[Find out more about Ross Dawson’s keynotes for the asset management industry]
Recently I was in Amsterdam for the International User Community Meeting of SimCorp, a leading provider of software for the investment management industry. I gave the keynote on the Future of Investment Management and ran a half-day Executive Master Class on Creating the Successful Organisation of the Future.
Prior to founding Advanced Human Technologies most of my working career had been in financial markets with Merrill Lynch and capital markets with Thomson Financial, with my final role as Global Director – Capital Markets.
My initial client base when I established my company was largely in financial services, and I began to focus on the investment management industry, for a number of reasons.
In the later 1990s my work and research was split between the fields of knowledge management and intellectual capital on the one hand, and futures methodologies such as scenario planning on the other.
I felt that one of the most important applications of our increasing understanding of intellectual capital was in asset management. Clearly information on non-financial indicators was often more important than historical financial data in making investment decisions, and I worked with a number of institutional investors on their efforts to value intangible assets of companies in which they were investing.
As I developed my expertise and experience in scenario planning, I saw there was an opportunity to apply scenario approaches to financial portfolio and risk management. I worked on applying qualitative scenario methodologies across several kinds of financial institutions, including asset managers and fund trustees.
In my book Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships, one of the key themes was that of adding value to client decision-making. Many of the case studies in the book examined how to enhance the cognitive and process aspects of financial portfolio decision-making, and I worked in applying that with a number of organizations, including the research departments of investment banks.
Having spent most of the last decade on broader issues such as the theme of living networks and examining the future of work, organizations, media, and government, it was a bit of a homecoming for me to speak at the SimCorp event.
Because I had not been deeply exposed to the industry for some time, in my keynote I spoke about high-level themes such as how changing information flows and distribution mechanisms are creating a wide variety of new opportunities in investment management.
Especially after running a highly interactive Executive Master Class with the most senior attendees at the conference, I found myself rather surprised to find that in fact the industry has changed very little over the last decade. Virtually the same issues – including talent, pricing, fee transparency, active vs. passive management, and distribution structures – are being discussed today.
There is a reasonable case to make that the investment management industry will change less than many others in years to come. The weight of capital to invest will inevitably increase, and there will be strong demand for capable fund management.
However there are certainly disruptions in store in investment management, and the industry currently hardly shines in its structural innovation. One of the speakers at the event noted that two-thirds of investment management firms ban social media in the workplace, a staggering statistic for companies that live off information flows.
In coming back to the industry I certainly see opportunities to help firms consider the future of the investment management industry, including identifying forthcoming disruptions and emerging opportunities.
I also see that there can be great value in applying what I have learned over the last decade and more in futures studies to the investment management process. I will be developing and sharing more content and ideas around the future of investment management in coming months.
Mobile and design are shifting to the center of technology and work
By Ross DawsonToday I am giving a keynote at the The Youth Festival of ICT (YITcon14) in Melbourne, with participation from over 1,000 students and young professionals.
The Australian newspaper yesterday featured an article titled Mobile exposes need for design skills, programming languages: Ross Dawson based on an interview with myself and Alan Patterson, CEO of the Australian Computer Society, which is organizing the conference.
The article begins: Read more →
It’s an attitude: Embracing the future
By Ross DawsonOn my RossDawson.com site I list some of the more popular topics for my keynote speeches.
Particularly for internal corporate events, one of the most popular themes is ‘Embracing the Future‘, in which I not only point to the dramatic shifts underway and the potential of the future, but show that the attitude of embracing those changes will bring the greatest personal opportunities.
I recently created a short video to help describe the main themes of the keynote, shown below.
Read more →
The focus of big data should be creating value FOR customers
By Ross DawsonBig Data is one of the hottest trends at the moment, as shown in this Google Trends chart below.
However much of the big data discussion is about how to market better to customers, gathering data ABOUT them so companies can sell more to them.
This seems to me to be the wrong way to think about it. Big data should be used to CREATE VALUE FOR CUSTOMERS. From that good things will flow to everyone, including of course attracting the most customers.
Read more →
The crime of the century: Stopping the potential of connectivity
By Ross DawsonRecently I gave the keynotes at the Sydney and Melbourne relaunch events of Nextgen Group, which has restructured and rebranded with the acquisition of 70% of the group by Ontario Teachers Pension Plan (OTPP) from Leighton Holdings. The group provides networks, data centers, and hosting services, including a 100Gbps link between major Australian cities, and is building a submarine fibre cable linking Australia to Singapore.
The theme of my keynote was The Future of a Connected World, showcasing some of most interesting implications and potential of connectivity.
To provide some context for the future I spent a moment looking at the past of connectivity, which unfortunately is not always as happy a story as the future. Following is a brief excerpt from my keynote speech:
One of the most important dates in our connected world was January 1, 1984, when the US communications monopoly AT&T was forcibly broken into 8 ‘Baby Bells’. In the following 12 years 44 state-owned telecommunications companies were privatized and exposed to competition for the first time.
Yet even after all of this deregulation and heightened competition it was still an enormously lucrative business.
In 1997 Qwest President and CEO Joseph P. Nacchio was quoted by BusinessWeek saying: “Long distance is still the most profitable business in America, next to importing illegal cocaine.”
The truth is that prior to 1990s connectivity pricing was insanely high relative to true costs, driven by a combination of national telecoms monopolies and excessive international exchange costs.
This was an extraordinary crime, holding humanity back from its potential.
People who were far from their family members could only afford to speak perhaps once a year, often trying to call on Christmas day for a few minutes but not getting through because the lines were jammed. The potential of human connection was cut off.
Businesses were severely constrained in being able to communicate with – or even set up – remote offices. Communication was often by mail, leading to massive lost opportunities on all fronts.
As new, cheaper communications technologies have emerged, telecoms firms in the main have tried to do all they can to maintain their super-normal profits, with a few last holdouts such as international roaming only now finally being normalized.
So fortunately, extortionate telecoms pricing is now largely history.
However, lest we forget, it was long an extraordinary crime holding back human potential.
Leadership in enterprise technology must come from all organizational functions
By Ross DawsonRecently I gave the opening keynote at SAP Australia Users Group Summit on Leadership in Enterprise Technology.
One of my central themes was that leadership in enterprise technology no longer resides just with the CIO and IT function.
The Future of the CIO is absolutely a critical frame, not least because I believe the CIO has primary responsibility for guiding boards of directors and top executive teams to understand the importance of technology in their organization’s future.
There is a divergence between organizations in which technology is being marginalized and treated as a commodity, and those in which its role at the heart of strategy, new business models, and value creation is recognized. The CIO must drive this recognition and the resulting investment.
Yet every leader and every organizational function – including HR, Marketing, Finance, Procurement, Sales, Supply Chain and more – also has the responsibility to shape the future of technology in the enterprise.
Technology is no longer just a support function. It is embedded into the core of almost every aspect of how organizations create value, internally and externally.
Each business function needs to build richer relationships with other internal functions and external capabilities. Just as organizations are shifting to create and tap value across broad business ecosystems, business functions need to widen their ambit and the scope of their value network.
From this technology-based opportunities for value creation become evident, along with an increasing recognition that executives from across the organization must provide leadership in shaping enterprise technology.
Certainly the CIO must be at the heart of shaping the role of IT, but they must increasingly be a channel and conduit for energy and insight across the organization in tapping the potential of technology.
Exploring the future of investment management
By Ross Dawson[Find out more about Ross Dawson’s keynotes for the asset management industry]
Recently I was in Amsterdam for the International User Community Meeting of SimCorp, a leading provider of software for the investment management industry. I gave the keynote on the Future of Investment Management and ran a half-day Executive Master Class on Creating the Successful Organisation of the Future.
Prior to founding Advanced Human Technologies most of my working career had been in financial markets with Merrill Lynch and capital markets with Thomson Financial, with my final role as Global Director – Capital Markets.
My initial client base when I established my company was largely in financial services, and I began to focus on the investment management industry, for a number of reasons.
In the later 1990s my work and research was split between the fields of knowledge management and intellectual capital on the one hand, and futures methodologies such as scenario planning on the other.
I felt that one of the most important applications of our increasing understanding of intellectual capital was in asset management. Clearly information on non-financial indicators was often more important than historical financial data in making investment decisions, and I worked with a number of institutional investors on their efforts to value intangible assets of companies in which they were investing.
As I developed my expertise and experience in scenario planning, I saw there was an opportunity to apply scenario approaches to financial portfolio and risk management. I worked on applying qualitative scenario methodologies across several kinds of financial institutions, including asset managers and fund trustees.
In my book Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships, one of the key themes was that of adding value to client decision-making. Many of the case studies in the book examined how to enhance the cognitive and process aspects of financial portfolio decision-making, and I worked in applying that with a number of organizations, including the research departments of investment banks.
Having spent most of the last decade on broader issues such as the theme of living networks and examining the future of work, organizations, media, and government, it was a bit of a homecoming for me to speak at the SimCorp event.
Because I had not been deeply exposed to the industry for some time, in my keynote I spoke about high-level themes such as how changing information flows and distribution mechanisms are creating a wide variety of new opportunities in investment management.
Especially after running a highly interactive Executive Master Class with the most senior attendees at the conference, I found myself rather surprised to find that in fact the industry has changed very little over the last decade. Virtually the same issues – including talent, pricing, fee transparency, active vs. passive management, and distribution structures – are being discussed today.
There is a reasonable case to make that the investment management industry will change less than many others in years to come. The weight of capital to invest will inevitably increase, and there will be strong demand for capable fund management.
However there are certainly disruptions in store in investment management, and the industry currently hardly shines in its structural innovation. One of the speakers at the event noted that two-thirds of investment management firms ban social media in the workplace, a staggering statistic for companies that live off information flows.
In coming back to the industry I certainly see opportunities to help firms consider the future of the investment management industry, including identifying forthcoming disruptions and emerging opportunities.
I also see that there can be great value in applying what I have learned over the last decade and more in futures studies to the investment management process. I will be developing and sharing more content and ideas around the future of investment management in coming months.
Innovation and future-proofing in mid-tier firms: The central role of CFOs
By Ross DawsonLast week I gave the keynote on Future-Proofing Your Organization at a function organized by American Express to launch their very interesting American Express CFO Future-proofing Survey.
There were many interesting insights in the report, with many media outlets picking up that 45% of CFOs of Australian mid-tier firms believe their company is at risk of failure in the next 3-5 years if innovation is not prioritized.
Some of the main themes coming from the qualitative research are shown in this graphic from the report:
Source: American Express CFO Future-proofing Survey
Read more →
Slides: Future of Business: Crowds and Sharing Economy
By Ross DawsonI am at Innovation Partnership Program, a three-day executive education program in Silicon Valley for senior executives from Fortune 100 companies, done as a joint venture between Singularity University and XPrize.
It is an exceptional program providing a deep dive into the exponential technologies driving change, including AI, robotics, crowds, 3D manufacturing, medicine, genetics, computing, digital finance and the strategic implications for enterprise.
I presented the session on crowds on the first day, providing a big picture overview of crowds, crowdsourcing and the sharing economy.
My slides are below. As always, they are not intended to be meaningful for those who did not attend the presentation, but may still be useful to others.
Read more →
The new layer of the economy enabled by M2M payments in the Internet of Things
By Ross DawsonLast week I gave a keynote on The Future of Banking to a group of the most senior risk leaders in a major bank, sharing some provocative ideas on how the banking landscape may change in the years to come.
One of the ideas I shared briefly was on how micro-payments between connected devices could enable an entirely new layer of the economy.
Read more →
Launch of Social Media Strategy Framework in Arabic
By Ross DawsonWhen we first released our Social Media Strategy Framework, the response was so strong that it ended up being translated into 12 languages.
At the time we did want to translate it into Arabic, however this proved difficult as it requires the Middle East version of Illustrator; most versions of Adobe CS do not support Arabic text. Fortunately we were recently approached with an offer to do a translation into Arabic, supported by the NGO Internews.
When I recently did the keynote at Arab Media World in Dubai on Creating the Future of Arab Media I noted that one of the defining aspects of Arab media is the exceptional uptake of social media in a number of Arab countries, by some measures the highest in the world.
As such the social media familiarity gap between users on the one hand and companies and governments on the other is extremely high. Hopefully this framework will prove useful. As always feel free to pass on the framework to those who might find it useful.
Click on the framework image to see the full pdf.