Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: government

  • Does small business need government support?

    Does small business need government support?

    The New South Wales State Government’s decision to axe their long standing small business programs raises the question of whether small businesses need government support at all.

    Last week’s announcement the NSW Government are abandoning their business education programs and replacing them with a previously announced network of local business advisors shows where small business lies in the state’s list of priorities.

    Taken at face value, the changes appear to be moving back to the face-to-face business advice model of a decade or so ago that was common before the winding back of small business programs and local enterprise centres by then Federal Liberal and state Labor governments under John Howard and Bob Carr.

    On closer examination, it’s a cut to business support and an effective withdrawal of NSW government assistance to small business. The remaining services will be outsourced to the same local business centres that have been starved of funds for over a decade.

    A concern with the individual advisors will be how many businesses they can reach, according to the NSW Trade & Investment annual report 2010-11 the axed events had an audience numbering over 5,000. It’s difficult to see how the advisor network will match that and makes one wonder how the more important events couldn’t have been streamed or podcast across the Internet.

    Putting aside the pros and cons of this restructure, the bigger question is should small business expect any government support at all?

    The record of Australian government support for industry is not good. We only have to look at repeated visits to the trough by what remains of the Australian car making industry, the bipartisan debacle of assistance to the renewal energy sector or the support given by the Keating Labor government to Kodak to see how well schemes have worked out.

    Most of Australia’s economic success stories have happened despite, not because of, government’s pouring money into industries. For example, the first five years of the current mining boom was completely missed by the political classes along with the Canberra press gallery and the media economic commentators.

    This is where small business steps in – rather than relying on access to the ministerial suite to protect their industries, the little guys and the startups compete on price, service and innovation. Aspects that organisations in protected industries or those dependent on taxpayer largess struggle with.

    Indeed many small business owners and entrepreneurs struck out on their own because they felt stifled by bureaucracy. So offering them programs wrapped up in paperwork is counter intuitive.

    Where the government can help is with keeping busy business owners up to date with new developments in business, markets and technology which was exactly what the events programs like Small Business September and Micro Business Week did.

    It’s difficult to see how the individual business advisors employed by local Business Enterprise Centres will keep up with their clients up with changes regardless of how skilled or well intentioned they are.

    All of the changes are justified by the report from the Small Business Commissioner’s listening tour. Apparently she was told businesses didn’t want events like Small Business Septtember

    I certainly didn’t hear any complaints at the breakfast fourm I attended at the Northern Beaches, most of the concerns seemed to be from cafe owners arguing about council outdoor seating permits. If the commish wants to get involved with that nest of vipers, I wish her the best of luck.

    Overall, small business can’t expect much from government; particularly in the modern corporatist society where Big Government does Big Deal with Big Unions and Big Business while Big Media selectively reports what suits it.

    Probably the best thing for small business is stay nimble and avoid being stepped on the Big Dinosaurs as they dance obliviously to the major changes that are happening in the world around us.

    Big dinosaurs look after their own, don’t expect them to give you anything except a big shower of dung.

    Disclaimer: I’ve been hired by Trade & Investment to host various events on the now axed programs and worked for 19 months at what was then the Department of State and Regional Development. I wish all of those former colleagues who now find their positions abolished the best of luck in finding another role.

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  • Irrelevance and the media

    Irrelevance and the media

    It’s a shame we weren’t around when dinosaurs became extinct. Then again, maybe we are.

    News Limited business commentator Terry McCrann writes about the “Bleakest of views from the shopfronts” in his Sunday column describing the problems of retail.

    All of the problems Terry cited are from big retailers – Woolworths, Dick Smith, Harvey Norman and JB HiFi. To make it clear he was talking about corporate issues there’s even a reference to General Motors.

    Nowhere does Terry talk about smaller businesses or those challenging the big guys, folk like Ruslan Kogan or the Catch of the Day team. It’s all about the big end of town.

    Terry’s article illustrates the problem of relying on incumbent mainstream media commentary; that it is Big Media talking about Big Business and Big Government.

    “Small”, “ordinary” or “average” has no place in their conversation, if you can call the pronouncement of mainstream media commentators a conversation at all.

    We can understand this – for a journalist, it’s good for the ego and career to look like a “heavy hitter” in big business. For the politician, small business and community groups can’t pay the speaking and consulting fees paid by corporations to supplement their meagre retirement benefits.

    Increasingly what happens in the corporate board rooms or the once smoke filled rooms of political caucuses is out of touch with the real world.

    This has become particularly acute since the responses to the 2008 crash proved to the management classes that their bonuses and perks will be protected by government bailouts regardless of how many billions of shareholder wealth they manage to destroy.

    In the United States we see this in political controversies being focused on contraception – an issue settled forty years ago – while the country faces fundamental challenges to its economic base and the basic welfare of its citizens and industries.

    While in Australia the media ‘insiders’ rabbit on about pointless internal party politics and soothing articles on how everything else is fine, we just need to be more optimistic. Yet the real questions about how we take advantage of the country’s greatest export boom, position the economy for the next 50 years and the nation’s dependence on the Chinese economy are being ignored.

    Terry McCrann’s story is emblematic of just how out of touch Big Media, and their friends in Big Business and Big Government, are with the real world.

    All we can do is let them get on with it and not take them too seriously.

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  • The need for speed

    The need for speed

    I’m at the Kickstart Forum for IT journalists on the Gold Coast this weekend talking to various companies and technology thought leaders on the direction of the industry.

    For the forum’s opening keynote, opposition spokesperson and former Optus telecommunications executive Paul Fletcher described his concerns about the Australian government’s National Broadband Network.

    Many of Paul’s objections to the project are based on the failure of former attempts to build telecommunications networks – citing Aussat, the NextGen fibre network, OneTel and international disappointments like WorldCom and Global Crossing.

    The other main concern is that no-one will use it. He cites a Parliamentary committee that where eHealth providers said their service could be adequately provided by a 512Kbit connection, a tiny fraction of the 100Mbit speed promised by the NBN.

    Previous failures aren’t a good indicator of the success or otherwise of the NBN, but what’s more important is what a poor job industry’s doing in explaining how high speed Internet can help their businesses.

    The big challenge for NBN advocates who believe this project is the essential infrastructure of the 21st Century, is to articulate the benefits and potential. We’re not doing a very good job at the moment.

    What’s your view on how high speed Internet can help your business or community?

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  • Knowledge and power

    Knowledge and power

    In the 16th Century English courtier Sir Francis Bacon declared “Knowledge is Power”, something certainly true during the conspiracy prone reign of Elizabeth I.

    Today the data available about ourselves and our communities is exploding along with the computer power to process that information to turn it into knowledge.

    We see that knowledge being used in interesting ways – US shopping chain Target recently described how they used data mining to determine, with 87% accuracy, to figure out if a shopper is pregnant.

    That 87% is important, it says the algorithm isn’t perfect and bombarding a false positive with baby wear advertising could prove embarrassing, or in some families and societies even fatal.

    A good example of data misuse are the two unfortunate Brummies (alright, one’s from Coventry) who were deported from the US for tweeting they were “going to destroy America and dig up Marilyn Monroe”

    For the US immigration and homeland security agents, they ready the jokey tweets by the Birmingham bar manager through their own filter and came to the wrong conclusion, although it’s likely their performance indicators rewarded them for doing this.
    This is the Achilles heel in big data – used selectively, information can be used to confirm our own prejudices, ideologies and biases.
    In 2003 we saw this in the run up to the US invasion of Iraq with cherry picking of information used to build the false case that the ruling regime had weapons of mass destruction that could attack Europe in 45 minutes.
    For businesses, we can be sure data showing the CEO is wrong or the big advisory firm has made the wrong recommendations will be overlooked in most cases.

    Despite the Pollyanna view of a world of transparency and openness driven by social media and online publishing tools, the information is asymmetric; governments and big business know more about individuals or those without power than the other way round.

    In a world where politicians, business people and journalists trade on their insider knowledge rather than competing in the open, free market we have to understand that filtering this data is essential to retaining  powers and privileges.

    Usually when the data threatens the existing power structures it is repressed in the same way a dissenting taxpayer, citizen, employee or shareholder is discredited and isolated.

    At present there’s lots of data threatening existing commercial duopolies, political parties and cosy ways of doing business.

    The fact many of those in power don’t want to see what their own systems are telling them is where the real opportunities lie.

    Entrepreneurs, community groups and activists have access to much of this data being ignored by incumbents, it will be interesting to see how it’s used.

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  • Megaupload, cloud computing and trust

    Megaupload, cloud computing and trust

    The closing down of file sharing site Megaupload has raised the question of trust in the cloud; “It has made cloud services look that much less legitimate” one daily paper quotes futurist Mark Pesce as saying.

    For those of us advocating cloud services and advising businesses on using them, this trust issue isn’t anything new. All of us have to be careful about who we trust with our data and Kim Dotcom, the founder of Megaupload, doesn’t come to mind as someone who would stand a great deal of due diligence.

    Like investments – another area where trust is essential – we have to spread our risk around. Saving copies of data to your own computer and making sure the information you save on the cloud is in a form easily read by different systems is important, as is not trusting any one service for critical services.

    The taking down of Megaupload also raises other questions – as privacy advocate Lauren Weinstein points out;

    “But the Megaupload case is more akin to the government seizing every safe deposit box in a bank because the bank owners (and possibly some percentage of the safe deposit box users) were simply accused — not yet convicted — of engaging in a crime.

    What of the little old lady with her life savings in her box, or the person who needs to access important documents, all legitimate, all honest, no crimes of any sort involved.

    They are — to use the vernacular — screwed.”

    It’s this over-reaction by government agencies which is the real concern and the co-operation of large corporations in shutting down services – as we saw with the shutting down of Wikileaks – probably does more to damage trust in all online services, not just cloud computing.

    Cloud services are no less trustworthy than our computer systems, all of which can breakdown, catch viruses or be compromised by staff making mistakes. We have to understand that all technologies carry some degree of risk.

    For businesses and home users, we need to spread the risks around – don’t just trust one service or technology to deliver your products or services and have a fall back plan if things go wrong.

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