Tag: business

Whose priorities do IT departments really care about?

A survey of IT managers shows that business risk and customer security are not their greatest concerns

Earlier this week mobile security company Imation showed off their latest range of Ironkey encrypted USB sticks and portable hard drives.

Accompanying the launch was a presentation from Stollznow Research on how Australian companies are managing data with a comparison against similar surveys carried out in the UK, US, Canada and Germany.

Of the 207 senior decision makers in Australian medium to large businesses surveyed, there were some interesting results on the attitudes of the nation’s IT departments and CIOs.

In the field of confidence about the security of their networks, Australian IT managers came out a lot more paranoid than their foreign counterparts with only 38% of Aussies confident their office data is protected from loss or theft against 73% overseas.

That result is encouraging as the internet and the world of IT security has a habit of severely punishing those with a false sense of security.

What was particularly notable though with the Imation research was what IT managers considered to be the consequences of a security breach.

consequences-of-data-breach

Around the world, IT managers see the headache of cleaning up the mess and bad media coverage as being the biggest consequences of a data breach. Customers come fourth in priority and even then the only concern is losing clients rather than the effects it could have on those people’s lives.

One of the tragedies of the continued Sony data breaches in 2011 was the leaking of credit card details. Many of those customers on pre-paid cards were young or low-paid workers who quite possibly lost all the money in their compromised accounts – debit cards don’t have the same protections against fraud as credit cards.

Even more terrible are the effects on those who become victims of identity fraud as consequence of a data breach. Letting that sort of information out is a fundamental betrayal of trust by organisations with sloppy security.

Interestingly over a third of respondents feared losing their jobs as a result of data being breached, in a perfect world it would be higher although we don’t live in a period where those accountable take responsibility for their actions.

What’s more likely in many smaller businesses is that a data breach could be the entire organisation to fold, something that should worry anyone running a startup or small business.

It may be true that many CIOs and IT managers aren’t too worried about the business effects of a data breach or system outage which shows that security – both physical and digital – are the job of everyone in an organisation, not just one department or executive.

Is Australia falling behind on the internet of everything?

Australian businesses are falling behind the rest of the world in using the Internet of machines says Cisco

Last Friday Cisco Systems presented their Internet of Everything index in Sydney looking at how connected machines are changing business and society.

Cisco Australia CEO Ken Boal gave the company’s vision of how a connected society might work in the near future with alarm clocks synchronising with calendars, traffic lights adapting to weather and road conditions while the local coffee shop has your favourite brew waiting for as the barista knows exactly when you will arrive.

While that vision is somewhat spooky, Boal had some important points for business, primarily that in Cisco’s view there is $14 trillion dollars in value to be realised from utilising the internet of machines.

Much of that value is “being left on the table” in Boal’s words with nearly 50% of businesses not taking advantage of the new technologies.

Boal was particularly worried about Australian businesses with Cisco lumping the country into ‘beginner’ status in adopting internet of everything technologies along with Mexico and Russia, with all three lagging far behind Germany, Japan and France.

cisco-country-capabilities-internet-of-everything

In Boal’s view, Australian management’s failure is due to “the focus on streamlining costs has come at the cost of innovation.”

This something worth thinking about; in a business environment where most industries only have two dominant players and the corporate mindset is focused on maximising profits and staying a percentage point or two ahead of the other incumbent, being an innovator itsn’t a priority – it might even be a disadvantage.

For Australian business, and society, that complacency is a threat which leaves the nation exposed to the massive changes our world is undergoing.

Surviving in business by executing a pivot

One of the key skills in running a business is knowing when to change direction.

One of the key skills in running a business is knowing when to change direction, to ‘pivot’ in the language of Silicon Valley.

Yesterday I had the privilege of interviewing Jonathan Barouch, founder of social analysis company Local Measure about the service’s pivot from Roamz.

I’ll be writing that interview up in more detail in a few days, but Jonathon’s observations about pivoting businesses reflected my own business experiences.

PC Rescue was born out of a pivot and its ultimate demise was due to the failure of the company’s management, and my own, to move decisively when it was clear the business wasn’t working as planned.

The founding of PC Rescue happened out of a virtual assistant service my wife an I set up in 1995. We’d been victims of the curiously insular attitude of Australian managers towards employing expats and starting our own business seemed to be the right option.

So Office Magic was born.

Office Magic was a good business, but in talking to clients it became quickly apparent there was a bigger need for computer training and repairs. Most small businesses were struggling to find reliable techs to help them out with their IT services.

So Office Magic pivoted into PC Rescue.

For  the next ten years PC Rescue was a profitable business, the problem I had was the classic small business proprietor’s dilemma – I couldn’t get the right people.

The staff and contractors I had were good computer techs but I couldn’t find one with the skills or motivation to take over the day to day supervisor role so I could work on growing the business. I was stuck in the trap described by Michael Gerber in his book the e-myth.

Originally, PC Rescue’s business plan had been a five year strategy — two years validating, two years executing and one year exiting. The exit I particularly liked was creating a computer support franchise operation.

This didn’t happen because the company lacked the human capital required;  my wife and I lacked the management resources to move PC Rescue to the next stage.

When this became apparent we should have pivoted the business. We didn’t because I was too busy with the day to day stresses of keeping customers and staff happy.

Eventually we achieved an exit of sorts, ten years later than intended and not in a satisfactory way. The business remained under capitalised and the new partners turned out not to have the expertise or drive required to grow the operation.

Which make Jonathan’s pivot of Roamz so much more interesting. He listened to customers, looked at the direction of the industry and realised where the company’s strengths lay.

Rather that doubling down on a model which was struggling, he took the business in a new direction.

Having that flexibility is probably one of the greatest assets for small and startup businesses as larger corporations struggle with executing massive changes.

As markets evolve and the rate of economic change accelerates, having the skills and mindset to execute successful pivots could be the difference between survival and failure for many big and small businesses.

Trolls never sleep – Social media and the twenty four hour business

Qantas Airlines learns the hard way that social media doesn’t sleep, unlike its marketing department.

One of the truths of social media is it gives idiots an opportunity to expose themselves for what they are.

For businesses using social media idiots posting stupid or offensive content on the company’s site or Facebook page can do a lot of damage to their brand and reputation.

This is the problem Australian airline Qantas faced last week when some fool posted a pornographic image to one of the company’s promotions pages.

As the Sydney Morning Herald reports, the father of an eight year old reported an inappropriate post to the airline after his son found the image while visiting the Qantas Wallabies page. He was allegedly told by the company’s social media staff “there was nothing we can do about it.”

The father points out correctly that both the airline and Facebook are 24 hour operations so claiming a post that is put up at midnight – one assumes Eastern Australian time – is out of hours seems to be disingenuous.

Until recently, businesses had given social media responsibilities over to the intern or the youngest person in the office. While organisations like Qantas have moved on from that, they largely leave these tasks with the marketing department.

While marketing is a valid place for social media responsibility – it’s probably the most obvious area to establish a return on the functions – it leaves organisations vulnerable to out of hours customer service and public relations problems.

Social media doesn’t knock off at 5pm and spend the evening a bar like the marketing department, it’s on all the time and customers are using it to complain about problems while twits and trolls are gleefully posting things to embarrass businesses.

For those businesses who do operate on a 24 hour basis, and probably all big corporations, it’s no longer good enough for the social media team to just operate during office hours.

Smaller businesses have a different problem – most don’t have the resources to keep a 24 hour watch on their Facebook page but the effects of a social media disaster could be proportionally far greater – so they shouldn’t be overlooking regular checks on what people have posted to their business sites.

What’s happening in social media is part of a broader trend in the global economy that’s been going on for thirty years as the pace of business has accelerated. It’s something that all managers, entrepreneurs and company owners need to understand.

Venture capital’s false jackpot

Thinking that raising capital is a jackpot prize misses the point of a much bigger business journey.

When a business run by a 22 year old raises 25 million dollars it certainly gets attention and Crinkle’s successful seed funding has provoked plenty of commentary.

Particularly notable are stories like the gush piece from the New Yorker magazine calling the fund raising “a $25 million jackpot.” Reading those, those, you’d think Crinkle’s Lucas Duplan had won the lottery.

The truth is, getting a fat cheque from investors is only the beginning of the business journey; the real work starts when you have a board and shareholders to answer to.

Where the real jackpot lies is in selling the business to a greater fool and the story of Bebo founder Michael Birch is a good example.

Bebo was bought by AOL, probably the greatest greater idiot buyer of all, in 2008 for $850 million. Five yearrs later Birch has bought it back for one million and promises to ‘reinvent” the social media service.

While Birch didn’t get all the $850 million AOL spent on Bebo, he and his investors did hit the jackpot. Whether Lucas Duplan and the backers of Crinkle do is for history to tell us.

Image courtesy of sgman through sxc.hu

Are executives out of touch with IT trends?

Two business briefings raise a worrying question about the technical literacy of business executives.

Yesterday was media briefing day with a number of vendor events, including a very nice lunch with IBM, on the state of the technology industry.

One thing that was particularly striking with IBM Truth Behind The Trends survey was just how out of touch many of the executives quoted in the report seem to be with responses on topics like malware and Bring Your Own Device being firmly behind the curve.

This was borne out at the earlier media roundtable with online security company Websense where they described some of the challenges facing Chief Information Officers in making company boards and senior managers aware of technology security risks.

What surprised most of the journalists in the earlier briefing was just how clueless many of the executives seem to be about online business risks, those who went along to the following IBM briefing realised why – managers genuinely don’t understand how the internet and business technology is evolving.

That should worry investors as markets are changing rapidly and managers who don’t recognise, let alone understand, the shifts happening are jeopardizing the their business’ futures.

Why exactly business leaders are so out of touch is something we look at tomorrow where we examine the background of Australia’s CEOs.

Little shots at the moon

Everyday there’s thousands of people risking all on their own little moonshots.

Today I wrote a story for Business Spectator on the Google Loon project, a pilot program to see if high altitude balloons can provide affordable internet access for the developing world.

What really fascinates me about Loon and the projects in the Google X program is the concept of the ‘moonshot’. Google explain it on their solve for [x] website.

Moonshots live in the gray area between audacious projects and pure science fiction; instead of mere 10% gains, they aim for 10x improvements. The combination of a huge problem, a radical solution, and the breakthrough technology that might just make that solution possible is the essence of a Moonshot.

Great Moonshot discussions require an innovative mindset–including a healthy disregard for the impossible–while still maintaining a level of practicality.

Missing in that definition is the concept of risk – it’s easy to propose a radical, audacious solution to a problem when it’s not your money or career on the line.

On the other hand, most organisations that have the resources to experiment with breakthrough technologies stifle any thought of true innovation or radical solutions.

The advantage Google has is that parts of the organisation encourage those moonshots, although there are divisions of Google which are just as bureaucratic and staid as a chartered accountant’s or quantity surveyor’s office.

Interestingly Apple were the reverse with only one guy allowed to do moonshots and everyone below him followed him either to the moon or hell, as this wonderful story tells.

Which brings me to the little folk – the startups, small businesses and backyard inventors who don’t have the resources of Google, Apple or the US space program.

For that matter there’s also the writers, painters, musicians and other artists who are risking everything for their vision.

Everyday these people are risking everything for their little ideas as their homes, livelihoods and sometimes their relationships are on the line for their one big idea or audacious vision.

These are the real risk takers and every day they are taking little shots at the moon.

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.

 

 

 

Big data’s big truths

There’s a lot of hype around Big Data but it doesn’t mean we should ignore the risks or opportunities.

One thing former Obama 2012 campaign CTO Harper Reed cannot be accused of is subtlety so his statement at the Sydney CeBIT conference last week that Big Data is Bullshit wasn’t wholly surprising.

Reed has a good point – like all IT industry buzzwords there is a fair degree of hype and BS around Big Data although his referring to it as a storage problem misses the point.

Data storage is a problem largely solved; when we’re talking about Big Data today, we’re talking more about analysing the information and managing the life cycle of an organisation’s data.

Not that these issues are new, the tech industry has been dealing with the challenges of storing, managing and analysing data since computers first appeared. In fact, that’s the reason computers were invented.

An excellent NY Times Bits blog post expands on Harper’s views and rebuts many of the myths and hype around big data.

Most important is the point that big data is not the truth, we can torture those bits and bytes to tell us anything we like.

Claims that Big Data can tell us everything or that it will conquer discrimination and make cities smarter are fanciful. It all depends on how we choose to use the data.

There are downsides with Big Data too — we live in an age where it’s easier to let the algorithm do the work and if the computer says ‘no’, then we can shrug and say “sorry it’s beyond our control.”

Letting the algorithms run our lives is one of many risks, but it doesn’t change the opportunities for businesses, governments and communities Big Data presents. If we can understand our world better, we can do smarter things.

That’s the real opportunity with Big Data and we don’t need the hype to tell us that.

And your message is? How Silicon Valley wrote its own history

Is the myth of the altruistic Silicon Valley entrepreneur an example of businesses rewriting history?

Sitting in on the Storytelling and Business panel of the Sydney Writers’ Festival it occurred to me how well Silicon Valley and the tech startup community have crafted an image for their times.

Author of What’s Mine Is Yours, Rachel Botsman focused on the need of businesses to articulate the organisation’s sense of purpose. While this begs the question of what’s the message if the business’ purpose is to enrich their senior management, it is an a good point.

What is a business’ purpose and how do you articulate it? More so, what is the purpose of your industry?

One group of businesses that has done very well in articulating their message is the Silicon Valley tech community who’ve portrayed themselves – regardless of the reality – as being driven by the altruistic aim of changing the world.

Steve Jobs was one of the leaders of this and, while we shouldn’t overlook his talents, he was a ruthless, driven businessman.

On the panel advertising industry elder Neil Lawrence raised Jobs’ ability to articulate Apple’s mission, telling the story of when the Apple CEO was challenged on the ‘Thing Different’ slogan not being good English, he replied “it’s Californian.”

Apple’s success in branding itself as a visionary, creative company – and Google’s image of ‘Don’t Do Evil’ – show how it’s possible to create an image for an organisation, an industry or even an entire industry.

In reality, Silicon Valley and the tech industry are as full of snake oil salesmen, mercanaries and paper clip counting corporate bureaucrats as any other sector, but legends have been built, and continue to be built, on the myth of  selfless entrepreneurs sacrifice all to make the world a better place.

Contrasting Silicon Valley’s success with the Australian experience was interesting, Botsman was scathing about the ability of Aussie managers in telling the story about their businesses finding most of them have lost her by the second slide of their Powerpoint presentation.

We shouldn’t get too hung up though about the nobility of telling a business’ story, Shehan Karunatilaka, former copy writer and author made the major point about business communications “story telling in business is about shifting product.”

He went on to describe the tragic career path of the advertising copy writer who comes into the ad industry believing they are a world changing artist and ends up being burned out.

“you are not an artist – you are a mouthpiece for businesses” said Shehan.

The truth is most of us in business are not artists, some parts of our work may involve creative skills – like copy writing, design or financial engineering – in reality most of us are there to make a decent living, if not a fortune.

Silicon Valley’s mythmaking shows how you can cover the mundane truth with a noble, a constant narrative which has  allowed ruthless businessmen like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg to portray themselves as selfless visionaries rather than the modern equivalents of  John Rockerfeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt and other 19th Century robber barons.

This is possibly the greatest message of all in business communications – history is written by the victors.

When you’re winning in your industry, you get to write the story.

Skills, data scientists and the decade’s big IT trends

As the amount data flooding into our lives explodes, we’ll all need to think about how we can get the skills to manage and understand data.

As we all get buried under a tsunami of data, the challenge is managing it. The MIT Technology Review this week looks at the rise of the data scientist, a job title unknown a few years ago.

The problem for industry is the skill sets required to become a data scientist are fairly esoteric.

Data scientist has become a popular job title partly because it has helped pull together a growing number of haphazardly defined and overlapping job roles, says Jake Klamka, who runs a six-week fellowship to place PhDs from fields like math, astrophysics, and even neuroscience in such jobs. “We have anyone who works with a lot of data in their research,” Klamka says. “They need to know how to program, but they also have to have strong communications skills and curiosity.”

Over the last twenty years we’ve done a pretty poor job teaching maths and statistics which is going to create a skills shortage as industry struggles to find people qualified to figure out what all of this data means.

While Big Data might be to this decade what plastics were to the 1960s, it’s not the only technology change that’s affecting business as the McKinsey Quarterly describes the ten IT trends for the decade ahead.

The thing that really stands out with McKinsey’s predictions is the degree of reskilling the workforce is going to need, today’s workers are going to need an understanding of programming, logic and statistics as much the kids currently at school.

If you’re planning on being in the workforce at the end of this decade right now may be the time to consider getting some of these skills.

Just as businesses will be separated by how they use Big Data, workers may too find those skills divide the winners from the losers.

As the amount of data flooding into our lives explodes, we’ll all need to think about how we can get the skills to manage and understand data.