After my recent opening keynote at the SAP Australia User Group Summit on Leadership in Enterprise Technology, I did a video interview for Inside SAP magazine, shown below.
The full transcript of the interview is available on our new publication CIO of the Future.
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A few weeks ago I gave the keynote at the annual conference of the Business Improvement and Innovation in Government (BIIG) network of the Queensland Government, speaking on A Future of Crowds: Implications for Government and Society.
I have been increasingly pulled towards the government sector over the last years. I’m delighted, as changing the nature and structure of government is one of the most important aspects possible in creating a better future for ourselves.
In my keynote, after describing the underlying tenets of crowdsourcing and giving a varied set of examples of how they can be applied in government (which I’ll share in another post), in my final section on leadership I ran through the practical issues that drive success and finally offered four principles for crowdsourcing in government.
Here are the four principles in summary:
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There has been a lot of press the last few days about a paper The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?, published by the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology.
Almost all the coverage has been on the headline figure that 47% of US employment is at risk. However the paper provides many more interesting insights when you examine the detail.
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There is a big hubbub today over a New York Times article N.S.A. Gathers Data on Social Connections of U.S. Citizens.
I fail to understand why this is big news, since US intelligence agencies have been using social network analysis (SNA) for domestic purposes since the 1990s, and likely even before that. The only issue here is that the NSA is tasked with non-domestic surveillance, so is not supposed to gather data on US citizens. However other US agencies that cover domestic intelligence have long been using SNA.
Certainly recent revelations suggest the NSA appears to have data surveillance capabilities that exceed those of US domestic intelligence agencies, but there is no good reason to imagine the CIA, among others, doesn’t have access to equally good data to seed its social network and other analysis.
I have been focused on networks since long before I wrote Living Networks in 2002. In the July 22, 1997 issue of The Bulletin (at the time Australia’s equivalent of Newsweek) included an article I wrote titled Beware! Netmap may be watching, which described how an Australian software package called Netmap was being used by police and intelligence around the world, taking examples of the identification of insider trading and a serial murderer. I wrote:
“For nearly 10 years, Netmap has been used primarily in high-level security and intelligence analysis. In Australia clients include the NSW Police… and the Australia Tax Office, while in the United States, several secretive government agencies use the software.”
When I was recently visiting Switzerland to deliver a keynote on the future of work my colleague Gerd Leonhard and I recorded a series of video conversations that are featured in his Meeting of the Minds series.
Following our conversations on the implications of Big Data and the future of privacy, here is our dialogue on the future of Switzerland.
While I haven’t spent a lot of time in Switzerland recently, I lived there for 13 years in my childhood, so do have experiences and perspectives to bring to bear on the topic.
Here are some of the issues we discuss in the video:
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A very interesting global survey title The Professional Revolution has just been released by Thomson Reuters (Disclosure: I long ago worked for its predecessor Thomson Financial as Global Director – Capital Markets).
The report uncovers a number of very interesting insights into professionals and professional work. One of the most interesting is the differences between emerging market and developed market professionals.
The most interesting statistics from the report, shown below, show emerging market professionals demonstrating clear leadership in creating the future of professional work.
Source of all charts is the report The Professional Revolution.
Emerging market professionals are substantially more entrepreneurial than their developed market counterparts, wanting to drive change and initiatives, and preferring a competitive environment. They also recognize there is no conflict between competition and collaboration, and that collaborative work is the essence of professional growth and work satisfaction.
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When I was recently in Stockholm my friend Magnus Linkvist introduced me to Einar Bodström of House of Radon, a young and innovative production company that is exploring the possibilities of online video.
Much of the group’s work is commercial, including recent TV ads for Electrolux and Sainsbury’s, and a series of 20 minute videos on the future for Ericsson, notably including the excellent The Future of Learning, Networked Society.
However House of Radon also likes to create interesting videos for their own sake, and is perhaps best known for PressPausePlay, an 80 minute film available for free online, which explores the recent extraordinary democratization of creativity enabled by technology, and the implications. It’s embedded below, well worth taking the time to watch.
The narrative is told through a series of interviews with fascinating creators, including Moby, Seth Godin, Robyn, and many others.
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One of the consistent themes in my Future of Work framework is the polarization of work and value.
In a number of the keynotes and workshops I’ve run recently, including at the Richmond Financial Services Forum in Interlaken, the Institute of Chartered Accountants conference in Melbourne, and for the executive teams of various corporate clients, I’ve pointed to research from noted labor economist David Autor that brings into focus what is happening.
Source: The Polarization of Job Opportunities in the U.S. Labor Market, David Autor
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For over a decade I have been working with various facets of the idea of Global Innovation Networks: connections around the world that facilitate new endeavors.
Innovation always stems from diverse connections between ideas and people. Bringing in different viewpoints from around the world necessarily provides more opportunities for the new. Moreover, in the many stages of the innovation process there are almost certainly points where resources or capabilities from other countries can create better outcomes.
In my travels I have often seen how national and ethnic diaspora have been at the heart of the connections between nations. The TiE network began in Silicon Valley as The Indus Entrepreneurs, with innovators from the Indian subcontinent creating an organization that is now well and truly global, facilitating connections not just between Indians but also people of any nationality.
Source: The Economist
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I recently travelled to Provence in the hills above Nice to give the keynote at the annual EuroCIO conference.
I used my framework for the future of the CIO to point to the macro drivers of change in technology and society, and how these are shaping the technology function in organizations, and in turn the role of the CIO.
The single most important shift in society is that we expect more on just about every front that we can imagine. We expect more in everything around us, in terms of excellence in quality and service, opportunity for ourselves and our children, flexibility in our work, and openness and transparency from business and government.
We also expect beauty.
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