Digital citizens and the future of government

On By Kate CarruthersIn ideas

Hosted a panel at the UNSW Michael Crouch Innovation Centre last week with Selena Griffith on Digital Citizens and the Future of Government with Dominic Campbell, Penny Webb-Smart, and Amelia Loye.

You can view the video here

Panel members

Dominic Campbell is a digital government entrepreneur with a background in government policy and technology-led change. He is an experienced in organisation design and has senior management experience in implementing successful change initiatives within public services. Having spent six years in government in the UK, Dominic established FutureGov in 2008. A team of 40, FutureGov supports digital and design thinking in government in the UK, Australia and many places in between. Dominic has previously been voted in the top 100 most influential people in UK local government.

Penny Webb-Smart is Executive Director, Service Reform for the Department of Finance, Services and Innovation in the NSW Government. The Service Reform team was established in February 2015 to facilitate digital and service innovation on a cross-agency basis that puts customer at the heart of NSW government. The key drivers for service reform are: * Accelerating digital government * Customer centric transformation * Joined up government services Penny’s has deep experience in digital transformation, service design and development, building customer-centric cultures, and developing strategic partnerships. Prior to NSW Government, Penny spent twenty years in financial services, consulting and telecommunications in Australia and New Zealand.

Amelia Loye is a social scientist with more than a dozen years’ engaging citizens and stakeholders for Government’s in Australia, New Zealand and Canada. She has engaged across the participation spectrum, for policy, planning and project development, for legislative change, and for community education and behavioural change. Amelia now provides strategic support for organisations wanting to practice digital democracy and improve the way they engage, consider social issues, and work with others to serve the needs of community. She is also well known for her work on Australia’s first Action Plan for Open Government.

 

 

Internet of Things and beyond: cyber-physical systems

On By Kate CarruthersIn ideas

The new industrial revolution is a cyber-physical systems revolution. The Internet of Things (IoT) forms a foundation for this cyber-physical systems revolution and it is driving the biggest shift in business and technology since World War II.

Introduction

“Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are physical and engineered systems whose operations are monitored, coordinated, controlled and integrated by a computing and communication core. Just as the internet transformed how humans interact with one another, cyber-physical systems will transform how we interact with the physical world around us.”[1]

It has been said that the world is on the brink of a fourth industrial revolution[2], and that this new industrial revolution is a cyber-physical systems (CPS) revolution. The Internet of Things (IoT) will form a key foundation for this cyber-physical systems revolution. The emergence of IoT is the beginning of a revolution that will have as great an impact on society and the way people and business are organized as the computer revolution did on the post-World War II era.

Machines now interact and interface with other machines and as well as human beings in new ways. The combination of AI, machine learning, the cloud, and IoT means that systems of machines will be able to interact with human beings, learn about them and adapt to their wants and needs.

These systems will also be able to apply the principles of behavioral economics[3] and enable human behavior to be ‘nudged’ in predetermined directions. Governments around the world are already setting up behavioral insight teams – also known as ‘nudge units’.[4] Further, marketers are already applying the principles of neuromarketing[5], where consumers’ sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective response to marketing stimuli are being studied with a view to driving consumer purchasing behavior based upon these studies.  It is likely that we will see autonomous machines adopting the use of these kinds of techniques to drive human behavior in predetermined ways. This trend is emergent, with fitness wearable devices, such as Fitbits[6], using social sharing and gamification to assist users in achieving fitness goals.

Other technologies supporting the evolution of IoT and the emergence of CPS include software-defined networks[7], software defined storage[8]. This drives automation of repetitive tasks, even for manual labor like bricklaying [9] – consumer products as well as industrial output[10]. This is reshaping industrialization, and regulatory frameworks for IoT are now beginning to emerge[11]. Issues like privacy, data ownership, and security will remain important for CPS.

With the emergence of IoT and CPS, consumers face new challenges with their personal data. The new devices, services, and products collect data in volumes hitherto unimaginable. The volume of data being collected about consumers and their activities is reshaping how business is done. For example, insurance companies can offer insurance premiums based, not upon actuarial assumptions, but upon real-time data provided by consenting human beings as they go about their daily activities[12]. This combination of real-time data and analytics enables pricing models and risk profiles can change subject to actual results in real time.

What Will Change?

There is emergence of the industrial internet together with the rise of networked industries, this convergence of industrial, digital, analytics, and connectivity is different, it is:

  • Shaped by a design focus;
  • Enabled by ubiquitous networks;
  • Driven by application ecosystems;
  • Enabled by different modalities such as flying drones, wearables and ingestible technologies;
  • Reshaping industries with adoption of autonomous computer systems, robotics, and 3D printing; and
  • Changing the nature of employment and restructuring the

Advances in IoT and related technologies make it possible to deploy CPS within which information from all related perspectives can be monitored and synchronized between the physical manufacturing locations and computational spaces. With real-time data analytics, capabilities together with software-defined infrastructure, networked machines will be able to perform more efficiently, collaboratively and resiliently. Thus, machines will connect autonomously to each other as and when required without human intervention. This trend is transforming manufacturing industries, leading some to call for a clear definition of CPS.[13] IoT and CPS build upon well-established protocols[14] and use enterprise grade cloud hosting.  Tools such as AI, machine learning, and data analytics are also critical[15], as are mesh networks and peer-to-peer connectivity.[16]

Societal and business impact

Identity, access, privacy and data security remain critical for IoT and CPS. However, as these systems become ubiquitous, understanding what autonomous systems are doing, recording and deciding in relation human beings will emerge as a problem area, together with commercial decisions made based upon this information.

There is be a shift from a product delivery model to a delivering products plus services model, and this is driven from a one-off product sales based model to an ongoing service delivery model. We are already seeing this shift from delivering a one-time only product to providing ongoing services to support connected products. This means that companies will to need to change the way their organization is structured to service customers and products on an ongoing basis.

“Business models will have to change. We used to build them [products], ship them and forget about them until we had to service them…”
“We’ve moved to a new world where we have to ship and remember.”[17]

The sharing economy[18] drives different utilization models for capital equipment, and it is already starting to change the way consumers and business provide access to capital equipment. Uber and Airbnb have enabled people to obtain greater utilization from their assets – cars and houses – to derive additional revenue from an existing asset. This idea of allowing other users to access existing capital equipment is growing, even in the manufacturing sector.[19]

Devices will increasingly communicate and operate autonomously and independent of human oversight. There was a recent example of a motor vehicle involved in an alleged hit-and-run accident where the car reported the accident.[20] The driver of the vehicle did not intend to report that accident, yet her connected vehicle did so autonomously. Thus in this connected world there are new affordances for business and consumers.  However, the reality of this connected world is only now starting to be perceived by society.

The regulatory landscape for IoT is evolving and regulators struggle to understand and support the rapid emergence of new services, products, and business models.[21] The regulatory landscape includes licensing and spectrum management, switching and roaming, addressing and numbering, competition, security and privacy. At present IoT is governed by a plethora of existing regulations, which may or may not be a good fit. A US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation hearing noted that IoT is more than merely about consumer protection and privacy. It is also significant in industry and agriculture and that strong security in all devices critical: “We have to design security in at the beginning and throughout a connected device’s lifecycle,” said Intel IoT Group Vice President and General Manager Doug Davis.”[22]

Summary

CPS includes traditional embedded and control systems, and these will be transformed by new approaches from IoT. However, the challenge for IoT and CPS remains privacy, security and risk management. As less rigorously controlled systems are linked then risk becomes distributed and the provenance of software components becomes difficult to trace. This gives rise to questions around risk management and liability for breaches or damages. As demonstrated in the 2014 Target hack[23], via their HVAC provider’s system, third party systems are now attack vectors. Further, regulators have not yet addressed this issue of distributed or daisy-chained risk arising from connected systems.  Attacks on connected systems from nation state actors and non-state actors are also an increasing threat: “According to Crowdstrike researchers, targeted intrusions will continue to proliferate and nation-states will use espionage to collect information from any organization with valuable data that will serve the country’s national interests.”[24]  The big challenges that are raised by IoT and CPS center around risk, security, geopolitics, trust, and privacy.

Notes

[1] Rajkumar, Ragunathan Raj, Insup Lee, Lui Sha, and John Stankovic. “Cyber-physical systems: the next computing revolution.” In Proceedings of the 47th Design Automation Conference, pp. 731-736. ACM, 2010.

[2] Schwab, Klaus, “The Fourth Industrial Revolution: what it means and how to respond”, World Economic Forum, 15 December 2015, https://agenda.weforum.org/2015/12/the-fourth-industrial-revolution-what-it-means-and-how-to-respond/ (retrieved at 30 December 2015).

[3] Thaler, Richard H. and Sunstein, Cass R., Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2008.

[4] Rutter, Tamsin “The rise of nudge – the unit helping politicians to fathom human behavior,” The Guardian, 25 July 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/public-leaders-network/2015/jul/23/rise-nudge-unit-politicians-human-behaviour (retrieved at 30 December 2015).

[5] Lewis, David & Brigder, Darren (July–August 2005). “Market Researchers make Increasing use of Brain Imaging”, Advances in Clinical Neuroscience and Rehabilitation 5 (3): 35+.

[6] https://www.fitbit.com/au (retrieved at 30 December 2015).

[7] Kirkpatrick, Keith. “Software-defined networking.” Communications of the ACM 56, no. 9 (2013): 16-19.

[8] Ouyang, Jian, Shiding Lin, Song Jiang, Zhenyu Hou, Yong Wang, and Yuanzheng Wang. “SDF: Software-defined flash for web-scale internet storage systems.” ACM SIGPLAN Notices 49, no. 4 (2014): 471-484.

[9] Redrup, Yolanda, “Robot bricklayer that can build a home in two days impresses on ASX debut”, The Australian Financial Review, 18 November 2015 , http://www.afr.com/technology/robot-bricklayer-that-can-build-a-home-in-two-days-impresses-on-asx-debut-20151118-gl1oa9#ixzz3vnAjAWIk  (retrieved at 30 December 2015).

[10] Regalado, Antonio “GE’s $1 Billion Software Bet: To protect lucrative business servicing machines, GE turns to the industrial Internet”, MIT Technology Review, 20 May 2014, http://www.technologyreview.com/news/527381/ges-1-billion-software-bet/ (retrieved 30 December 2015).

[11] Spencer, Leon “IoT could ‘smash’ Australia’s regulatory framework”, ZDNet Australia, 25 March 2015, http://www.zdnet.com/article/iot-could-smash-australias-regulatory-framework/ (retrieved at 30 December 2015).

[12] Olson, Parmy “Wearable Tech Is Plugging Into Health Insurance”, Forbes, 19 June 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/06/19/wearable-tech-health-insurance/  (retrieved at 30 December 2015).

[13] Lee, Jay, Behrad Bagheri, and Hung-An Kao. “A cyber-physical systems architecture for industry 4.0-based manufacturing systems.” Manufacturing Letters 3 (2015): 18-23.

[14] Protocols include Wi-Fi, RFID, Zigbee, Bluetooth, 2G, 3G, 4G

[15] Kambatla, Karthik, Giorgos Kollias, Vipin Kumar, and Ananth Grama. “Trends in big data analytics.” Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing 74, no. 7 (2014): 2561-2573.

[16] Wark, Tim, Peter Corke, Pavan Sikka, Lasse Klingbeil, Ying Guo, Chris Crossman, Phil Valencia, Dave Swain, and Greg Bishop-Hurley. “Transforming agriculture through pervasive wireless sensor networks.” Pervasive Computing, IEEE 6, no. 2 (2007): 50-57.

[17] Robinson, Teri, “IoT security forcing business model changes, panel says”, SC Magazine, 22 October 2015, http://www.scmagazine.com/iot-security-forcing-business-model-changes-panel-says/article/448668/  (retrieved at 30 December 2015).

[18] Zervas, Georgios, Davide Proserpio, and John Byers. “The rise of the sharing economy: Estimating the impact of Airbnb on the hotel industry.”Boston U. School of Management Research Paper 2013-16 (2015).

[19] Anagnost, Andrew “Not Just Airbnb and Uber: Why Manufacturing Is Already a Sharing Economy”, Autodesk LINE/SHAPE/SPACE, 8 December 2015, http://lineshapespace.com/manufacturing-sharing-economy/  (retrieved at 30 December 2015).

[20] Osborne, Charlie “Car calls 911 after alleged hit-and-run, driver arrested: A Ford safety feature has also turned out to be a way to track badly-behaved drivers”, ZDNet, 7 December 2015, http://www.zdnet.com/article/car-calls-911-after-alleged-hit-and-run-driver-arrested/  (retrieved at 30 December 2015).

[21] Soltani, Ashkan “What’s the security shelf-life of IoT?”, Federal Trade Commission, 10 February 2015, https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/techftc/2015/02/whats-security-shelf-life-iot?utm_source=govdelivery (retrieved at 30 December 2015).

[22] Bracy, Jedediah “Senate Committee Explores Internet-of-Things Regulation”, The Privacy Advisor, 12 February 2015, https://iapp.org/news/a/senate-committee-explores-internet-of-things-regulation/  (retrieved at 30 December 2015).

[23] Weiss, N. Eric, and Rena S. Miller. “The Target and Other Financial Data Breaches: Frequently Asked Questions.” In Congressional Research Service, Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress February, vol. 4, p. 2015. 2015.

[24] Vicinanzo, Amanda “Targeted Intrusions By Nation-State Actors Pose A Major Cyber Threat Going Into 2015”, 12 February 2015, Homeland Security Today, http://www.hstoday.us/single-article/targeted-intrusions-by-nation-state-actors-pose-a-major-cyber-threat-going-into-2015/1f96ee7a4b2867f1b1511387660bb4b8.html (retrieved at 30 December 2015).

 

Innovation, government, and #policyhack

On By Kate CarruthersIn ideas

Can a government really change the way it does innovation by doing a #policyhack ?

It was refreshing to hear the Turnbull government immediately turn around the depressingly negative rhetoric of the Abbott era and start talking about innovation, agility, and action. And it was a nice surprise when Wyatt Roy MP announced that he was hosting a #policyhack in associating with well-known startup incubator, BlueChilli.

What is a #policyhack ?

policyhack-300x63
In about two weeks the staff of Wyatt Roy and Blue Chilli pulled together a good quality event called #policyhack. The idea was simple:

“Ideas for policies that could grow innovative, globally competitive industries in Australia

Policy and industry experts collaborate in a one day policy hackathon.

Along with Assistant Minister for Innovation Hon. Wyatt Roy MP, BlueChilli will bring together representatives from startups, VC funds, accelerators and other components of the innovation ecosystem, with policy experts from government departments to collaborate in a one-day industry policy hackathon in Sydney, Saturday 17 October 2015.

We’ll use the hackathon methodology to nominate, select and work together in mixed teams on new government policy ideas designed to foster the growth of innovation industries including tech startups, biotech, agtech, fintech, renewables and resources.”

The judging criteria for the ideas were simple:

  1. Value proposition – Does the proposal address a clear and present problem in the innovation ecosystem, and has the problem been clearly articulated?
  2. Impact – Does the proposal contribute to making the innovation ecosystem stronger?
  3. Implementation – Is the proposal practical to implement; has the proposal identified required resources (public and private); has the proposal indicated who would be the relevant stakeholders? Is the proposal practically achievable in realistic timeframes?
  4. Value for money – Has consideration been made to proposal’s potential costs?
  5. International comparisons – Has anything similar been done internationally?

Initial policy ideas for consideration on the day were crowdsourced from the public via the  OurSay online forum prior to the event.

I signed up, partly out of curiosity and partly out of a desire to see government try something a bit different to develop new policy approaches. I have had previous experience of hackathons and design jams, mostly in a tech startup or service design context, and was interested to see how well the hackathon model translated for rapid policy development. I ended up working with the always disruptive Anne Marie Elias, along with the amazing Annie Beaulieu and Cass Mao on a social innovation idea for reshaping the existing welfare model for disadvantaged communities.

Was it worth doing #policyhack ?

It was a great day. It was a place full of interesting and engaged people who were working collaboratively to change the way Australia does innovation. Lots of Federal public servants were also there. I hold out hopes that many people who participated can see the value of this kind of rapid design process for use in policy development. It was also good to get the public servants out of their Canberra eyries to meetup with real entrepreneurs and folks who are doing innovation everyday in real life. Exposing government and bureaucrats to the lean and agile approaches for getting new ideas off the ground at minimal cost and effort, that are already used successfully across the global startup community, is a benefit.

Having worked in state government and been involved in policy development over the years I can see that this is an area that is ripe for disruption. Approaches to policy development, like #policyhack, might just be part of the equation for renewal of the government’s policy development framework.


Building connections between Canberra types and entrepreneurial types working together with a common focus is one of the best outcomes. We need to develop more informal ways for government and public service people to continue the dialogue with the startup community. StartupAus is a good start.

But to make it real, it is up to Wyatt Roy and his ministerial colleagues and their departments to be brave and turn these ideas into reality. I await the next steps with great interest.

The whistling winds of change are possibly just about to reach Canberra, and we might all be the better for it. As my colleague, Gavin Heaton summarised it neatly: “The new MVP – minimum viable policy.”

Design-Led Tuesdays at UNSW Michael Crouch Innovation Centre

On By Kate CarruthersIn ideas

Have been meaning to post about Design-Led Tuesdays at UNSW for a while now.

Selena Griffith, Martin Bliemel, and I kicked off Design-Led Tuesdays as a new initiative between UNSW, ENACTUS UNSW and Social Innovation Sydney.

Tuesdays at UNSW’s Michael Crouch Innovation Centre this semester are all about design thinking for innovation. The Design-Led Tuesdays program runs for 10 weeks across Semester 2, 2015, with lunchtime and evening events.

12 to 2pm: Design for Innovation
These Tuesday ‘brown bag’ lunchtime workshops are for UNSW students and staff who want to learn and collaborate by ‘design doing’ and design tools for innovation.

ENACTUS UNSW and Social Innovation Sydney have designed a ten-week series of workshops to help you cultivate all the design tools you need to realise your innovative ideas.

The workshops will be very hands on – lots of ‘design doing’!

Places are limited to 30 people each week, so booking is essential: RSVP details here

Call for papers: Design for Disaster Response Conference #d4dr15

On By Kate CarruthersIn ideas

A colleague and I are co-chairing the Design for Disaster Response cross disciplinary conference to share research and actions around approaches to preparing for, and delivering responses to, disaster. We recently issued the following call for papers. More information will be available on the #d4dr15 conference website.

Date and Location

Date: Friday November 13, 2015

Venue: UNSW Australia Michael Crouch Innovation Centre UNSW Sydney, Australia

Conference Chairs

  • Selena Griffith UNSW Art & Design
  • Kate Carruthers UNSW School of Computer Science & Engineering

Conference Themes

The goal of this conference is to share research, actions and approaches to preparing for, and delivering responses to, disaster. The themes below are indicative but papers, posters and roundtables will be accepted on any disaster related topic.

  • Disaster Response
  • Disaster Recovery
  • Disaster Resilience
  • Humanitarian Disaster
  • Environmental Disaster
  • Medical Disaster
  • Engineering for disaster response and resilience
  • Technology for disaster response
  • Open source technology solutions for disaster response

Abstracts

Abstracts will be peer reviewed and full papers will be published in the conference proceedings. Selected papers will be double blind peer reviewed and published in full in the First Issue of The Asia Pacific Journal of Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Proposal ideas that extend beyond these thematic areas will also be considered.

Abstract Submission Process

Your abstract should be submitted via email using Word or PDF format via email to Selena Griffith by 6th September 2015
  • Your abstract (300-500 words, not including references)
  • 3 key words to help describe your paper
  • 2 references
  • A personal biography for up to three (3) presenting authors (50 words per person)
  • Email and phone contact details for all authors

Abstracts are accepted on the following conditions:

  • Papers must be presented by the authors. Proxies will not be permitted except in an emergency such as illness or misadventure.
  • The Committee reserves the right to accept or refuse any paper, symposium, workshop, or Poster.
  • The Committee reserves the right to allocate a session time or presentation type, which differs from that applied for.
  • Do not include tables, diagrams or graphs in the abstract.
PLEASE NOTE that only the first author will be advised in writing with regard to the acceptance or otherwise of the abstract submission. The first author (as given in the abstract submission) will be the main contact for correspondence about the presentation, however please also ensure that all co-authors/presenters’ email addresses are supplied.

Abstract Submission

Please send your abstract using Word or PDF format via email to Selena Griffith by 6th September 2015

Conference Timeline

  • Call for papers and posters opens August 6th 2015
  • Call for papers closes September 6th  2015
  • Notification of acceptance September 15th  2015
  • Full papers due October 30th  2015

Navigating the social media maze for academics

On By Kate CarruthersIn ideas

Life for an academic these days seems to be getting more complex. In addition to the traditional tasks – teaching, researching, and publishing – the job has expanded to include endless grant applications and the need to develop a public persona to publicise their work. All of this is in addition to having some kind of personal life and human relationships.

The advent of social media has made life for academics more complex and has opened up new ways of publicising their work.

Earlier today I saw an interesting interchange among some science researchers on Twitter. The conversation was inspired by Cameron Webb, a.k.a. @Mozziebites on Twitter, who posted on his blog about Putting a value on science communication. The conversation then moved onto how challenging it can be to manage multiple social media and media channels and how best to collate and curate these. Here’s a few of the tweets:

Many people working in universities tell me that social media just seems like too much on top of an already busy schedule. They ask me how it is possible to fit more into their limited spare time. The trick is to create content once and reuse it across social media platforms, it is also to share other people’s work to build your online communities and networks.

Some ideas for managing multiple social media platforms with minimal effort

Use tools

Merely using the native Twitter or Facebook apps is neither efficient nor effective. Consider using a tool that enables easy cross posting between social media platforms. There are a number of free or low cost tools that serve this purpose. Examples are Hootsuite which gives a dashboard for sharing context to social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn; or Buffer which schedules posts to various social media sites.

Find a place to save interesting links and posts

It is worth finding apps that you like to collate the links you find in your travels across the internet. For academic items I tend to use Zotero, for general links I use Pocket, and Feedly to track websites that are worth regular catchups. Both Pocket and Feedly apps enable sharing of the content that is bookmarked across other social media sites.

Collate interesting content from yourself and others for future reference

It is not sufficient to spread your wit and wisdom across the social media universe, you need to collate your own and others’  content for future reference. This is where tools like If This Then That (IFTTT) come in handy. This free site enables you to create simple processes (called recipes) to share information between various applications. There are many pre-built recipes to use or you can create your own recipes. It is a very powerful yet simple tool for curating your own and others’ content. For example it is easy to create a recipe that automatically posts any items you have favourited via Pocket to Buffer for scheduled posting to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Some handy  IFTTT recipes include:

  • Archive your Instagram photos in an Evernote notebook
  • Save your Tweets in a Google Spreadsheet (which archives your new tweets to Google Drive)
  • Create link notes in Evernote from Feedly articles saved for later
  • Post new SoundCloud tracks to your WordPress Blog

Invest your time parsimoniously on social media

This is a really useful post by Kevan Lee that outlines how you can spend 30 minutes per day on social media to good effect, it’s worth reading:  What’s the Best Way to Spend 30 Minutes of Your Time on Social Media Marketing?

Work out which social media platforms are worth investing time in & which you can simply cross-post to

I spend a lot of time on Twitter because I enjoy the open conversational nature of the platform. However, for academics there are a few other ways to share information and build a public profile you might not have considered:

  • Setup a public profile page on Facebook so you can share professional information separately to your personal profile (it is much less annoying for family and friends)
  • Setup a LinkedIn profile and cross-post interesting articles and information there (I rarely log into LinkedIn and use Buffer to post links there)
  • Don’t forget the emerging academic social media networks, such as Academia or ResearchGate – by posting your published materials to these kind of site you can boost citations and downloads of your work. They can also be handy for asking questions and finding new collaborators.

 

Disclosure: I am an Adjunct Senior Lecturer in School of Computer Science & Engineering at UNSW Australia and publish in academic journals from time to time

Sir Nicholas Winton: saviour, people smuggler, hero?

On By Kate CarruthersIn ideas

The sad news of the death of a great and humble man came out overnight:

“Sir Nicholas Winton, who organised the rescue of 669 children destined for Nazi concentration camps, has died aged 106.

Sir Nicholas, then a stockbroker, arranged for trains to carry Jewish children out of occupied Prague.

Via BBC

He, like others during the 1930s and World War Two period, took action at great personal risk to aid refugees in fleeing persecution by the Nazis.  And he did this at a time when countries all around the world were rejecting Jewish refugees and returning them to persecution.

People of all stations in life assisted Jewish refugees. Even HRH Prince Philip’s mother, Princess Alice, gave refuge to a Jewish family in her own home in Athens during the war at great personal risk.

I honour Sir Nicholas and people like him who faced up to a great moral challenge and who took action. They are heroes and deserve our admiration.

The experiences of those persecuted by the Nazis in World War Two led to the establishment of the United Nations’ 1951 Refugee Convention.

This Convention established the principle that people might seek refuge when facing “a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular group, or political opinion. ”

Yet today people, like Sir Nicholas, who seek to assist refugees in fleeing persecution would be called people smugglers.

Australia seeks to reject asylum seekers who arrive by sea and has even established a punitive internment camp regime as part of a series of deterrent measures.

It is interesting to consider Australia’s response to asylum seekers and refugees in the light of the following definition of ‘concentration camp’:

“The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy. ”

Via Holocaust Encyclopedia

With refugees and asylum seekers today we seem to be repeating the sins of our forebears. This is a tragedy for the human beings who are suffering, and for our national conscience in the face of this moral challenge.

It is clear that local solutions will not suffice and that coordinated measures are the necessary and humane requirement.

 

Mobile and social media – what it means for business

On By Kate CarruthersIn ideas

Mobile and social media have created a new business landscape

If you’re not already working out how to disrupt your business and your industry then you will be disrupted…

The web 2.0 revolution and social media changed the game for business. At a basic level brands discovered the notion of customer ‘conversations’. But for the most part this was not  strategic, rather it often consisted of random tactical efforts.

It is amusing to see that even in 2015 many brands are only just now discovering the notion of metrics and measuring their online activity:

“…many brands moving towards measuring audience impressions, clicks, and thinking cross-platform”

– Tania Yuki , Shareablee CEO and Founder

Then we often hear statistics like this:

“…Instagram delivered these brands 58 times more engagement per follower than Facebook, and 120 times more engagement per follower than Twitter.”

The real question to ask about all statistics like this is “so what?” What does that engagement translate to as business outcomes?

“There is no ROI in anything if you don’t learn how to use it.”

– Gary Vaynerchuk, Founder VaynerMedia

The simple fact is that hardly anyone is driving direct revenue from social media, and many businesses are not optimized to sell via mobile. And the big question for businesses is what is the goal for their social and mobile activity?

But now all business online presence must be mobile friendly – Google and customers will punish businesses that do not embrace this. Increasingly users are accessing digital  content via mobile devices, and this means that businesses need to ensure a good quality experience.

Social media was only phase 1

Social media was phase one of the new digital revolution, next coming is the collaborative economy and internet of things ( IoT).

The present of social is mobile. The future of mobile is IoT and wearables. and these offer huge  monetization opportunities:

Cisco [former] CEO John Chambers Values Internet of Things at $19T #CES2014

People

People, both customers and staff, now have a default position that assumes access to any resources they want. And they want it online, on demand, real-time, anywhere, and on any device they choose.

This is all part of the democratisation of communication enabled by the digital revolution. It leads to an inversion of power relationships and puts the means of production for communication in the hands of the populace.

It leads to opportunities and growth in peer-to-peer and mobile. Kevin Kelly sums it up nicely as:

“…a shift towards the individual as the centre of a network of relationships mediated and enabled by technology…”

The shift is from customer channels to a customer continuum mediated by social and mobile.

This means that businesses need to connect social media activity to purchasing activity, they need to make it work on mobile and tablet. And it must be friction-less.

Changes to team and organisation structure

In a fast moving context like this command-control management is dead. This is because the operational tempo of a digital business is not days or weeks or months; it is minutes and seconds.

To support this shift in operational tempo we need employees with skills to work in a social or collaborative context. We need team members who can deal with ambiguity and a fast pace.

To support customers who do not have patience with internal silos businesses need to move towards integrated teams. This means using ideas like DevOps and agile to support cross-functional teams to meet customer needs and deliver across organisational silos. To achieve this all parts of the business will need to bring together expertise:

  • Tech
  • Marketing
  • Sales
  • Operations
  • Customer service

Workforce changes mean that new ways of working will emerge, such as co-working and collaboration. These will lead to increased decentralisation of the workforce and be accompanied by much shorter change cycles.

And these changes will all lead to issues with boundaries between public and private; between personal and business. With this blurring between roles it will be increasingly difficult to establish role clarity. And this means that team members need to be able to manage through ambiguity and across functional lines.

Risk and governance

In the fast-paced world of digital business we still need to consider how to manage risk and how to enact effective governance.  Some factors to consider in this regard include:

  • Monitor your business online
  • Assign responsibility for online channels
  • Include social & mobile in digital strategy
  • Link digital strategy to marketing strategy
  • Ensure cross media planning in place
  • Develop mechanisms to track progress
  • Create and manage loosely connected networks
  • Grow a business in a networked world
  • Engage people and garner advocates for your business
  • Focus outward while protecting your brand

Top 10 checklist for digital business

  1. Digital strategy: is just part of it, includes websites, email marketing, etc.
  2. Tactical plans: For implementation of campaigns
  3. Resource plan: Social is not free, it needs people and tools
  4. Tools: Required to enable management, tracking and monitoring
  5. Metrics: Need to be decided prior to implementation to enable effective reporting
  6. ROI: Need to track investment and results
  7. Reporting: For good governance
  8. Roles & responsibilities: Defined and clear to all parties, in particular governance + cross-functional teams
  9. Cross media plan: Integration with other digital and marketing activities
  10. Risk management: Includes social media policies and procedures and crisis management process

LinkedIn and the power of networks

On By Kate CarruthersIn ideas2 Comments

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I used to think of LinkedIn as a boring but worthy social network for business contacts. But I was wrong.

Over the years it has become a critical B2B social network, with multi-million dollar deals often being done via the platform.

LinkedIn has also disrupted the recruitment business and reshaped the way people find jobs. It changed the power dynamic in recruitment by enabling the jobs to find people. Clever recruiters embraced LinkedIn early. The rest clung to their clunky old proprietary resume databases.

With the recent acquisition of Lynda.com, the reach of LinkedIn looks like growing into training and education. This is a more interesting play than MOOCs from an education perspective.

Remembering my LinkedIn story

Last night I caught up with a longstanding buddy, Des Walsh, as he visited Sydney. Des is a doyen of social media in Australia, as well as being a passionate networker and executive coach.

As we chatted I finally remembered to tell him the story of how one of his ideas helped me to get a great job.

LinkedIn ’30 day blitz’

Back in late 2012 Des contacted a diverse bunch of folks who were active on social media, noting that LinkedIn was our ‘orphan’ social network. He was right, most of us were enamoured with other sexier social media platforms. We were all members of LinkedIn, but at that time none of us were particularly active there, nor were our profiles up to date.

Des setup a social network challenge for November 2012, rounding up a diverse group to take part in a month of LinkedIn activity.

The concept was simple – “A collaborative project, in which each participant commits to take action on his/her LinkedIn presence and activity, over a 30 day period.” – 30 Day Linking Blitz.

I signed up for the blitz, and started with updating my LinkedIn profile with previous work and a decent profile picture.

The results were immediate

Almost immediately after that I was contacted by a recruiter. The recruiter had been trying for almost a year to find a candidate for a role that called for a diverse mix of skills. She explained that my name had popped up in her LinkedIn search that morning.

The rest is history. I interviewed for the role at UNSW Australia, where I’ve been working happily since then. All thanks to Des and his 30 Day LinkedIn Blitz.