Paul Wallbank, talking about media and comms

How broadband won the Australian election

building a new communications network was the difference between the two parties

In a dour and negative Australian election campaign, the National Broadband Network was the one issue separated the look alike policies of the two major parties. In the end, it decided the election.

Privately developed communications networks are rare in the nation’s history for a combination of factors including Australia’s population distribution and commercial appetites for investment risk.

Australian governments have always been critical to the development of regional communications, from the establishment of state operated railway networks, through the post office owned telegraph and telephone networks and eventually the road system.

So the National Broadband Network is typical of Australian communications development where the government provides the infrastructure framework and the private sector grows around it.

There’s no doubt regional communities understood the importance of being connected to the global economy, successive Federal governments have struggled with a patchwork of government programs such as the Universal Service Obligation and Broadband Connect in an effort to guarantee some level of service for all Australian communities.

The NBN itself was conceived in the realisation that any solution that relied wholly on private funding was not going to deliver a national solution. This was view that regional organisations such as Digital Tasmania had held all along when agitating for their communities not being left behind.

And Tasmania was were the vote mattered, the coalition failed to win any Tasmanian seats where three would have been won had the state followed the rest of the nation. Those three seats; Bass, Franklin and Braddon would have been enough to give the Liberal and National Parties power.

Had the coalition focussed on the legitimate criticisms of the NBN such as the government’s failure to quantify the $43 billion price tag or NBNCo’s failure to produce a business plan then they may well have won the election.

As the country Independents stated, the NBN was one of the key considerations in their decision to support the Labor government, so not getting their NBN policy right cost the coalition government in two ways.

Now the NBN is going ahead we need to focus on what it can deliver, along with a sensible discussion on the right mix of fibre and wireless infrastructure, the proportion of private and public investment and exactly how much the project is going to cost.

Now is the time to get on with building what will be the 21st Century equivalent of the roads and railways of the 20th and 19th Centuries.

the need for a digital footprint

every business person needs an online profile

The need for a digital footprint
Everyone needs a personal description on the Internet

Once upon a time business reputations were spread through local taverns, guilds and market squares.

There was only one thing worse for a local merchant than having a bad reputation and that was having no community profile at all, if the townsfolk didn’t know who a merchant or professional was, their business would simply have no customers.

In modern times, the Internet is the town square and our customers and colleagues expect they can find our backgrounds and profiles on the web. All business people — individual staff members, managers, owners or founders — need something on the web to establish their credibility.

So an online presence, a digital footprint if you will, ranging from a basic profile in your company’s website through to an elaborate personal website, is now essential for all business people.

A good online start for most people is LinkedIn, which at its most basic is like a ready made online CV listing your work history, achievements and qualifications.

Enhancing LinkedIn’s value is the recommendation function where you can publicly thank colleagues for their good work and they can do likewise to you. These become instant professional references on view to the world.

The most powerful part of LinkedIn though lies in the social networking aspect. When you look at someone’s profile the service lists everyone connected to them and, most importantly, what connections they have in common with you. This is a great way of establishing an individual’s bona fides in an industry.

Social networks tend to reward frequent updates, while most business people don’t have time to update them, it is worthwhile keeping recent appointments and qualifications up to date so people checking you out have the latest details.

There are downsides with our digital footprint, we have to be careful about what we say online as inappropriate comments do get noticed and we are held accountable.

Privacy issues are always an issue for what you post online so don’t post family details on the public Internet or add anything you wouldn’t want broadcast next to your photo on the six o’clock news.

Just as we’ve previously said that web pages are today’s shopfront, the net is also becoming our business card. Just as we need business cards, we also need that digital footprint.

Even if you don’t want to put your details on a service like LinkedIn, make sure you at least have an up to date personal profile on your company website.

The good news story

We have some great tales to tell. It’s time to do it.

Last night, 700 children gathered at the Sydney Opera House for The Festival of Choral Music. Over the four days the event is run, over 2,000 kids will have performed in the choirs, bands and ensembles.

Why aren’t we telling these stories of talent, potential, happiness and beauty? Why are we bogged down in the negative, backward looking view of the world we see in much of our commentary of the world?

Maybe it’s time for a rethink about the stories we tell.

Why hung Parliaments are good for business

A government answering to independents is the best result for businesses

Heather Ridout, the Australian Industry Group chief executive, is quoted that Independent control of Parliament will result in “instability, uncertainty and short-termism in policy development” which is an interesting view, given these are exactly the reasons voters have punished the major parties.

Indeed Heather has seen this first hand as a member of the Henry Tax Review Panel, where the final report was hidden for six months, then the bulk of the recommendations were ignored and the few accepted were mutilated and taken out of context.

All of this with no debate or consultation with the community in a review that would “position us to deal with the demographic, social, economic and environmental challenges of the 21st century.”

So much for the vision of the big parties.

Leadership isn’t delivered by risk adverse, focus group obsessed political managers doing deals with big corporations and lobbyists; it’s delivered by leaders who are capable of stating their case and steering their views, visions and policies through fair and robust debate, not hiding behind well crafted communications strategies and sound bites.

We need leadership in both business and politics to face those 21st Century challenges the Treasurer identified when he announced the Henry Tax Review.

A hung Parliament is a once in a generation opportunity to rebuild leadership and confidence in our governments. It’s one we shouldn’t squander.

The new accountability

What business can learn from the Australian election

The distrust and disengagement of voters in last weekend’s election holds valuable lessons for business.

As the politicians have found, the days of empty slogans are over. If you say “people are your most important asset”, “service with a smile” or “no question refunds” then you have to be sure you value those smiling employees as they cheerfully refund money. Otherwise your disgruntled staff and customers will be letting the world know the truth quickly.

We’re in an era of accountability. The connected society means all of us — in our professional, political and personal lives are more accountable than we have been for several generations. This is even more true of our businesses.

A good example of this is restaurants; where twenty years ago few eating places were reviewed by newspapers or magazines while most scored a paragraph in an annual guide, which could have been up to two years out of date by the time it was in the bookstores.

Today dozens of rating sites give customers the opportunity to report their experiences and customers are reading those reviews before they choose where to dine.

The same process is happening in all industries, your business is being reviewed and discussed online in forums, blogs and various social media channels. You have to deliver on your promises and you will be caught out if you don’t.

For society, the Internet and the new communications tools that run on it are changing how we deal with our peers, customers, employers and staff. We have more power and we have more responsibility.

It’s interesting this point was missed by the political parties that ran campaigns that relied almost exclusively on TV, radio and print. Although it isn’t surprising seeing that both parties’ 2010 campaigns seem to operate in a 1960s time warp where cheap fuel, plentiful credit and unlimited mineral exports were the nation’s boundless future.

This sort of complacency is understandable when you have a duopoly. As we know in the business world, a comfortable duopoly breeds cosy, risk adverse managers who spend more time squabbling over who should have the keys to the executive toilets than worrying about minor things like staff, new products or customer satisfaction.

Which is what’s happened to our political parties; winning the privileges of power is all that matters to the factional warlords and their supporting ranks of scheming apparatchiks; just like second rate managers in a cosy, protected industry.

The underlying beliefs of the major parties — free enterprise, a strong regional Australia or a fair go for the Australian worker have all became empty slogans and their markets, the voters, are now holding them to account.

In many ways the three or four independents who will hold the balance of power are like upstart business that disrupt cosy markets, they are reminding the incumbents of the business they have chosen to be in.

That’s the biggest business lesson from last weekend’s election; that in the new global economy the barriers to entry have fallen and new businesses are waiting to grab the customers you’re neglecting. Markets are moving quicker than ever and you need the tools and the teams to take advantage of the opportunities.

Unlike the political world, today’s business environment has no place for the safe, comfortable incumbent. It’s a great time to be a genuinely smart company.

What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing is the buzzword of the moment. But what does it really mean?

Cloud computing is about using other people’s computers to do the work for you.

Rather than having programs running on your computer and saving information to the hard drive, a cloud service connects to your system and you access both the program and your data through a web browser such as Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari.

That service could be free such as Hotmail and Flickr or it could be paid for like Salesforce or Google Apps. Either way, they use a “cloud” of computers to provide the application and store their customer’s data.

Having your applications and data saved on someone else’s servers brings a number of advantages in security, cost and flexibility.

For businesses, that flexibility comes out of not having to buy complex software licences for their networks, instead they only pay for what they use. For home users it means not having to install software that often slows down machines and sometimes conflicts with other programs.

As we use the Internet more on our phones or with mobile devices like the iPad, having the advantage of not needing different software versions for each device makes it easier for us to access and use the information that used to be locked in our personal computers or office servers.

Cost too is an important factor, while many programs such as Yahoo! Mail and WordPress are free, even the paid for programs like Sassu and Basecamp offer considerable savings over their traditional competitors that require you to buy a disk and install the tool on your system.

One of the reasons for those reduced costs is the cloud services are sharing the resources between many users. That reduces the supplier’s distribution and support costs while making it easier for them to update their program when new features or security problems appear.

Security is probably the most misunderstood part of cloud computing. While cloud services do require a degree of trust in the supplier, most providers are providing a much more secure and trustworthy computer environment than most homes and businesses.

There are downsides however; you do need to have a reliable Internet connection and you do have to trust that your supplier will not only keep a secure environment but also won’t share your data with others and won’t go broke.

While some of those disadvantages with cloud computing mean that some businesses — particularly those in the medical and banking industries — have to be careful about using online services, for most homes and enterprises the cost and flexibility benefits outweigh the risks.

Over the next few years we’ll see many, if not most, computer programs move onto the cloud as reliable Internet becomes commonplace. It is the way the IT industry is heading and where we will all be doing our computing in the next few years.

702 Sydney Weekend computers: Free and easy ways to start a website.

Join Simon Marnie and Paul Wallbank to look at some free and simple ways to get your organisation online.

Setting up a website for your small business or community group isn’t difficult and it’s a great way to keep in touch with your customers and members.

Join 702 Sydney’s Simon Marnie and Paul Wallbank from 10am on Sunday, August 15 to look at some free and simple ways to get your organisation online with cheap or free websites and social media tools.

Further information on developing web sites and social media strategies for business and community groups can be found on our page at Five Free and Easy Online Business Marketing Tools.

Tune into ABC 702 Sydney from 10am or listen online through the ABC Sydney webpage. We love to hear from listeners so feel free call in with your questions or comments on 1300 222 702 or text on 19922702. If you’re on Twitter you can tweet paul at @paulwallbank and 702 Sydney on @702sydney.

Head in the clouds: ABC Nightlife

What does cloud computing mean to businesses and households

What is cloud computing and why does it matter to most homes and businesses?

Join Tony Delroy and Paul Wallbank to discuss cloud computing and what it means to the ordinary business and household on ABC Local Radio across Australia from 10pm on August 19.

Tune in on your local ABC radio station or listen online at www.abc.net.au/nightlife.

If you’d like to join the conversation with your questions or comments phone 1300 800 222 within Australia or +61 2 8333 1000 from outside Australia.

You can SMS Nightlife’s talkback on 19922702 or twitter @paulwallbank using the #abcnightlife hashtag

Failing Fast: Google Wave’s real business lesson

The fail fast philosophy is changing how businesses in all industries are operating.

A key philosophy underlying much of Silicon Valley’s successful companies is the “fail fast” concept where a business releases a rough version of a new idea and asks the world what it thinks. Should people like the idea, it gets developed and if they don’t, it gets dropped and everybody moves on to the next brainwave.

The “fail fast” philosophy was behind Google Wave’s dropping last week, as CEO Eric Schmidt said at the Techonomy Conference on the day it was announced; “….we release it and see what happens. It works, you announce product, you ship it…”

Until recently, “failing fast” was restricted to hot shot Internet businesses but as the cost of product development falls due to better collaboration tools, testing methods and global outsourcing, it’s become easier for all businesses to experiment without risking an organisation’s future.

This is very different from the old style of doing business, a good example of how things used to work was Boeing’s development of the 747 Jumbo Jet which was a $2 billion dollar bet, $14bn in 2010 dollars, on a big lumbering subsonic jet in the mid 1960s when the future of aviation seemed to be with sleek supersonic aircraft like the Concorde.

While Boeing’s bet paid off, it took 15 years and nearly sent the company broke.

Most of today’s businesses aren’t locked into 14 billion dollar and 15 year investment cycles as we can test products with simulation tools, computer aided design programs, fast prototyping and oursourcing services like o-desk for labour and alibaba.com for manufacturing without risking the farm.

For most businesses, it’s not even a matter of spending time and money actually developing ideas, usually it’s something as simple as testing a new idea by buying a domain name and setting up a low cost website on a cheap hosting service for under $200. If the idea flies then you start looking at spending real money on making the product ready for the broader market.

Failing fast presents a great challenge to the traditional organisation where the slightest failure is a stigma. In the new economy, a risk adverse culture is going to be punished by competitors who accept that not every idea is right for its time and learn lessons rather than punish those associated with the unsuccessful project.

While this is bad news for large organisations run by risk adverse managers it is one of the great opportunities for nimble and smart companies. If your business is prepared to take small risks, learn from the misses and celebrate the wins then your business could well be on the way to being the next Google.

Asking the tough questions

Being well informed is the key to getting real results from a technology investment

Last week saw three challenging questions cross my desk — “What on earth is cloud computing?” “Can you explain the National Broadband Network?” and “Why does the Internet matter?”

All the questions ended up being rolled into an article that was picked up by radio and television. Which in itself is an interesting study on how Twitter and blogs drive other media channels.

That these three questions had to be asked shows how poor those of us in the technology sector have been in explaining the great opportunities the digital era offers businesses and communities

For too long we technologists have been locked into talking about gigabytes and megabits, HTML and XML while not explaining what these tools deliver

In most of the tech industries, it’s assumed that if something is shinier and has more features then it’s better for the customers.

This is best seen in the social media circles, where most experts are blinded by the fun of using Twitter or Facebook and struggle to explain what they can deliver to business.

Bizarrely this has resulted in a whole tribe of social media experts who claim there is no way we can apply business measures to their blind recommendations that your organisation should be tweeting out status updates every hour.

A blind acceptance that newer or cheaper is better has locked many big and small customers into at best dysfunctional deals. Worse still, is the “we’ll save a fortune with this new widget” mentality we discussed in last week’s column that is nothing but a trap for people who should know better.

Promising cheap, new and shiny has allowed many technology vendors to lock ill informed buyers into upgrade cycles that have delivered increased costs for little benefit. Internet providers, telephone companies and outsourcing multinationals have exploited customer ignorance to deliver massive profits over the years.

This isn’t to say there aren’t cost savings to be had by adopting new methods and technology, there clearly are. But it relies on the customer, in this case your business, to understand how the new ideas will benefit their workplace.

It comes down to the user to ask the tough questions, if you don’t understand what the computer tech, web designer or social media expert is talking about, stop them and ask.

Tough questions are good for the experts and gurus. It forces the good ones to think about the solutions they recommend and gives the poor ones the hint that other industries might offer better prospects for selling snake oil.

Most importantly, it’s about allowing you to understand what’s going on without jargon and verbiage. Having a clear, concise view allows you to make better, informed choices.

With a changing business environment, it’s too important to be bluffed or ignorant about what these tools mean for you and your industry. Ask the hard questions so you can make the right decisions.

The freeways of the future

How the Internet is changing Maggie’s life

“I don’t see why the Internet is important to me” said Maggie, the first caller to our “is the Internet the ultimate consumer’s revenge “ radio program.

Maggie’s question is a very good one at a time when governments, businesses and households are investing heavily in Internet technology. Just a few hours before the radio show I’d been invited by television program A Current Affair, to discuss if Australia’s 43 billion dollar investment in a National Broadband Network is worthwhile.

For Maggie and ACA’s viewers, the answer is “yes, it is very important” — the Internet today is what the motor car was to the early 20^th Century and railways were to the 19^th Century. Communities that aren’t connected will miss the benefits of the 21st Century economy.

To illustrate how important it will be, let’s have a look at Maggie’s life. We’ll assume she’s an older person living in a regional Australian town or one of the fast growing fringe suburbs of a big city.

Probably the most immediate change the Internet delivers for Maggie is how it is giving her a stronger voice as a consumer and citizen. This is what we discussed on the ABC program, how Internet tools like social media are giving customers and voters their voices back.

With reliable broadband Maggie can be researching products and voicing her dissatisfaction with government and private organisations to the world in a way that would have been impossible a few years ago.

Those Internet tools also growing communities around her as like minded people across the world and in her own district are connecting online then meeting in real life at events like Coffee Mornings.

Not only does the Internet connect communities, it connects families — one lady recently described to me how she speaks more to her daughter living in Brazil through Skype than she did when they lived nearby. The net brings friends and families back together and helps overcome social isolation.

Exclusion in education has always been a pressing issue, once upon a time you had to be in Cambridge or Oxford to access the world’s great minds. With a fast reliable Internet connection, the kids in Maggie’s neighbourhood can listen to a Harvard or MIT professor’s lecture without leaving their hometown.

Bringing knowledge to local communities will also help Maggie should she have to have to go to the local hospital, the local doctors will be able to consult specialists without Maggie having to travel long distances to get specialist advice.

Importantly for Maggie and her local hospital, the access to online training resources mean the local staff will be up to date with their professional development and across new trends, ensuring Maggie’s standard of care will be equal to the big city teaching hospitals.

Solving staff training issues also delivers benefits for the local business community. It means the Maggie’s son Tim, the owner of a local plumbing business, doesn’t have to pay for expensive training courses or to travel into town to attend business conferences.

The net also means Tim can access the world’s best business minds without leaving his office. Which gives him benefit of running his business more efficiently and profitably.

For Tim’s kids, it also means they aren’t excluded from the entertainment world. They can stream and download the latest things happening and share equally on social networking sites. They may be in a small town, but they can play in the big world.

Having these education, business, training and entertainment resources strengthens communities. It means kids and entrepreneurs can live in their home towns and still participate in the global economy. It means Maggie is a valued and important citizen of her country and the world.

Fast accessible Internet is more than important, it’s vital just in the ways roads, railways, canals and the telegraph were in their eras. The investment in these freeways of the future is necessary to grow strong and dynamic communities.