Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: government

  • Engineering for change – the ethics of the new economy

    Engineering for change – the ethics of the new economy

    Technologies like the internet of things, cloud computing, 3D printing and big data are changing our industries and society. At the ACI Connect event today, I gave a presentation on some of the opportunities, risks and ethical issues facing technologists and engineers in the connected economy.

    While many of the engineering principles underlying these technologies aren’t new, their scale and the power they give businesses and governments means there are serious ethical, security and societal issues we have to consider.

    This presentation explores some of those issues and the technologies and trends driving them.

    Entering the Data era

    A conceit among technologists is that we’re in an unprecedented era of change. This is not true.

    The Twentieth Century saw massive restructuring of our society as the telephone, mains electricity, the motor car and television changed our society. Many of today’s settled industries came out of the huge technological steps forward over the last hundred years.

    Just as cheap energy – delivered to us through the motor car and mains electricity – defined the Twentieth Century, this century will be defined by easily accessible and abundant information.

    Those changes over the last hundred years give us some hint as to where we are going; the shifts that saw coal carters, newspaper sellers and night soil men eventually become extinct, along with a shift from a largely agricultural workforce to industrialised employment, is going to be repeated this century as information becomes abundant.

    Harnessing the Internet of bees

    Cheap and small sensors mean it’s easier to put a chip on something. In this case we have a CSIRO project tracking bee activity where Tasmanian scientists have put tracking devices on bees.

    Those tracking devices would have weighed several hundred grams and cost hundreds of dollars ten years ago but today they are small and cheap enough to fit onto the backs of bees.

    Being able to deploy these sensors means we can fit them to things we couldn’t have imagined a few years ago and the data they generate is going to give us insights into patterns and behaviours we couldn’t have contemplated.

    However not all of this data is useful or necessary and some may even be damaging to individuals and groups. One ethical question we have to ask ourselves is whether it is in the community’s interests to collect this information.

    Another aspect of connecting devices, or even animals and people, to the Internet or a network is it opens the possibility of hacking, as we’ve seen in the recent Jeep case where engineers showed they could control a vehicle remotely. The security and privacy aspects of the IoT are critical and something designers and product engineers can’t overlook.

    Decoding the data

    It’s often said that Data is the New Oil. In truth it isn’t, data is increasingly cheap and easy to access. Being able to analyse that information is where the power lies.

    Data analytics is probably going to be one of the most important fields in an information rich economy and already we’re seeing companies springing up to help farmers estimate crop yields, truck drivers plan their routes and even organisations like the Royal Flying Doctor Service using cloud services to better plan their operations.

    Again these services plan a lot but there’s also downsides as inappropriate data matching risks breaching consumers’ privacy and even drawing false conclusions from confusing correlation with causation. A good example of this is Facebook being used to judge credit worthiness.

    Removing the human element

    Automation – whether it’s through robotics, machine learning or algorithms – will change many industries and the workforces employed by them.

    One understated field is management where many white collar supervisor jobs are at risk from business automation. It may be that the executive suites are the next sector to be decimated by computers and robots.

    Similarly, many services industry jobs such as taxi drivers and baristas are at risk from robotics while large scale 3D printing of buildings threatens to put many building trades under pressure.

    No more truck drivers

    Driverless vehicles have a whole range of applications, in logistics were seeing them put forklift drivers out of work while mining companies are rolling out massive dump trucks in their new mines that don’t require $200,000 a year drivers.

    One study estimates that half the police workforce in the United States would become redundant as law abiding driverless cars become common.

    Similarly electric cars will have a massive impact on government revenues. Currently Australian governments raise $17bn a year from fuel excise and has ramifications for businesses involved in the supply chain for service stations.

    Once driverless vehicles become commonplace we may well see them changing industries like daycare, public transport and couriers as it becomes possible to summon an autonomous vehicle, put the kids or the luggage into it and then send it off to its destination. If you’re worried, you can track the progress on an app.

    The effects of the driverless car show how we have to think laterally about the effects of new technologies on our businesses, sometimes the effects of a new way of doing things could indirectly hurt our business or create new opportunities.

    Squeezing out inefficiencies

    One of the great promises for the IoT, Big Data and business automation is to remove inefficiencies from industry. Cisco believe that up to 14% of the Oil and Gas industry’s costs could be stripped away with today’s technologies. That in itself is worth over a 100 billion dollars a year in cost savings.

    GE are deploying their technologies into a diverse range of industrial equipment ranging from jet engines to railway locomotives and wind turbines with spectacular results in reducing costs and improving productivity.

    The effect of these improvements means less downtime and maintenance costs which are good news for customers and shareholder of these companies, but bad news if you’re a maintenance business. It also means the speed of change in business is accelerating.

    Skilling the future workforce

    In summary the skills needed today are very different to those of 1915 and 1965 and those of the next fifty years will be even different.

    As a society we have to decide what skills we are going to give not our children but those currently still in the workforce who are going to be working longer and later into their lives as the workforce ages.

    We also have to consider what sort of ethical compass we have. While the technology we have today is powerful and capable of great things, it’s also capable of great harm. We need to have an understanding of what the effects and limits are of our actions with the Internet of Things, Big Data and analytics.

    Ultimately we need to ask what value we as individuals can add to our communities and society.

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  • Politicians cannot save you

    Politicians cannot save you

    Around the world threatened incumbents are turning to their political cronies to protect them from competition with businesses using technologies their cosy managers and shareholders never envisaged would exist.

    In Australia, one of the laziest industries has been the retail sector. Long coddled by cosy duopolies and favourable regulatory arrangements, retailers ignored the changes to their markets since the web arrived in 1995.

    Of the Australian retail industry probably the most cosseted of all was the department store duopoly. Protected by their market share and product licensing agreements, Myer and David Jones neglected investments in their internal systems and largely ignored the online world, with DJs even shutting down their website in the early 2000s.

    Insular Australia

    Eventually it became obvious to even the most insular Australian retailer that the internet was here to stay however in the meantime canny Australian shoppers had discovered buying overseas online was substantially cheaper, and much easier, than local stores.

    Faced with offshore competitors that beat them on price, range and service, the Australian retailers started lobbying the Federal government to lower the threashold, currently $1000, that customs would take an interest in and add the ten percent Goods and Services Tax (GST) and various fees and duties. In the hope the bureaucracy would discourage local shoppers looking overseas.

    Mistaken lobbying

    The campaign to lower the GST threashold was a mistake says Ian Moir, the current Chairman of now South African owned David Jones. “It set Australian retailers back because they spent more time trying to persuade governments to do this than they did thinking about what the long term future for the business is.”

    Moir was speaking yesterday in Sydney at an Australian Israel Chamber of Commerce lunch panel titled ‘Reframing retail for the digital age: The importance of an integrated approach’. Joining the DJs executve on the board were Craig Dower, the CEO of Salmat and David Mustow, Head of Retail & Consumer at Macquarie Bank.

    The message from the lunch was clear – technology savvy customers were demanding more from retailers now smartphones are driving purchase decisions. “Everyone talks about Big Data and how you use it as an organisation,” observed Scottish born Moir. “Not enough people talk about the big data the customer has on their mobile phones.”

    Mobile first

    Moir’s view on mobile was endorsed by Macquarie’s Mustow who stated “if you’re investing in this space it’s mobile first.” Salmat’s Downer added to this with Salmat’s research that found 55% of online retail sales are coming through mobile devices.

    That Australian consumers have one the world’s highest smartphone penetration rates and are also among the planet’s most avid web user only shows how poorly local retailers have responded to the web and mobile devices over the past two decades.

    When Moir took the reigns at David Jones last August after Woolworths South Africa – unrelated to the local supermarket giant – the company was making a piddling one percent of its sales online. The new management has grown this three fold but it’s still trivial compared to Australians’ appetite for online shopping.

    Dampening overseas demand

    The appetite of overseas online sales will dampened should the proposed GST changes reducing the taxable threshold on imports to $20 be introduced as consumers deal with the bureaucracy, delays and costs of Australia’s dysfunctional customs system however Moir warns this will only be a temporary respite, “these changes only affect you in the short term, it tends to sort itself out over time.”

    Indeed for retailers, the GST changes will probably only benefit customs agents and bloated ticket clippers like Australia Post along with introducing a whole range of unexpected consequences as foreign retailers and local entrepreneurs find opportunities in the new tax regime.

    While the champagne may taste sweet for Australia’s retail lobbyists as they celebrate their likely win over brunch at Sydney’s exclusive Balmoral Beach Club this Sunday, their employers are going to find that swaying the politicians is the easy part – it’s ultimately the market that guarantees your success.

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  • Rewriting the Silicon Valley playbook

    Rewriting the Silicon Valley playbook

    Silicon Valley’s lean startup model may not be relevant to most regions warns writer and entrepreneur Steve Blank.

    The lean startup model is based on getting the minimum viable product into the marketplace and should users be enthusiastic seeking investor funding to develop the business further.

    Guy Kawasaki described this in an interview last year where he described the minimum viable valuable product idea of getting the most basic service to market at the lowest cost and then getting users and investors on board.

    However it might be that model only works where “startup entrepreneurs have full access to eager and intelligent business customers, hosts of industry angels and venture capitalists with money to burn,” reports Canada’s Financial Post.

    Blank came to that conclusion on a trip to Australia where he met with sports tech startups: “Meeting with a coalition of entrepreneurs in the tech and sports space, he realized the lean startup framework didn’t account for the vagaries of local economies. Australia sports-tech entrepreneurs trying to scale their businesses would find that their major customers are in the U.S., halfway around the world. And unlike most Valley startups, the Aussies would need to source manufacturing expertise — which means budgeting for several trips to China.

    The problems facing Australia’s entrepreneurs probably extend further as the nation’s investors are notorious risk averse and the high cost of doing living means the burn rates for startups are much harder.

    Blank’s recommendation is any region looking at establishing a startup community should identify its own strengths and advantages then build its own playbook.

    That it’s difficult for other regions to copy Silicon Valley shouldn’t be surprising, since the start of civilisation each industrial or trade hub has risen and fallen on its own strengths and weaknesses.

    We can be sure the next Silicon Valley – be it in the US, China, Europe or anywhere else in the world – will have different strengths than the Bay Area today.

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  • Creating a false divide between startups and small businesses

    Creating a false divide between startups and small businesses

    “We aren’t small businesses” cries Tank Stream Ventures’ Managing Partner Rui Rodrigues in Business Spectator yesterday.

    Rodrigues’ point was tech startups have a very different set of needs to the local small business. “Bob down at the corner shops has been there for 10 years, and he’ll be there for another, he might sell milk, or office chairs, or even fix your watch,” he writes.

    Technology startups on the other hand “have ambitions to become big companies, global empires. They are high-growth technology businesses and they are working on goods and services that you might not yet know you need.”

    Silicon Valley’s greater fool model

    Rodrigues’ comments come from the Silicon Valley Greater Fool mindset where the end game for investors is to flip the business to a bigger company or make out like bandits in a stock market listing. Under that model profitability doesn’t matter, “too early is considered a deterrent for investors looking at a business.”

    Not making a profit is fine for a company promising unlimited future growth to the market or a flipper based on finding a greater fool but for most startups those lack of returns see all but a few spectacularly successful ones shrivel away as the company’s funds exhaust before the founders achieve their objective. For Bob the locksmith who doesn’t have a fall back option of returning to a management consulting job, he needs the income.

    What’s more fallacious in Rodrigues’ piece is the idea today’s tech startups themselves will be great employers themselves. Even the successful ones haven’t proved to be job generators in the way traditional business have been.

    For the traditional small business sector the risks aren’t insubstantial either as the majority of proprietors will barely make a living while risking their assets, time and often health – something understated by the motivational writers urging people to quit their jobs and prove themselves.

    A lack of capital

    For both the startup community and the small business sector the real challenges lie in being undercapitalised. Most startups will fail because of insufficient capital while the majority of small businesses never quite reach their potential because they lack the funds required to invest in the proper tools.

    Much of this comes down to banks retreating from small business lending thanks to the ill thought out Basel rules that treat home mortgages as almost risk free which has discouraged any form of finance not backed by residential property.

    In fact many of the challenges facing traditional small businesses such as high rents, unnecessary regulation and high labour costs are as much a problem for the thirty something renting a desk in a tech incubator as they are for 55 year old Bob who’s been running the local locksmiths for the last twenty years.

    Misdirected government

    Silly schemes like the Australian government’s depreciation scheme aren’t addressing this problem, indeed the Abbott administration’s intention is to provide a brief sugar hit to the nation’s GDP as small business owners buy new laptop computers and toolboxes. It does nothing to address the uncompetitiveness of Australian business or its attractiveness to local investors.

    That Rodrigues wants to create a schism between the tech startup community and the small business sector is regrettable, it only confirms in many people’s minds that technology is for geeks and not ‘ordinary people’.

    In truth a nation’s business community needs a level playing field, one that doesn’t give preferential treatment to one form of activity over others – be it property speculation, tech startups or dog walking franchises.

    While there are genuine differences between the startup sector and the small businesses community – in the same way there are differences between Bob’s locksmiths, Jane’s cafe or Sarah’s dog walking franchise – there is need for businesses divided in asking for equal and fair treatment from government, banks and large corporations.

    Having a united voice for all entrepreneurs, however modest their ambitions, is far more important than single groups pleading for special treatment.

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  • Tech and tax write offs

    Tech and tax write offs

    In last week’s Federal budget the biggest news for business was the expansion of the accelerated depreciation limits where items up to $20,000 can be immediately claimed as a tax deduction.

    While this was a reversal of the previous budget that slashed the previous allowance, it was welcome news for businesses looking at replacing older tools and equipment or investing in new technology.

    One of the notable things about business technology is companies have a habit of holding onto older equipment long beyond what should have been its use by date.

    The consequences of using old technology are real, the older equipment is often not as fast as the newer kit which affects productivity and unpatched software is often the way malware finds its way into a business.

    Point of sale risks

    Earlier this week computer security vendor Trend Micro held their Cybercrime 2015 breakfast in Sydney where the director of the company’s TrendLabs Research division, Myla Pilao, described some of the threats facing businesses.
    One of the top risks were Point Of Sale systems (POS) where Trend Micro’s research had found over a third of US retailers had malware on their cash registers, in Australia it was six percent.

    Most of those infected POS terminals would be older units with many of them being software running on out of date versions of Windows that haven’t been patched or upgraded since they were bought a decade ago.

    Similar problems exist with older workstations, internet routers and even photocopiers where the technology has moved on and security holes discovered. Basically old equipment holds businesses back and exposes them to risks.
    Now the carrot of an immediate tax deduction gives Australian businesses an opportunity to refresh their technology. So what is the technology, smart company managers and owners should be spending their money on?

    Kick out your desktops

    “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is the mantra for most business IT and desktop computers are the best example of this. In most companies as long as the word processing software or accounting package works the PCs continue to be used.

    With the withdrawal of support for the decade old Windows XP operating system last year, many older computers started being a liability in a business so now is the time to replace them.

    Consider tablets

    It may not be necessary to replace the old desktop computer with new ones, for many job roles a tablet computer is often a better choice. With cloud technologies increasingly being adopted there’s less of a need for a grunty PC sitting on each staff member’s desk.

    Upgrade the router

    One of the areas where businesses often compromise is with their internet access. Having an old, cheap router designed for home use is just not good enough for companies who rely upon being connected.

    A new business grade router will improve office internet access along with resolving most of the security issues older equipment is notorious for.

    Going mobile

    If you’re struggling on old mobile phones, now might be the time to upgrade to the latest smartphone. Amongst other things this will improve your office productivity, particularly if you combine the investment with some of the cloud services that make working on the road a lot easier.

    Cloud services are not part of the depreciation rules as they are usually subscription models and this shows the weakness in the Federal government’s thinking.

    Indeed for those vulnerable Point of Sale systems, a cloud based service running on tablet computers is probably a better solution than most server and PC based packages.

    A lack of vision

    The ‘ladies and tradies’ theme of the budget shows the Federal government is stuck in with the vision that Australian businesses are mainly mom and pop service operations in the traditional trades and professions.

    While the depreciation changes are welcome they do little to help startups or companies in emerging industries and for the economy in general will provide not much more than a GDP ‘sugar hit’ for retailers’ cash registers as we buy imported equipment for our businesses.

    For the Australian economy in general, the move really only benefits Gerry Harvey who can buy a few more racehorses from his stores’ and his rich mates who can afford some more expensive wine fuelled brawls in Sydney waterside restaurants.

    Australian businesses owners need to be demanding better thought out policies from a government that claims to be friendly to industry. The economy is changing and 1970s style tax benefit is not the way to prepare for a changing world.

    In the meantime, enjoy your tax write offs.

     

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