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.

Digital Reputation Is All

In some of my early posts, I likened Digital Disrupters to Vikings, in terms of being fast moving, launching asymmetrical market attacks and continuously changing their angle of attack to pursue value, whilst using light weight tools, agility and simple instrumentation to facilitate this. 

Latterly, I have been stressing reputation, which was important to vikings too. In fact some people would say that a Viking's name and reputation were more important to him (or her) than gold and land. As they wanted their reputations to last for ever and reputation was a strong means for recruiting a band of warriors for the next viking voyage or raid.

In the digital world, reputation is important to digital enterprises, becasue customer loyalty is much more volatile than with traditional businesses and a whole new set of organisations are embracing Customer Care (CC) as well as Customer Experience (CX) in what could be termed C2X. I touch on this in my book ( The Way of DAU ). If culture eats strategy for breakfast, then loss of reputation destroys company value for lunch. A strong digital brand should have a positive and engaging reputation based on positive values.

A recent story about Cloudflare in Wired, is a salutary lesson about reputation and proactive reputation management. For those of you who don't know about Cloudflare, it provides a cloud service for intermediating and absorbing DDoS attacks. It does this by sitting between a cloud service and its users and sampling traffic to detect patterns associated with DDoS attacks and filtering out any DDoS transactions against the service.

The founder & CEO, Mathew Prince, takes a strong stand on Freedom of Speech so is happy to provide services to some organisations which many may find distasteful. Interestingly enough early experience with escort services in Turkey showed that learning to protect a service which many people attack, actually improved the overall capability of the DDoS service to defend against similar attacks against more innocent targets.

Cloudflare relied on simply stating its position and liberal principles which are enshrined in the American Constitution. Unfortunately this was not enough and providing services one particular Neo Nazi organisation began to lead to a snow ball of assaults on Cloudflare's reputation, until the CEO felt compelled to take action and modify their stance on what protecting free speech actually meant for the company, leading to the banning of this particular customer.

This goes to show that reputations have to be actively managed and part of this is continuing review of an organisation's ethical stance as well as actual customer experience is essential; something which might be termed Ethics Sustainability, Customer Care and Experience (ESC2X), with the accronym pronounced Essex, redefining the old joke about someone with a lisping estuary accent saying that "Ethics isn't a place East of London".

At the same time, many other people and organisations are beginning to question what free speech should mean on the web. To my mind, with freedom comes responsibility, as I define freedom as the right to make your own decisions and mistakes, and not to have them imposed upon you. This is a two way deal. In the Cloudflare example, the Neo Nazi organisation appears to have gone beyond free speech to threaten and bully people, as well as slander the leadership of Cloudflare by implying that they were sympathisers to their ideology. So they broke the free speech contract and deserved to be kicked off Cloudflare's service. Cloudflare probably needed to encourage more debate about their stance and code, as part of their overall leadership practices.