3G 4G 5G Anyone?

Earlier this month, during London Tech Week a large sector of the telecommunications industry was keen to promote what is happening with the emerging 5G standard and the various pilots and technology trials being conducted to demonstrate what you can do with faster, less latent mobile networks and increased capacity. Everyone was keen to show how it makes wide scale implementation of IoT with billions of devices possible.

Meanwhile in the real world, Virgin is busy implementing its own 4G network freeing itself from its historical dependence upon EE's infrastructure. This is obviously a huge investment and critical to its future operations. So it is a pity that the roll out to customers has been so poor. The standard letter provides simple instructions, which when followed leaves many Virgin customers without a working mobile 'phone. My wife's experience has been that it left her phone unable to receive phone calls or text messages, although she could send texts and make calls. This is not good if you rely on your mobile for business as she does. Anyway, on phoning Virgin, she was told that she had not registered the SIM card which Virgin had sent her. She was then told she would have to wait until Monday (from Friday lunch time) for the SIM registration to take effect. One has to ask, why Virgin did not pre-register the cards when they were sent out. BTW, I also received a card from Virgin because I am upgrading from 3G to the new 4G network and was told that my card was not registered either. Requiring every single customer to contact Virgin at more or less the same time to register a SIM must be a major implementation bottleneck and the result of a poorly thought out implementation plan. Let's hope that the coverage of the new network is good. As I live in a village where traditionally only EE's network worked well.

Moving on from the parochial to the transatlantic, I have to thank Adam Stead, from Nimbus Ninety, for pointing out the Elon Musk and the Farting Unicorn story from the Guardian, in his weekly news letter. This is a truly funny farce which could have been avoided. Hopefully he reaches an amicable and mutually satisfying arrangement with the other protagonist, who is complaining about alleged breaches of his artistic copyright.

In the meantime, I have put my money where my mouth is and bought a Dreem headset, to see if it really will deliver the promised enhancement to my sleep patterns. Once I have a few weeks, apparently 5 weeks is the period over which I should notice this, I shall report back in another blog.

Capitalism 5.0

Recent events in Europe have created turmoil in EU politics as populism has trumped old style party politics. The same could be said for America where Trump's emergence has ended the series of ever blander presidents being elected not on any particular inspirational message, but a war of personality based attrition. Political commentators and party traditionalists have condemned this as "dumbing down" whilst failing to admit that this is a natural expression of democracy by people who are fed up with leaders who don't stand for anything (except political power for its own sake) and don't address their real needs.

So what does this have to do with a digital blog? well it's just that social media has had a lot to do with it, Opinions, information, propaganda and "false news" have flown freely, and the people have spoken. Though, even now, the career politicians in Europe and America are refusing to understand the message.

Successful digital businesses, however, should understand. The way in which they conduct business, their ethical principles and even the way in which they treat their people affect their long term survival and thrival, as a digital business model makes it many times more easy to attract new customers but also so much more easy to lose them. Retention rates are many times lower in the digital world, once a business loses its reputation. The agility necessary to enable continuous innovation also relies on an internally collaborative culture, which can only be built in an atmosphere of trust.

This leads me to ponder on the future nature of capitalism. Its history could be divided into a number of generations:

I - Feudal - characteristic of traditional kingdoms and empires, where trade was dependent upon the rights granted by rulers and the exchange of cash (gold, silver etc.). Capitalism is fundamentally based upon the shortage of resources.

II - Banking - characteristic of the emergence of international banking with Lombardian Jewelers in England, The Knights Templar across Europe and medieval jewish money men are often portrayed as typical sterotypes of this era, although Italians also invented modern accountancy to ensure probity of books and other networks evolved in deifferent parts of the world. Paper money and bills of exchange, formation of limited liability companies and early forms of future's trading encouraged investment, credit and risk taking which stimulated commerce and drove the need for more people to be educated as an enabler for commerce.

III - Unfettered Greed - driven by agricultural and industrial revolutions as well as post enlightenment science, the Georgian and Victorian eras saw massive growth in the world economy, accompanied by exploitative labour and employment conditions, as well as the emergence of a familiar regular cycle of economic boom and bust. During this period Adam Smith invented economics and the concept of the invisible hand of the market, Karl Marx predicted the eventual evolution of an egalitarian style of communist society and the death of capitalism, and at the same time that many entrepreneurs were tainted with accusations of ruthlessness, corruption and oppression.

IV - Regulation and Globalisation - driven by successive technological revolutions and the social impacts of successive world wars and major regional conflicts, democracy and other forms of social representation over turned many traditional forms of government, whilst surviving governments had to evolve to adapt to new pressures. Money was decoupled from the gold standard to become just information or life's brownie points and regulation was introduced into most markets. At the same time, many "free trade areas" have evolved and electronic money transfer and business trading has facilitated increasingly global operation. Iain Banks, a Sci Fi author, predicted the emergence of a society like "The Culture" in which money has disappeared, AI entities have the same legal status as human beings and live alongside them, and critical resources are assigned for investment according to the governing council's prioritisation of survival and expansion needs, as all other resources are treated as almost infinite due to the capabilities of advanced technology to mine the universe and recycle them. Business Leaders started to recognise that quality and lean principles are more important than managing by just efficiency and volume to meet arbitrary financial targets, and that positive empowerment of employees and customer care improves company performance. 

 V - Digital - We are now at the beginning of the digital era of capitalism. Cash as coins and notes is increasingly disappearing. In many countries, banks are being sidestepped by exchange of money between electronic wallets. Digital business models unfetter innovation and encourage a focus on customer experience, whilst design thinking replaces functional thinking in product design to focus on customer needs and emotional attachment to products. The business of the future has to be ethical, nurture its employees, build an innovative and collaborative culture, anticipate future regulation and build capabilities to accommodate it into its products, and to continuously adapt. There are some questions about what happens with money. will crypto currencies replace money for some or all transactions. Will companies have to track and report "customer mentions" in social media as part of their regulatory accounting and reporting? as there will be a linkage between positive awareness and sales, and therefore value. Have companies now become at the mercy of customers and the general populace at large? Are we knocking at the limits of the current system if society cannot expand beyond the confines of a single planet with significant sustainability issues? Will there be a fork in capitalism? some companies do things which are not that subject to consumer or customer pressure; these companies could become the dumping ground for old style antediluvian management practices. To date Capitalism has been based on the assumption that money and resources are scarce. The future of Capitalism will be a hybrid of hybrid of resource restricted products and information products which are unrestricted and have very low marginal costs.

So this just leads to speculation about what happens between Generation V of capitalism and the Banksian projection of a Post Marxian view of the evolution of society and capitalism. Getting off the planet and colonising the solar system with current technology is extremely resource heavy and expensive. Either a new form of economics and treatment of money is needed to make this feasible or we face the risk of colonists being treated almost like bondsmen or slaves due to the high debts which would be incurred in sending them off planet. As this could be linked to future sustainability of Earth's population, Some imagination may be needed.

The Renaissance of the City State - Digitally of Course

This week is London Tech Week, a series of co-ordinated and themed events aimed at promoting London's place in the Digital World. So the week was kicked off with a talk by Sadiq Khan (Mayor of London) at the Francis Crick Institute (Crick was one of the pioneers in DNA research) where he spoke about London's "leading position in AI"; apparently London has 745 AI focused companies, which is more than twice the number in Paris and Berlin combined. He also spoke about his ambitions for London to become the world's leading smart city, which will obviously be a challenge given the competition from Bangalore, Singapore, China in general and quite a few American cities even before some unexpected contenders such as Moscow are taken into account.

Yesterday TechXLR8 kicked off as one of the major combined exhibition and conference events, combining a huge number of themes: IoT, VR/AR, Cloud, DevOps, a platform for small start ups (known as project Kairos) as well as pretty much smart everything or SmartX. TechXLT8's theme this year is "changemakers" across technology, business and society and the opening talks were quite focused on the national and smart city impacts coming.

So Greg Williams (Editor-in-Chief of Wired) mentioned that 13 of Europe's 47 or so Unicorns (digital companies worth more than $1Bn) are based in Britain. Gavin Patterson (the outgoing CEO of BT) emphasised how BT is preparing to invest in the next new wave of connectivity infrastructure such as FTTP, 5G and quantum key networks with pilots for 5G and quantum key networks having just been announced. This investment is aimed at keeping Britain as the "leading digitally enabled nation" in the world.

Juliet Bauer, Chief Digital Officer for NHS England, discussed the recently published Digital Roadmap for the NHS and how this should drive a revolution in the way in which citizens access and receive treatment from the NHS as well as a shift towards greater prevention of health problems before they become serious.

Paul Copping, Chief Innovation Officer for Greenwich, discussed some of the challenges for cities moving to a Smart City model and the architectural issues around defining what a "City Digital Platform" really looks like and some of the questions around the blurring of lines between local city  authority provided services and private digital service providers, especially with respect to access methods. He also discussed issues of future integration and interoperability between adjacent metropolitan areas and how to marry architecture with public procurement processes. Though what he did not mention was the need to deliver iteratively in small chunks and experiment to continuously fine tune solutions before investing too much or how to abstract changing technical standards within service wrappers to deal with obsolescence across the long time frames needed to implement anything at this scale.

Colin Rhys, VP Virgin Hyperloop for Middle East & Asia, spoke about how Hyperloop could make commuting distances such as London to Edinburgh on a daily basis quite feasible, extending the footprint of cities outwards. His tag line "live in the forest, work in the city" offers the prospect that digital enablement plus fast transport means that the "virtual city" of the future will spread far beyond the natural physical boundaries of a cities geography and extend almost like a virtual state into the rest of the country or continent in which it is located. This has implications far beyond the traditional turf wars between metropolitan and rural councils over "who owns whom" for the purpose of local taxation and implies that all these councils need to collaborate more effectively for collective good. This means that we need to rethink socially our ideas about cities and rural communities and address a whole host of issues around community identity, legal frameworks, representation, pooing of investment and resources, as well as how to deliver the grand scheme that a Smart City is base upon.

Way of DAU Release 2

Release 2 of the Way of DAU has been released via Amazon and is available as a printed version here  and as an electronic version here. 

This takes into account feedback received for the MVP version and is now in a handier physical paper format.

I would like to thank everyone who took the time to provide comments and feedback.

The LinkedIn discussion forum can be found here if anyone has any constructive comments, suggestions or criticisms to help refine the next release of the book.

The Chief Data Officer

Many organisations are experimenting with the concept of a Chief Data Officer. Although according to Raconteur most are struggling with the concept as well as making headway with the concept of managing data for value.

It seems that there are a number of problems:

• Business Understanding of the Role and Data Issues;
• Resourcing, Funding and Provisioning Data Initiatives;
• Current Starting Points for many Businesses with Poor Data Quality;
• Focusing too much on compliance and not enough on Value.

Personally, I would suggest that there is a value staircase for Data Management starting with Compliance and Protection on the Bottom Rung and then progressing through Quality, Integration, Sourcing (external data feeds), Insight & Intelligence to Adaptive Control (involving use of machine learning, experimentation and up to the minute data feeds to optimise control).

It is difficult howver to obtain value if a business tries to progressively work its way upwards through this staircase if it attempts to do everything in the first one before attempting the next step. The scope is too wide. Instead busnesses need to prioritise a business problem or opportunity and address a vertical slice down this value staircase to deliver value quickly. Progression can be achieved by addressing the next opportunities and reviewing what is needed in each step to improve overall capability as each increment is implemented.

However, probably the biggest issue is the role. What is the difference between a CIO, a Chief Digital Officer, a CTO, a CSO, a Principal Data Archiect and a Chief Data Officer? These all overlap and are often confused in scope. Many businesses are handing the Chief Digital Officer role back to the CIO, so it may be time to do the same with the Chief Digital Officer, because if they are separated the CIO's role is hollowed out to just look at the plumbing and not the value to the business.

It is also important to delegate data quality and integrity to business managers responsible for exploiting data in their day-to-day operations. IT may provide the policy framework, tools and measurement framework for managing data quality, but line management needs to take responsibility and include data quality in their personal objectives, just like they do with budgets. Otherwise value will never be achieved.