Meeting of the Minds: Key future trends with Ross Dawson and Gerd Leonhard

By

When I was in Switzerland recently, esteemed colleague Gerd Leonhard and I recorded a number of video conversations, produced by Jonathan Marks. Following ones on Big Data, the future of privacy, and the future of Switzerland, here is our conversation on Key future trends.

For more conversations about the future see Meeting of the Minds.

After discussing some of the major trends, we go on to discuss our own preferred futures.

Trends and implications that we raise and discuss in the video include:
Read more →

Citizen sourcing and the future of cities

By

As I noted last week in my post on Four fundamental principles for crowdsourcing in government, one of the most powerful applications of crowdsourcing is in government.

PSFK has just launched a nice report and summary presentation on the future of cities, embedded below.

The third section of the report covers Citizen Sourced aspects of the future of cities, including:
Read more →

How technology is enabling the humanity of organizations

By

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.
Read more →

As more jobs are automated, how many of us will still have productive work?

By

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.
Read more →

Launch of CIO of the Future

By

Advanced Human Technologies is, among other things, a publisher. To complement our existing ventures and publications, we have been building the platform and capabilities to generate more web publications and soon, more books and reports.

The general theme of our publications is the future, or in some cases what we need to do today to be successful in the future.

The first of our new phase of publications is CIOoftheFuture.com, looking at where the Chief Information Officer role is going.

CIOoftheFuture_500w
Read more →

Leadership in enterprise technology must come from all organizational functions

By

This morning 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.
Read more →

The crime of the century: stopping the potential of connectivity

By

Last week 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.
Read more →

Meeting of the Minds with Gerd Leonhard: The implications of Big Data

By

My futurist colleague Gerd Leonhard and I have highly complementary perspectives, so we are finding increasing interest in engaging us together for executive sessions.

When Gerd was in Sydney two years ago we created a series of videos together. After I recently did a keynote in Interlaken, Switzerland, I visited Gerd at his home in Basel where we did another series of videos for his Meeting of the Minds project. Here is the first one in the series, on Big data.

Just a few of the points we cover in our conversation:
Read more →

The democratization of creativity: the most important aspect is greater human expression

By

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.
Read more →

How soaring expectations of beauty are shaping technology and society

By

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.

iMac

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.
Read more →