Eschew ephemera

I had the good fortune to attend a Tech Event in Silicon Valley this week and I gained some fascinating insights. I also met some very interesting people. Here are some snippets from the event.

Silicon Valley Innovation Institute in Palo Alto

The SVII gets together every month. This month there was a panel discussion on broadband. It was interesting to see the direction broadband was taking  but even more interesting to see and hear how people were reacting to the idea of unlimited bandwidth.

But first some numbers from the panelists:

• 4G will deliver better than wired broadband speeds eventually but the infrastructure isn’t there
• 120 million people in the US have access to 4G
• There are 4 billion cell phones world wide and 1.5 billion personal computers in the world today
• It is estimated that there will be 20 billion mobile devices by 2015
• It took 125 years to get to 1 billion land-line phone users, 20 years to get to 1 billion cell phone users and took only 3 more years to get to 2 billion cell phone users

Two main themes emerged from this panel. Firstly the effect that unlimited broadband would have on our society and second the different perspective of digital-natives from digital-migrants (to be explained shortly).

One speaker, Ray Abrishami from the WiMax Forum, was convinced that always-on, unlimited broadband was a bad idea. He suggested that language would suffer (lol), social interaction would cease, culture would collapse and economies would fail as increasing numbers of the population saw their device as their companion and they eschewed human contact. This nightmare scenario was increasingly likely, he said, as we lose the ability to manufacture wealth from goods and services and try, instead, to create wealth from ephemera such as games and social media which have no intrinsic value.

Not surprisingly, from a tech crowd like this, he was pretty much alone in his opinion. Indeed one person in the audience pointed out that they would use all the bandwidth they could get their hands on for streaming HD movies and music. Another person commented that without online gaming, online gambling and online porn we would not have made the investment in the infrastructure we have today and we would not all be benefiting from the huge amount of bandwidth we already have.

The economist and digital historian on the panel, Professor Alexander J. Field from Santa Clara University, took a more sanguine approach. He pointed out that it is our children who were born into the digital world, the digital-natives, who are adapting the technology to address world issues that had been previously intractable. While the evidence is clear that we are much less productive when we allow interrupts from email, chat, texts and even phone calls while we are working, the digital-natives take it all in their stride and are still productive. This is because they are harnessing the technology and exploiting it making them more productive than someone who is more reticent in its use. Indeed his main point was that technology brings productivity booms though there is often a lag between the inventing and the exploiting.

And for those of us who are digital-migrants, those of us who have learned to let go of analog technologies (vinyl records, wired-phones and over-the-air broadcasts), we are benefiting from the from the digital-natives embrace of all things new and shiny. If not in the productivity and wealth they are creating but also in what they are teaching us to do with technology. It is not uncommon for our children to give us “hand-me-ups” of their old (12 to 18 months) phones, PC’s and MP3 players as they move to the next cool gadget.

There is no doubt that with always-on, unlimited bandwidth the digital-natives will make full use of the capacity and will do extraordinary things with it. They will shape the future. We should encourage them to do so and accept their leadership. In our society, the Empowering Change we must facilitate is one where success is rewarded, failure is stigma-free and new is embraced.

September 5, 2010 at 3:48 pm | Business and Technology | No comment

Working in the margin

For more than six decades now we have been using technology, specifically computer-based technology, to drive costs out of the business. Quaint hardly describes those now sepia pictures of serried hoards of clerks, stamping, signing and sorting multi-part documents in vast open-plan offices. Typewriters on every desk but phones only on the manager’s. And over the last 60 years we have slowly replaced those jobs with technology solutions and those people have moved their skills into different fields. Maybe you are one of them.

Today there is not much automation that is left to be done. Indeed most people in the computer business spend their time trying to replace the systems they put in 10 or 20 years ago  and we are even replacing systems we put in only one or two years ago. And we are doing this now because we are desperately trying to drive cost out of IT.

With the way the economy has been for the past 10 years everyone is completely focused on cost containment.

But that is not the only way to keep increasing the margins in your business. Mr. Micawber once reflected; “Annual income £20, annual expenditure £19 19s 6d, result happiness. Annual income £20, annual expenditure £20 0s 6d, result misery.” Profit is the difference between income and expenditure. We have already driven out all the significant and unnecessary expenditure we can: the pips are squeaking, there is no more juice in the lemon!

Businesses that can turn technology to their commercial advantage will be the Glaxo’s, the BP’s, the British Airways, the Sainsbury’s of the future. It used to be, in 1935, that if you made it to the Fortune list of top companies you’d be on that list for 90 years. Today companies on the list last only 15 years there on average.

Look at FaceBook, Microsoft bought by a 1.5% stake for $250mn, or Amazon, worth over $50bn, these are companies that could not exist without technology to create markets,  create products and deliver revenues.

So what does this mean for your business? Look to turn technology into a way of creating new revenue.

Maybe you can deliver your product and services to your customers through technology that gets it there faster, cheaper, safer. Do kids want to go shopping in the High Street? No, they want to surf the web, from their iPhone and get a package on their doorstep the next day. And kids have a lot of money these days.

Can technology help you understand your customers better? Help you with detecting trends, buying behavior? Can technology help you discover why customers don’t buy from you? Or why they start to buy and then stop.

Is the customer experience with your company better because of technology or worse? What can you do to make your customers become your best sales team because your technology makes them love doing business with you? What can you do to make your competitors look un-cool, out of date, not in tune with the customer?

If you have an idea for changing your business model does your technology allow you make those changes? Or does it hold back and force you to do things the old way? Can you model what effect your ideas might have if you implement them? Or do you have jump and hope?

How do you know that you are being successful? Does your technology tell you, give you feedback on how you are running your business? Does your technology monitor your competitors?

There are as many ways of turning technology into a competitive advantage as there are business people with ideas.

In this series of postings I want to explore ideas on how we start to use technology to drive sales, how we enable business owners to run their businesses proactively and how we Empower Change that increases the margins in your business.

Tell me how you turn technology into a competitive advantage.

July 9, 2010 at 11:47 pm | Business and Technology | 5 comments