Category: Innovation

Ranking managers

Microsoft’s problems are deeper than just a misused HR tool

Vanity Fair’s analysis of Microsoft’s lost decade focuses on an unlikely culprit – the management tool of stack ranking.

Stack ranking, or “forced distribution”, is the practice of listing staff members in order of effectiveness or placing them on a bell curve where those in the middle are satisfactory and those at the right hand of the graph are exceptional.

Those on the left of the curve or the bottom of the list are deemed to be underperformers and risk losing their bonuses or even their jobs should the company be shedding staff.

Like all business tools, stack ranking can be useful. One manager of a North American multinational who encountered this when working with an Indian outsourcer described how it was used.

“A senior manager told me how he applied it in his group. Of 300 people, everybody was given a ranking and were told that ranking and given a chance to put their case if they thought it was unfair.
Then the bottom 5% were culled. Tough but fair.”
So at the Indian outsourcer it was applied to large groups and the bottom tier were given the opportunity to put their case. There was some transparency and at least some fairness in the process.
Used poorly though, it can backfire, “using it for groups of ten is stupid and lazy” said that manager who later saw it introduced at his own corporation with catastrophic results.

The real problem at companies misusing tools like stank ranking is too much management.

Like the old saw of “too many cooks spoil the broth”, too many managers create mischief. To justify and protect their positions they build little empires and make work for themselves.

Give empire building middle managers a tool like “stack ranking ” and you have a problem where office politics and patronage become more important than technical skill or performance which is exactly what the Vanity Fair article describes at Microsoft.

Ranking employees in a mindless way is symptom of a bigger problem in an organisation. In Microsoft’s case, the problem is too many managers.

The solution to that problem is simple.

Connecting the data dots

The age of big data means big opportunities

One of the connected world’s weaknesses is its fragmented as various silos of data appear in the different social and cloud services.

Bringing those sources together in a way that’s useful and relevant is one big opportunity for entrepreneurs.

Sydney company Roamz is one of the businesses looking at this opportunity by bringing together a user’s Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare feeds to figure what interesting stuff is happening locally.

Roamz’s CEO and founder Jonathan Barouch has a vision to “cut out the noise” from social media services by “curating and cleaning the data”.

The idea of curation isn’t new in the online world, this is probably one of the biggest challenges for everyone on the web as we find ourselves swamped with data. To date, much of the idea of ‘curation’ has been around news sources where services like Google News try to deliver relevant current affairs to the user’s desktop.

Social media sites are particularly in need of curation, particularly given your friends in Nevada are much help when you’re looking for a good coffee shop in Melbourne.

This is the problem Roamz seeks to solve and we’re seeing this with various other services, not least the social media platforms themselves as Facebook tries to extend its reach and Google attempts to integrate their local services with the Zagat restaurant review system and Google+.

Some would dismiss these services as “first world problems”, after all who cares about twittering hipsters trying to find a single origin, fair trade soy latte in Broadmeadows?

There’s a point in that view, although there is a much bigger problem for businesses in this fragmented data world in harnessing and validating various sources of market intelligence.

For businesses that get this right, they’ll be able to target advertising and marketing much more effectively while being able being able to tap into what their customers think and want.

It’s no accident therefore that one of Roamz’s major investors is consumer communications giant Salmat, who can deliver great value to their corporate customers through supplying this data and market intelligence.

The next IT buzzphrase is “Big Data” where businesses deal with this flood of information that is swamping all of us, by being able to understand customers and their behaviour things become far more efficient and cost effective.

Bringing data together and making sense of the results is the big challenge of our times, those who can solve the problem will be among the next generation of business leaders.

Mapping new industries

Can Google Maps Coordinate change the business world?

As smartphones become ubuiquitious in business, more applications are appearing that take advantage of the devices’ inbuilt features like GPS and cameras.

To date, many of these have services have been in consumer based, social media style applications but as the market matures, more business orientated services are appearing.

Google Maps Coordinate, the latest service from the search engine giant, uses a smartphone’s built in location services to track field staff and allocate jobs through an Android smartphone app.

On top of that, Google have added a Maps-style interface for businesses to schedule appointments and for staff to accept assignments.

It’s a nice but basic product that doesn’t really address any gaps in the marketplace with job scheduling technology being available for over a decade in the logistics and field service industries.

Connect2Field’s chief executive Steve Orenstein compared Google Maps Coordinate to his own product and while Steve is talking up his own company, the comparison does show this is a market that’s well catered for.

Given the market already has plenty of participants, it would make sense for Google to make the API available to existing players and profit from the rich data they can provide, that move might even give the edge to Android devices in an enterprise market that will become a two horse race if Microsoft fail to execute on Windows 8 and their tablet devices.

Unfortunately Google has chosen not to include these services into their enterprise API packages, leaving them competing against existing players rather than working with them.

At the moment Google Maps isn’t on a roll, having dropped their developer rates by 88% to deal with threat from Apple’s new mapping service.

Probably the biggest drawback to Google Maps Coordinate is its lack of integration with Google Docs, the increased siloing of Google’s operations makes the company start to resemble Microsoft and this is an issue Sergei Brin and Larry Page are going to have address lest the company find itself locked into the same inward looking stagnation.

While its difficult to see Google Maps Coordinate surviving in its current form given the nature of the marketplace, the trend in business orientated geolocation services is changing how companies work.

As smartphones take over the market and location based services become accepted, we’ll see more tools taking advantage of the business opportunities. For Google, this sector has huge potential and it will be interesting to see how they succeed in capitalising on their market dominance.

Can Sydney become a smart city?

What are the challenges facing building a down under entrepreneurial culture?

How does a city become smart? That seems to be the question of the moment as countries and cities around the world try to figure out how to catch a little bit of Silicon Valley’s magic.

As part of the 2012 City Talks series, the City of Sydney hosted a discussion on how the city can become a smart city;

Sydney is bursting with talented, creative and forward-thinking people. How can we harness the energy of government, education, businesses, media, and creative thinkers to create space for innovation?

While it’s questionable that a “creative space for innovation” is a worthy objective – albeit laden with buzzwords – it’s certainly true that Sydney, along with other Australian cities, has the components to be a entrepreneurial centre, the question is how does the city harness the various talents across the different sector.

Working to advantages

Rather than aping Silicon Valley, New York or Ireland all cities should be exploiting their natural advantages. Fast Company Magazine recently looked at how Oklahoma City has advantages over its bigger cousins in New York and California.

For Sydney, and Melbourne, those strengths include an educated, multi-cultural workforce with first world legal systems in a similar time zone to the world’s major growth markets.

One of the tragedies in Australia’s marketing over the last twenty five years has been the failure to mention the ethnic diversity of the nation. This is huge competitive advantage that is barely being discussed.

What can governments do?

At the Sydney City Talks event, Lord Mayor Clover Moore said that creating a smart city requires “the same incentive to be given to innovators and creatives as is given to property investors and mining companies.”

That change requires state and Federal governments to change laws and businesses, particularly banks, to pick up on those price and policy signals.

Education too needs reform although this needs real consultation or we’ll end falling for short term fads or copying the damaging anti-teacher jihad that has infected the US.

A welcome change for many Australian innovators would be changes in government procurement policies as currently all levels of government prefer to deal with the local offices of large multinationals. As the Queensland Health Department debacle shows, these organisations are often less competent than local providers.

Making those changes though will require major reforms to policies and laws, something that neither major Australian political party at any level has the courage or vision to do.

That the NSW Digital Action Plan is now in its thirty-first draft speaks volumes about the inertia among the city’s, state’s and country’s political and business leaders.

Ditch the Silicon

Probably the first failure of imagination is the “silicon” tag – US entrepreneur Brad Feld skewers this nicely in his blog post on The Tragedy Of Calling Things Silicon.

Sydney has already has a group called “Silicon Beach” which has spread out to Melbourne and the Gold Coast and it’s interesting that both Google Australia’s CEO and Engineering head want to co-opt the name.

On of the suggestions was “Silicon Banana” a tag which brings to mind the phrase “kill me now please?” to anyone already uncomfortable with the ‘Silicon’ label.

The “Silicon Banana” idea comes from the curved shape of Sydney’s ‘digital heartland’ which curves from Darling Island to the west of the city and curves around the edge of the city centre through Surry Hills across to the film and television facilities at Fox Studios.

Describing Sydney’s centre of innovation as lying within the ‘banana’ illustrates the lack of thinking outside the current app and web mania. It also neglects the bulk of Sydney, particularly those parts of the Western Suburbs where languages such as Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Vietnamese, Arabic or Hindi are spoken.

Once again we neglect those assets because they aren’t white, Anglo or living in the prettier parts of the city.

Does it have to be Sydney?

We should keep in mind that the Silicon Valleys of the past haven’t been the biggest cities – Silicon Valley itself is barely a city and San Francisco is not one of the US’ biggest cities.

It’s quite possible that an Australian centre of innovation could be any one of dozens of smaller towns such as Geelong, Wagga or Cairns.

The problem in Australia is, once again, property prices. Compared to the US or Europe, housing and office rents aren’t substantially cheaper outside the big cities unless you’re prepared to move to seriously blighted parts of the country.

Spinning the wheels

Probably the most disappointing thing of the ‘smart city’ discussion is just how bogged down we’ve become – there was little in the City Talk that wasn’t being spoken about five, or even ten, years ago. Things have not moved on.

Creating a smart city isn’t about picking winners among industries, suburbs or groups. To really be smart we have to give the opportunities for clever people to succeed.

Simply jumping onto today’s technology fad or mindlessly aping Silicon Valley is to squander our advantages and not learn from the mistakes of others.

The real worry though is just how little progress is being made in seizing today’s opportunities. It doesn’t bode well for tomorrow’s.

Building the Internet’s Frankenstein monsters

Changing Internet empires give rise to strange alliances

Apple’s announcement of deep Facebook integration into their iOS6 operating system for the iPhone and iPad is the latest in the weird beasts created as the various online empires jostle for position in a changing marketplace.

We’re used to failing companies creating alliances – most notably Microsoft and Nokia in the mobile phone sector – and almost all of these ventures fail as they are akin to the two slowest runners in a race tying their legs together believing that will make them faster than the leader.

In other areas we see the big players buy out hot new businesses as the incumbents figure its easier to buy out the competition rather than try to compete.

While those purchases form the basis of the Silicon Valley greater fool model, usually the new business gets subsumed into the big corporation, the technology is lost and all but the most cynical founders wander off to do something more interesting.

Then there’s the merger of equals, and today’s announcement of Apple and Facebook’s deep co-operation is one of these.

Facebook has been talking about building its own phone – much to the scorn of industry participants – as the company struggles to deal with user moving onto mobile phones.

Apple is hopeless at social media, which is barely surprising from a company that employs its own secret police.

So the two coming together make sense although it may not work well as alliances like these can be likened like mating the world’s best golfer with a Grand Slam Tennis champion and expecting the child to be an Olympic swimmer.

Of course Apple had a successful merger of equals back in the early days of the iPhone – Google. The alliance worked well and, Google’s then CEO Eric Schmidt sat on Apple’s board for some time.

Than Google decided to develop its own mobile software build its own phones so relationships soured between Steve Jobs and Eric.

Now Google Maps has been ditched from the iOS phone system and steadily Google are finding their services being dropped from all of Apple’s products.

Those moveable alliances – not dissimilar to Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania in George Orwell’s 1984 – are something we should get used to as the Big Four maneuver for position in the changing online world.

While it’s going to be tough time if you’re a mindless fanboi following the progeny of these strange alliances, for the rest of us it should be fascinating viewing.

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.

What do we call the long term?

Has the long term arrived yet?

Yesterday Optus launched their revamped business services under the banner of Optus Vision.

As part of the launch, the telecommunications company released their Future Of Business report complied by Deloitte Access Economics.

In discussing the details, economist Ric Simes of Deloitte Access made some observations on what drives businesses in adopting digital technologies. Ric broke it down into management time horizons.

Short term: Economic uncertainty is no excuse for ignoring digital strategies.

Medium term: Companies start using digital technologies for competitive advantages.

Long term: Structural change disrupts industries.

On asking Ric what his definitions of short, medium and long terms are, he said “1-2 years”, “3 to 5” and “beyond five years”.

The interesting thing with this is that for most industries the long term has arrived, in fact it’s been with us for a decade. It’s just many managers and investors haven’t noticed.

John Maynard Keynes once said, “in the long run we are all dead.”

For some industries that long term disruption has happened and their business models have died – it’s just that managers haven’t noticed they are dead.

Now Facebook’s challenges really begin

How can Facebook build their revenues to justify the huge market valuation.

The long awaited float yesterday of social media service Facebook was a triumph for the business’ founder Mark Zuckerberg, his management team and advisors.

A market valuation of 100 billion dollars for a business started less than ten years ago is an impressive achievement and that sum now presents massive challenges for management who have to deliver on what investors believe the service is capable of.

At US$38 a share, Facebook is valued at 76 times its projected 2012 earnings of 50 cents a share, and nearly twenty times its expected revenues of US$5 billion. This compares to Google which trades at less than 15 times its 2012 profit estimate and six times revenue.

For Facebook to match Google’s value, the social media service is going to have to start making serious money beyond they can from charging egoists and corporations $2 a time for featured posts.

Google’s success was in moving out of their walled garden, had Google focused on advertising just on their own search pages the company would be earning a fraction of the billions they now make every quarter.

It’s difficult to see how Facebook can move off their platform into other sites and with users moving to mobile, the company will find itself even more constrained by Google and Apple who want to control access to their devices.

A more obvious course for Facebook is to maximise income from the massive data base of likes, preferences, relationships and opinions they have amassed from their users. How they do this will probably be the biggest challenge to Facebook’s management.

In monetizing their database, Facebook will push the limits of the law, tolerance of privacy advocates and possibly the patience of their user base. This is going to test a company that has in the past been slow to respond to public concerns.

Another challenge is perception – with such a massive valuation, Facebook is going to attract critics regardless of what they do.

A good example of this is the number of people criticising the float for not ‘popping’ on the stock market debut. At the end of the first day’s trading the stock had only gone up 0.6% and some in the media claimed this showed the IPO wasn’t the successful.

The idea a successful IPO is one that soars on the first day of trading is a naive view from a 1980s mindset. The idea was born out of the privatisation of British and Australian utilities in the 1980s and 90s where taxpayers were seduced by the idea of “free money” in exchange for selling community assets cheaply.

A ‘stag profit’ from a share that soars on its public float is theft from the existing shareholders and a transfer of wealth to insiders and their advisors.

Silicon Valley venture capitalists and startup founders aren’t dumb and have never fallen for that trick – investors pay dearly for stock in their ventures.

While no-one would call Mark Zuckerberg and his management team dumb they have a big job ahead of them finding revenue sources to justify the $100 billion market valuation. It’s going to be an interesting ride.

Grappling with the online news beast

Old media organisations are struggling with the web. Is the news industry dead or evolving?

The head of Google News, Richard Gingras, last week discussed how the news industry is evolving at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation.

Much of Richard’s discussion centred around disruption – the newspaper industry was disrupted in the 1950s by television and by the 1980s most print markets had seen several mastheads reduced to one or two.

The remaining outlets were able to book fat profits from their monopoly or duopoly position in display and classified advertising.

By 2000, the web had killed that business model and the newspaper industry was in a decline that continues today as aggregator sites like Huffington Post steal page views and Google News further changes the distribution model.

One of the problems for the news industry is how different the online mediums are from print, radio or television broadcast. The struggles of media startup The Global Mail is a good example of this.

In the middle of last year news started trickling out that one of the Australian Broadcasting Corporations’s top journalists, Monica Attard, had left the broadcaster to set up The Global Mail, an online news site funded by Wotif founder Graeme Wood.

The site launched on schedule in February 2012 and underwhelmed readers with pedestrian content and a confusing layout. By May, Monica Attard announced she was leaving the organisation she’d founded.

Tim Burrowes of the media site Mumbrella examined why the Global Mail is struggling, his Nine problems stopping The Global Mail from getting an audience details how the site doesn’t use online media effectively.

At heart is a fundamental mismatch between the methods of journalists raised in the “glory days” of print and broadcast journalism against those of the online world, not least the much harsher financial imperatives of those publishing on the web.

One key problem it the TL;DR factor – Too Long; Didn’t Read. Where online readers tend to leave stories after around four hundred words.

Richard Gringas is quoted as encountering this problem when he worked at online magazine, Salon.

At Salon, articles were paginated, but only 27% of readers made it to the end of the four-page articles. Compared to competitors, Richard was told, this was a good benchmark. But with fresh eyes, he was astounded that a product was being produced with the knowledge that the vast majority of the audience would not consume the entire piece. Richard loves the long form, but if the objective is to convey information, we need to think about the right form for the right medium at the right time.

So “long form” journalism has to be written the right way and it has to be backed up with good visual components and have “short form” versions suited to the more impatient readers who make up the bulk of the web audience.

The New York Times made a step in this direction with their iEconomy series on how the US middle classes have been displaced with manufacturing’s move to China.

An even better example of journalists using the web well is The Verge’s Scamworld where an online expose of Internet get rich quick schemes and the conmen behind them.

Scamworld shows us what skilled journalists can do online. The amazing thing is the site’s new steam is tiny compared to those of established outlets like the New York Times, Guardian, Fairfax or those of News Corporation.

This failure to execute by incumbent news organisations isn’t because they are lacking talent – every young, and not so young, journalist has been required to have multimedia skills and the ability to file stories in multiple formats for at least a decade.

Old Media’s problems lies in the mindsets of senior journalists, editors and their managements who are locked into a 1950s way of thinking where fat advertising revenues funded the adventures and expense accounts of roving reporters who tough as nails editors occasionally bullied into filing stories.

That model started to die in the 1980s and the Internet gave it the last rites.

Richard Gringas’ discussion at Harvard shows news and journalism isn’t dead, but it is evolving. Just like many other disrupted industries, the news media has to adapt to a changed world.

Digital roadkill

Is your business the fluffy bunny sitting in the Internet’s fast lane?

Digital Roadkill first appeared in Smart Company on 10 May 2012

Just over thirteen years a group of Silicon Valley technologists wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto detailing what they saw as being the new rules of business in a connected world.

Cluetrain was mandatory reading when terms like “information superhighway” were fashionable and Yahoo! was the dominant web portal. It’s somewhat fallen out of fashion today.

Like most manifestos Cluetrain was partially unreadable and heavy on dramatics but it did lay down the principles that are now largely accepted in both the online and mainstream business worlds.

I was reminded of the Cluetrain Manifesto earlier this week at a suburban marketing event run by one of the country’s biggest media organisations. The lessons of the last thirteen years seemed to have passed by almost every business in the room.

Most of these businesses were operating they way they did in the 1990s. While some of them had a website and a couple had Facebook pages, their businesses had barely changed in the last twenty years.

These businesses are digital roadkill. Many of them have no idea what’s about to hit them as they sit paralysed wondering what the bright lights baring down on them are.

In this respect they aren’t dissimilar to the big department stores or electrical chains that are working to a model that’s ticked along nicely for decades and don’t realise how the fundamentals of the economy have shifted in the last five years.

Many of these small traders are still taking orders by fax and some of them still keep their cheque book ready to pay their suppliers bills. It’s that bad.

The idea of selling over the net is completely beyond them, only big overseas companies dodging GST do that sort of thing.

Even in the marketing field, these businesses have ignored the obvious for years with many still advertising in their local Yellow Pages and freebie community newspaper, despite barely making a sale from either in five years. But these channels worked for them once.

Few of them have up to date websites, are doing the bare minimum search engine or mobile optimisation and almost every single one hasn’t bothered to claim their local business listings.

To be fair to the little guys the host organisation was no better, this large media organisation has a good online product – they even own one of the major online local business listing services – but their sales people on the night didn’t mention it as they are too locked into selling their traditional local newspaper advertising products.

At least that company is wealthy and has other profitable arms that can prop up its dying local newspaper arms which can at least appear profitable while there are costs to be stripped from the operation.

Unlike those big media companies and retailers, the small local business doesn’t have big cash reserves or deep pocketed investors allowing them to survive for years in a declining market.

These small businesses are just going to drag their owners into poverty.

Not only have the old rules of business gone, but the value of businesses which choose to live in the past has evaporated. Few people are going to buy a business with an old, declining customer base.

“Roadkill” is an apt term for a business that probably won’t be around in two years.

Today the Cluetrain is big lumbering road train carrying ecommerce goods down the fast lane of the information superhighway with a driver that has no intention of stopping.

Make sure your business isn’t the cute fluffy rodent sitting in its path.

Bringing your own device and business change

how the Bring Your Own Device philosophy is changing the businesses operate.

Two years ago I realised that the management trend of staff bringing their own computers to work – BYOD – was more than a fad when I noticed executives were bringing the then new iPads to meetings.

Most of these executives worked in organisations where IT departments had waged war on employees connecting their own equipment to the corporate network, so this was a serious development in the computing world.

In many ways employees had been bringing their own technology devices to work for years. It was, and still is, quite common to see public servants and those working for other bureaucratic organisations arriving at meetings with an underfeatured work supplied handset and their own smartphone.

IT managers hated this as they saw those private devices as a security risk and another headache for their overworked staff to deal with.

When the iPod was enthusiastically adopted by the executive suite, the game was over for those IT managers. Suddenly they had to deal with these devices and the issues involved.

At a seminar run by systems integrator Logicalis earlier this week looked at some of the issues around BYOD for companies. What was striking in their presentations were the need for HR and legal departments to be part of the process for adopting this philosophy.

The BYOD philosophy is a big jump for organisations as it means relaxing controls on employees and for many managers that is the biggest challenge.

Part of that challenge is controlling the organisation’s data on devices that could be going anywhere and doing anything.

While companies like Logicalis and Citrix address this with remote desktop applications that create a virtual Windows desktop on the employee’s device, networking giant Cisco offer their ISE devices to run “identity services” that set up rules controlling what staff can access and where they can access it from.

Cisco Australia’s Chief Technology Officer Kevin Bloch gave a good round earlier this week up of where they see BYOD driving business. To Cisco, the move to mobile devices is irresistible as shown in their Global Mobile Data Traffic Update.

Interesting both Kevin and the Logicalis speakers see BYOD as being part of the recruitment process. Increasingly younger workers expect they will be able to use their own devices rather than relying upon employer issued workstations and mobile phones.

According to Kevin, Cisco’s research is finding many employees would trade salary for the right to bring their own device which is something that should grab the attention of budget constrained managers.

This also ties into other employer trends such as Activity Based Workplaces where companies provide hot desks and staff are expected to store their items away at the end of each workday.

Ross Miller of the GPT Group described how this is another trend driving the paperless office as staff using hot desks find packing away files and paperwork each day is an unnecessary hassle.

What we’re seeing with businesses adopting BYOD policies is a big change in the way places operate and this has consequences for all divisions of an organisation from HR and legal through to marketing and corporate affairs. It’s a genuine game changer.

How the BYOD philosophy is changing business is good example of technology driving our habits and work practices in ways we don’t always anticipate.

One thing is for sure, the workplace of the future is far more autonomous and diverse than those we’ve been used to for the last hundred years, the businesses who don’t adapt are those being left behind.

Continuing the online payments battle

Mastercard’s PayPass is a direct challenge to Visa and PayPal

Today Mastercard announced their PayPass service, a “digital wallet” that allows consumers to pay through various online channels including the web and their smartphones.

Mastercard’s PayPass is the latest move in the battle to control the online payments industry as consumers move from plastic cards to using their mobile phones and Internet devices.

One of the interesting aspects of PayPass is how it is a direct challenge to PayPal who in turn recently launched their PayPal Here service which threatens incumbent credit card services like Mastercard and Visa along with upstarts like Square.

While its early days yet in the mobile payments space as consumers slowly begin to accept using smartphones and tablet computers to pay for goods and services, its clear the industry incumbents are moving to secure their positions in the market place.

It’s going to be interesting to see how this develops, many merchants will be hoping this competition starts to drive down transaction costs.