Tag: Australia

NBNCo’s storytelling failure

Why Australia’s National Broadband Network gets bad press

One of the baffling things in reporting the Australian tech and business scene is how the National Broadband Network project manages to get such bad press.

Part of the answer is in this story about Google Fiber sparking a startup scene in Kansas City.

Marguerite Reardon’s story for CNet is terrific – it covers the tech and looks at the human angles with some great anecdotes about some of the individuals using Google Fiber to build Kansas City’s startup community.

This is the story that should have been written in Australia about the National Broadband Network.

I’ve tried.

Failing to tell the story

Earlier this year I travelled to Tasmania to speak to the businesses using the NBN and came back empty handed.

In Melbourne, I finally made it to the Hungry Birds Cafe – vaunted by the government as the first cafe connected to the NBN – to find they do a delicious bacon roll and offer fast WiFi to customers but the owners don’t have a website and do nothing on the net that they couldn’t do with a 56k modem.

I’ve found the same thing when I’ve tried to find businesses connected to the NBN – nil, nothing, nada, nyet. The closest story you’ll find to Cnet’s article are a handful of lame-arsed stories like this Seven Sunrise segment which talks about families sending videos to each other, something which strengthens the critic’s arguments that high speed broadband is just a toy.

Businesses need not apply

This failure to articulate the real business benefits of high speed broadband after four years of rolling out the project is a symptom of a project that has gone off the rails.

It’s not surprising that businesses aren’t connecting to the new network as NBNCo and its resellers have continued the grand Australian tradition of ripping off small businesses. Fellow tech blogger Renai LeMay has quite rightly lambasted the overpriced business fibre broadband plans.

Even when small business want to connect, they find it’s difficult to do. The Public House blog describes how a country pub was told the cost of a business NBN account be so high, the sales consultant would be embarrassed to reveal the price.

“The cost for exactly the same connection (and exactly the same useage) is so much higher for a business that you wouldn’t be interested.”

The whole point of the National Broadband Network is to modernise Australia’s telecommunications infrastructure and give regional areas the same opportunities as well connected inner city suburbs.

Failing objectives

If businesses can’t connect, or find it too expensive, then the project is failing those objectives. So it’s no surprise that NBNCo’s communications team can’t tell a story like Kansas City’s because there are no stories to tell.

Apologists for the poor performance of NBNCo say it’s a huge project and we’re only in the early stages. In fact we’re now four years into a ten year project and we still aren’t hearing stories like those from Kansas City.

Telling the story should be the easy part for those charged with building the National Broadband Network, that they fail in this should mean it’s no surprise they are struggling with the really hard work of building the thing.

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The Present is Unevenly Distributed

The global economy is changing faster than many business and political leaders realise. The future is here now.

“The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed” said author William Gibson in a quote often used by futurists and speakers.

A great example of this is the Australian Government’s National Digital Economy Strategy which was re-released last week.

The report itself was met with howls of indifference as the objectives were modest with little new really added since its first release in 2011. What’s notable though almost all the stated objectives for 2020 are achievable today. Here’s the list.

  • Government service delivery—by 2020, four out of five Australians will choose to engage with the Australian Government online.
  • Households—by 2020, Australia will rank as one of the top five OECD countries in terms of the proportion of households that connect to broadband.
  • Businesses and not-for-profit organisations—by 2020, Australia will rank as one of the top five OECD countries in the proportion of businesses and not-for-profit organisations using online opportunities to drive productivity improvements and expand their customer base.
  • Health and aged care—By 2015, 495,000 patients in rural, remote and outer metropolitan areas will have had virtual access to specialists and by 2020, 25 per cent of all specialists will be participating in delivering telehealth consultations to remote patients. By 2020, 90 per cent of high priority consumers such as older Australians, mothers with babies and those with a chronic disease, or their carers will be able to access individual electronic health records.
  • Education—by 2020, Australian schools, registered training organisations (RTOs), universities and higher education institutions will have the connectivity to develop and collaborate on innovative and flexible educational services and resources to extend online learning to the home and workplace and the facilities to offer students and learners the opportunity for online virtual learning.
  • Teleworking—by 2020, Australia will have doubled its level of telework to at least 12 per cent of Australian employees.
  • Environment and infrastructure—by 2020, the majority of Australian households, businesses and other organisations will have access to smart technology to better manage their energy use.
  • Regional Australia—by 2020, the gap in online participation and access between households and businesses in capital cities and those in regional areas will have narrowed significantly.

With the exception of the telehealth objective, where the barriers don’t lie in the technology, all of these laudable aims could have been achieved in the past 15 years.

Some of them already have but it’s been missed by the cossetted bureaucrats who write these reports.

For the businesses who aren’t already “using online opportunities to drive productivity improvements and expand their customer base”, these folk are digital roadkill anyway and may as well get jobs driving taxis today.

Probably the most depressing of the objectives is the first one focusing on government service delivery. Here’s Bill Gates’ comment about online government services while visiting Australia.

The Government itself needs to become a model user of information technology, literally seeing government will work with its citizens, with its businesses without paper exchange will be able to do in our taxes, licences, registrations, all these things, on a basis where you don’t have to know the organisation of government and its various departments, you don’t have to stand in line, you don’t have to work with paperwork.

Gates’ comments were made in September 2000.

That a vision for the future is so modest, mundane and achievable today is probably the most disappointing thing of all with reports like the Australian National Digital Economy strategy.

Not only is the future unevenly distributed but so too are the jobs and prosperity that will flow from it, if you’re going to have a vision. You better have a good one.

Image courtesy of pdekker3 on sxc.hu

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Australia’s economic rigor mortis

Australia has become too complacent in a competitive world warns one US business leader.

This is worth watching, Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris and Australian Business Council chief Tony Shepherd spoke on Sunday with Alan Kohler on the ABC’s Inside Business.

At 5.40 Andrew Liveris says Australia is suffering a state of economic rigor mortis – “we’ve lost the ability to innovate” – with no plans and a great complacency. It’s something all Aussies should reflect upon, although don’t expect these blokes to be any help.

 

 

 

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Does closed government hurt business and the economy?

Does a culture of government secrecy make it hard for innovators and entrepreneurs to flourish?

Earlier this week I interviewed Vivek Kundra, the former US Chief Information Officer and now Salesforce executive, on innovation, technology and government with some of the Australian business perspectives run as a story in Business Spectator.

Something that stood out for me from the interview were Vivek’s views on the effects of governments making both innovations and information freely available.

“Two policy decisions that transformed the future of civilisation – GPS opening and human genome project through the Bermuda Principles.”

While it’s probably too early to draw conclusions on how the opening of the human genome data will change business, it’s certainly true the Global Positioning System has allowed whole new industries to evolve and it’s an important lesson on making technology available to the masses.

The Global Positioning System was, like the internet, a US military technology developed during the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

After Korean Airlines flight 007 was shot down by Soviet fighters in 1983, President Reagan approved civilian use of the GPS – then named Navstar – to prevent similar tragedies.

Such a decision was controversial, this was military technology being given over to the general population which could be used by enemy forces as well as airlines and truck drivers.

No doubt if the GPS technology was developed in the UK or Australia, there would have been demands to monetize the service. It almost certainly would have been sold off to a merchant bank that would have charged for the service and stunted its adoption.

By making GPS freely available, the US gained a competitive advantage which maintains the nation’s technological and economic lead over the rest of the world.

This openness isn’t just an advantage for technology companies. While US governments are no means perfect, the relatively open nature of local, state and Federal administrations is an advantage for the United States economy and society. As Vivek says,

Making data available provides three concrete functions; it allows citizens to fight corruption, it allows you to build the next billion dollar companies and it transforms government functions by breaking down silos.

When the default position of government is to classify everything as secret or ‘commercial-in-confidence’, there’s little chance of an entrepreneurial culture growing in that society – instead you have a business culture that favours connected insiders who can trade off their privileged contacts within government.

A culture of closed government reflects the business culture of a society and the reluctance of both the private and public sectors to openly share knowledge is why countries like Britain and Australia will struggle to emulate the United States.

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Are Australians becoming apathetic towards retail?

Have Aussies given up on retailers?

This morning IBM launched their Retail Therapy report where they looked at the state of online shopping around the world.

One interesting aspect to the report is that Australians seem to have become indifferent to stores with 60% of the 2000 respondents claiming they were ‘apathetic’ towards their choice of retailers.

At least this is an improvement on the 2011 report where 46% of those survey said they were ‘antagonistic’, this year that proportion is a mere 5%.

So, have we gone from hating our retailers to simply not caring any more? The answers should be focusing the minds of Australian CEOs if they are hoping for consumers to reopen their wallets.

Image of a bored girl by ChristieM through sxc.hu

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Ending the motor industry’s 1950s delusions

Can governments kick their habit of supporting the motor industry and focus on 21st Century industry investments?

Today Ford announced the pending closure of its Australian manufacturing operations, bringing to an end ninety years of the company building automobiles down under.

Ford’s announcement is small on a global scale – the Broadmeadows factory built 40,000 cars out of a worldwide supply of sixty-three million – it does illustrate some major structural issues facing both the global automobile industry and the Australian economy.

An Automotive Depression

Over capacity has been the curse of the automobile industry for decades as governments have propped out producers around the world.

KPMG’s 2012 Global Automotive Survey forecast the global industry would be 20 to 30 percent over capacity in 2016.

This doesn’t seem to worry industry executives or their government supporters, as KPMG reported;

Alarmingly, most auto executives still seem to regard the risk of overcapacity and excess production as a necessary evil to remain competitive. As the rapid growth of recent years eventually slows down, manufacturers that fail to address overcapacity could face some tough decisions.

Ford’s Australian executives could at least be credited with facing some of those tough decisions.

Many governments though are still in denial as they continue to subsidise motor manufacturers in an effort to copy the industry model that worked for the US Midwest during the 1950s.

Indeed, the Australian government in 2008 committed 5.2 billion dollars to support their domestic industry through to the end of this decade. Ford’s announcement today coupled with General Motor’s cutbacks last year show that policy is in ruins.

At the Ford and government press conferences, journalists pressed the Prime Minister and the Ford Australia’s CEO about repaying some of the millions of corporate welfare doled out to the multinational over the last decade. Naturally little was to be said about that.

In a stark comparison to Ford Australia’s announcement, US electric car manufacturer Tesla Motors repaid a $465 million US government loan.

While no-one can say Tesla’s future is certain, at least US investors are putting their money on 21st Century technologies instead of propping up declining industries of the last century.

Australia’s predicament

The car industry is just one sector that faces global overcapacity – ship building, real estate and mining are just three with similar excess production.

For Australia, the mining industry is winding down investment as worldwide production capacity expands. At the same time, the blue sky projections of China’s resources demand are being challenged.

While the mining boom comes to an end, Australia now has to face the consequences of the nation’s economic decision to focus on resources and property speculation in the 1990s and early 2000s.

As the Thais and Indonesians found in 1997, and the Irish and Icelanders a decade later, economies based on unsustainable foundations seem to work fine until suddenly they don’t.

It may well be that Australia is about find out what happens when the economic tide suddenly changes.

One bright side is that the government has the best part of five billion dollars to invest in new industry – assuming Australia’s politicians can wean themselves off their 1950s view of the world economy.

Image of Ford Australia celebrating 50 years of Falcon Production courtesy of Ogilvy Communications.

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Training for mediocrity

Australian treasurer Wayne Swan’s cap on education expenses is a path to mediocrity

In researching the tech angle of the 2013 Australian Federal budget for Technology Spectator last night one thing kept really bugging me – the government’s cap on tax deductible education expenses.

The decision to cap self education deductions was made earlier in the year by Treasurer Wayne Swan.

The Government values the investments people make in their own skills and recognises the benefits of a tax deduction for work related self-education expenses. However, under current arrangements these deductions are unlimited and provide an opportunity for people to enjoy significant private benefits at taxpayers’ expense.

So the government is going to save $500 million dollars over the next few years by capping legitimate educational expenses on the grounds they were ‘unlimited’.

We could ask why negative gearing continues to be unlimited where taxpayers claiming the expenses of property speculation cost the Federal government eight billion dollars last year.

So Treasurer Wayne Swan says a salaried worker has effectively no limits on claiming losses from property speculation against their taxes but is subject to a ludicrously low limit for claiming education expenses.

This one comparison – between negative gearing and self education expenses – shows the magic pudding fairyland that Australia’s political leaders live in and their cowardice.

What’s bizarre about this policy is that most industries are undergoing major changes and almost every worker will have to reskill a number of times through their careers.

Many of those workers will be able to get their courses and education expenses under the limit, many others won’t.

As the New Australian points out, Wayne Swan – like most lifetime Australian political apparatchiks – has never to worry about reskilling as the party has nurtured and cared for him all his adult life.

In the real world though, Australia’s economic future will depend on the workforce picking up the skills to operate in rapidly changing times.

That Australia’s politicians and economic policies are focused on encouraging property speculation over skills only guarantees mediocrity.

Although mediocrity might be the world that suits Wayne Swan, Tony Abbott and the rest of Australia’s political classes.

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