Keynote: Creating the future of retail shopping precincts: The Power of Community and Uniqueness

By

Tomorrow morning I will give the keynote at Mainstreet Australia conference on the topic of Creating the Future of Business.

My slides are below. The usual caveat applies – the slides are designed to accompany my presentation and not to stand alone.

Keynote: Creating the Future of Retail Spaces

View more presentations from rossdawson

While the title of the presentation is Creating the Future of Business, it has been tailored to the conference audience, so after a more general introduction on the driving forces of business, the presentation is really about the future of retail shopping precincts. Here are some of the points I will be making in my keynote.
Read more →

The implications of the new broader, flatter distribution of music taste

By

The distribution of music taste and consumption has shifted dramatically over the decade years, and will continue to evolve significantly in coming years.

Back before a dozen years ago, radio and MTV exposed people to a limited range of music from label playlists, and the cost of records and CDs made it hard to experiment with new music.

The first big change from that landscape was the widespread availability of online music downloads, which suddenly massively broadened the music libraries of the minority of people who were active downloaders, though didn’t give people an easy way of discovering music they liked that they hadn’t heard before.
Read more →

Qantas Business Radio: why crowdsourcing will drive the future of organizations

By

This month’s Qantas Business Radio has a technology focus, including interviews with Nick Leeder, Managing Director of Google Australia, Simon Hackett, Managing Director of Internode, Peter Williams, CEO of Deloitte Digital, Charis Palmer, Editor of Technology Spectator, Ian Hogg, CEO of FremantleMedia Australia, as well as myself.

There are some great insights in the various interviews, and if you’re not going to be on a Qantas flight you can listen to or download the interviews here, though I believe only until the end of August.

My interview was very broad-ranging: we spent some time discussing implications for organizations of a connected world including the role of crowdsourcing and the idea of the global brain, went on to look at how to use the iPad for work and why it is the first technology that is better than paper for many purposes, and finally when newspapers will become extinct around the world.
Read more →

Research: The acceleration of Australian banks’ use of social media

By

Financial services is one of the most industries in which the use of social media is the most relevant, not least because customer service is a critical differentiator between highly commoditized offerings. While financial services and banking were traditionally highly relationship-based, the shift to online has significantly eroded those relationships. Social media, used well, provides an opportunity to build relationships in a world in which most financial services are executed online.

In a global context, Australian banks were fairly slow to adopt the use of social media, however more recently a number have become a lot more active as they recognize its fundamental importance to their future.

Vindaya Senadheera, Prof. Matthew Warren, and Dr. Shona Leitch from Deakin University have done some interesting research in their paper A study on how Australian banks use social media.

To analyze the banks’ activity they use the Honeycomb framework of social media which was presented by Kietzmann et al in their paper Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media, which points to the key elements of social media engagement as Identity, Groups, Relationships, Presence, Sharing, Conversations, and Reputation.

Here are a few key points from the research

Twitter:

Read more →

Futurist conversations: Ross Dawson and Gerd Leonhard on the future of newspapers

By

Continuing our series of conversations between fellow-futurist Gerd Leonhard of The Futures Agency and myself, here is our session on the future of newspapers.

Here are a few notes from our conversation:
Read more →

Slides for Opening Keynote at Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit

By

Tomorrow morning I am giving the opening keynote, titled The Future of Living Networks and Organizations, at the Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit.

Here are my slides for the keynote. As always, the slides are intended to accompany my speech, not to stand alone, so are provided for people who are attending the event, or who like nice images :-) (though note the videos are not embedded).

Keynote: The Future of Living Networks and Organizations

View more presentations from rossdawson

If I get a chance later I’ll expand on some of the ideas from the keynote, but in the meantime here are a few of the core ideas:
Read more →

The role of informal social networks in building organizational creativity and innovation

By

For the last decade I have examined and applied social network analysis in and across organizations, for example in large professional firms, technology purchase decision-making, high-performance personal networks, and other applications.

The more time you spend with the analysis of social networks in organizations and those firms that have applied the techniques, the more evident the power of these approaches. In particular for high-performing organizations, applying social network analysis is one of the most useful tools in pushing value creation to the next level. This is evident in the California Management Review paper I co-authored on Managing Collaboration: Improving Team Effectiveness through a Network Perspective, in which we examined how to improve performance in sales, innovation, and execution.

Innovation is of course a particularly pointed issue today, with the increasing pace of external and industry change driving the necessity of effective, applied creativity. However this is often difficult in large, complex organizations.

To this point, the IBM Institute for Business Value has released a report on Cultivating organizational creativity in an age of complexity.

The report has some interesting insights and findings, including this chart of the opposites needing resolution in a creative organization.


Source: IBM Creative Leadership Report
Read more →

Futurist conversations: Thoughts on the future of television

By

Continuing our series of conversations between fellow futurist Gerd Leonhard and myself, here is our session on the future of television.

Here are a few of the ideas we share in the session:
Read more →

Reality mining, pervasive data capture, and how Big Data can create value

By

On Tuesday I gave the opening keynote on The Future of Information Infrastructure at the Implementing Information Infrastructure Symposium.

CIO magazine did a nice article titled IIIS: Big Data driving new trends which reviews my keynote and the one immediately after from Steve Duplessie, one of the world’s top analysts on data and storage. It says:

Speaking at the event, co-hosted by Storage Networking Industry Association A/NZ and Computerworld Australia, strategy advisor, author and futurist, Ross Dawson, said “reality mining” — the gathering of data based on the activities of people in a given environment — was a major trend to emerge out of, and contributor to, Big Data.

“If you look at an office environment there is an extraordinary amount of data to look at. For example, what gestures people are making, where are they looking, what conversations are they having, how much are they smiling when they speak to each other?” he said.

“You can literally get terabytes of data out of just a few hours of this. That data is being collected to drive productivity; to design new ways to enhance collaboration and create value inside organisations.”

Read more →

Futurist conversations: Ross Dawson and Gerd Leonhard on Open vs Closed Systems

By

Continuing our series of conversations between friend and fellow futurist Gerd Leonhard and myself, here are some discursive thoughts on open versus closed systems. Given this issue’s central role in virtually all business strategy today, we find that our clients are consistently asking us about how to think about and build strategies in this context.

Here are a few of the points we make in the video:
Read more →