problem in finding skilled Gen Y workers has been the collapse in university IT course enrolments along with the broader turning away from STEM — Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathmetics — related degrees.

Diaz is quite positive on this and sees the pendulum swinging back towards more technical degrees and diplomas with more younger people taking on STEM subjects. At present though enrolment statistics aren’t bearing this out.

Finding those skilled workers is going to be one of the great challenges for business in planning for the rise of GenY workers, one of the greater tasks though might be getting the baby boomers out of the corner office.

Image of a younger worker courtesy of ZoofyTheJi through sxc.hu

Reducing the road toll through the internet of everything

How can the internet of everything reduce the road toll?

How can modern computer technology cut the road toll?

Transport for NSW’s John Wall spoke last week at Cisco’s Internet of Everything presentation in Sydney about some of the ways the connected motor car can reduce accidents.

John’s presentation comes from personal experience, having being a volunteer for nearly thirty years at his local State Emergency Service brigade where he was often among the first responders to local vehicle accidents.

Some of the improvements in technology see the road toll falling as people travel less because of remote working, teleconference and business automation. Many of the applications though are built into the vehicles, street signs and the roads themselves.

Finding the safest route

John’s first suggestion for improving driver safety is having navigation systems sourcing traffic, weather and other information to suggest the best route for the driver. An intelligent system may also modify the recommended journey based on the experience of the driver and state of the vehicle, such as the tyre conditions.

Watching the eyes

Fatigue kills and all of us have driven when we were really too tired to be behind the wheel.

The first in car technology John discussed is facial recognition technology that detects when drivers are fatigued. Tying this feature into the vehicle’s entertainment system with a stern aviation style “PULL OVER – YOU ARE TIRED” warning could well save hundreds of lives a year on his own.

Connected road signs

One of the underpinning factors of the internet of everything is cheap computers and transmitters embedded into almost anything. Road signs and sensors talking to cars could help reduce driver errors such as entering curves too fast.

Those signs can also be plugged into weather conditions so if there’s ice, fog or rain then the car can be told of the hazards ahead.

Going on the grid

Signs are not the only devices that could be talking to each other, vehicles themselves could be talking to each other. Should one car hit a slippery or soft patch on the road, it could tell following vehicles that there’s a problem ahead and respond accordingly.

That technology too could help traffic planners and road authorities, as data on traffic speeds and road conditions feed into their databases it becomes easier to identify black spots or road design problems before lives are lost.

Helping the first responders

A wrecked car or roadside sensor can also help those first responders attending an accident. The vehicle itself could transmit the damage and give rescuers valuable, time saving information, on the state of the occupants.

Similarly, the system could also warn emergency services such as hospitals and ambulances of the injuries likely and what’s needed to treat the injuries on site, in transit and at the casualty ward.

Importantly, a smart vehicle can also warn those first responders of potential risks such as live air bag gas cylinders, car body reinforcements or high voltage cables as they attempt to free trapped occupant from a wreck.

The rescuers themselves may be wearing technologies like Google Glass that help them see this information in real time.

Bringing together the technology

As Kate Carruthers points out, the internet of everything is the bringing together of many different technologies – wireless internet, cloud computing, grid networks and embedded devices all come together to create a virtual safety net for drivers.

By the end of this decade that we will all be relying on these technologies to help us drive. Which means we might find our licenses start to be endorsed for the level of technology in our vehicles, just as we used to have to get qualified to drive a car with a manual transmission.

Concluding his presentation, John Wall told the story of Jason, a cyclist from his town who was killed in a road accident and left a young family. In his slide he showed Harry, Jason’s young son, playing with the flowers on his father’s memorial.

“I hope for Harry is that when Harry learns to drive that things will be different on our roads and things will be different because we are all connected,” said John.

It’s a strong reminder of the real human opportunities and costs when we adopt new technologies.

Car crash image courtesy of jazz111 through SXC.HU