Smart Gardens Take the Cool Award

Last week was an interesting week in many ways. Intel and Juniper announced that Singapore was leading the way in Smart City adoption, beating 19 other advanced adopters. One of the more interesting statistics was around how much time lost to congestion can be saved. Average figures suggested that over 80% of the time lost to congestion can be freed up by using Smart City technology to manage traffic flows better. Whilst this is interesting to motorists in the UK as town planned continue to persecute them with more and more "traffic calming" measures such as speed bumps, lights, constrictions in road width etc. it is also good news for those interested in urban health. Less congestion equals less emissions as well as a lower carbon footprint.

Moving on from this, India was identified as the leading Asian country for cashless money adoption, driven by widespread electronic purse adoption on phones in a country where many people don't have bank accounts.

Meanwhile in London, Cloud Expo returned to Excel with its partner exhibitions. This was definitely more interesting than last year (which had been a disappointment following the great show 2 years ago). It was noticeable that a wider set of companies are now offering global services with a first appearance (that I am aware of) from China telecom. there were more companies looking at clod orchestration and Oracle was making its pitch for differentiation from the mainstream service vendors such a Azure (Microsoft), AWS (Amazon) and GCS (Google) by featuring its cloud DNS services and Systems Management as a Service. The latter being apparently multi-platform for hetergeneous technologies and offering an automated and intelligent Machine Learning capability to features normally associated with companies such as Splunk.

The coolest show stealer however was on the diminutive stand for Gartenzwerg. Gartenzwerg offers an indoor automated gardening kit which uses smart technology to control lights, watering, temperature and pH. This apparently enables you to grow things all the year round and at 3 times the normal rate of growth. So you can have all the herbs, chillies etc. that you want. Anyway, in the stark and quite sterile ambience of a trade show, the luscious and colourful display was a verdant knock out.

Is HR Ready for the New Digital World?

One of the features of the future is that we are really bad at predicting it, So much so that we react late and often have problems catching up with the present. This translates into the essential behaviour of a Digital Enterprise of adaptivity. Since a Digital as Usual business needs to constantly innovate to stay ahead of the competition and innovation itself is fraught with missteps and corrections, resulting in the need for agility, design thinking and the need to know when to "pivot in the market".

At the same time Millennials apparently want to design work life around themselves, desiring to work flexibly, perhaps on several different jobs at once, whilst industry analysts who should know better are forecasting the end of jobs as AI robots automate everyone out of a job.

Anyone who has ever worked with a robot, knows that they need a lot of input to become effective and their flexibility is limited. AI bots are just as bad. They need a lot of teaching, can be fooled and have problems adapting quickly.

As I have argued in previous posts, AI and Machine learning fills a gap in process automation to help people become more productive and focus on higher quality work. so the nature of jobs may change, and some new types of jobs may be introduced, but in the end there will still be jobs.

So it was interesting to see this opinion confirmed by a recent survey by Willis Towers Watson which reinforced this opinion. What was most telling is the opinion that less than 5% of businesses believe that their HR functions are ready for this challenge. The have not anticipated the future and are having problems catching up with the present. At the same time, these businesses believe that they will be shifting more and more to contingent working with flexible contractors performing an increasingly important role in their work-forces. So perhaps the Millennial Dream will come to pass, but probably not in the way that we anticipate now.  

UK Viewpoint on Digital Trends

At this time of year, Nimbus Ninety publishes its annual survey report on digital trends. What's nice about this is that not only do they provide a UK only perspective on the marketplace, but some of their commentary is contributed by leading practitioners, rather than consultants or journalists.

Anyway, this year shows strong themes around AI as the big disrupter and big data as the continuing big focus of spend. Predictably enough, Blockchain has moved into the picture as one of the future technologies of interest for disrupting business, just leapfrogging IoT by a single percentage point. Cyber defence technology remains one of the top disrupters too.

Culture is still cited as one of the big barriers to success identified by participants. This echoes a concern cited in this month's PM Today magazine that 51% of UK IT Leaders are struggling to secure boardroom consensus on digital transformation objectives (source: Interoute sponsored research).

Overall businesses are driven mainly by the need to meet customer expectations and improve customer interactions, whilst improving the speed and efficiency of processes. Only a third of businesses seem to be thinking about re-inventing their business model, which is still a large number but suggest that many businesses are still thinking short term about what Digital is about. Although half are pursuing Digital to enter new markets or develop new products. 

Put together this suggests that too many businesses are taking a departmental or functional approach to implementing digital and have not got into the One Team One Strategy approach needed for successful and sustainable Digital Evolution into Digital As Usual Businesses.

Interestingly enough though, the survey's respondents seem to rate fear of internet giants entering their markets much greater than fear of new entrants or startups. This mirrors the recently emerging consensus that digital markets tend to favour those who have already built scale, such as the big platform based businesses, e.g. Amazon.

Cyber Defence Gains Traction

Whilst the spotlight has been upon implementing GDPR in Europe, things have not been standing still elsewhere.

Singapore has passed a new Cyber Security Bill. This has many positive aspects as it appoints a National CISO to oversee and coordinate measures to protect critical national infrastructure. It also contains important requirements regarding accepted best practice, a duty to report incidents and enables the CISO's staff to investigate and demand standards based improvements.

This does not come a moment too soon as a recent report from AT Kearney and Cisco ( Cybersecurity in ASEAN: An Urgent Call to Action ) indicates that Cyber Security spending in ASEAN countries is at half the global average (0.07% of GDP cf. 0.13%) and much less than European or North American Countries which are typically at around the 0.2 - 0.3% mark.

So for global organisations, now is the time to make sure that their cyber measures are up to standard so that they can contine to operate safely and legally on a global basis.

Redefining Performance with Smart Cities

One of the key things that a successful Digital Business Needs to Do is to identify meaningful Strategic KPIs which focus on value based outcomes for both it and its customers. Then all opportunities and activities should address how they move KPI scores in the right direction.

Traditional metrics such as revenue, productivity and profit tend to miss the mark. If they don't include customer experience and quality based aspects, e.g. Customer orders shipped correctly within N hours, then they are unlikely to drive improvement and sustainable growth of the enterprise.

This lesson is beginning to be learnt even in the area of Smart Cities where to date the focus has been more driven by what the technology could do and arbirary efficiency measures than providing better value to local residents.

However, Barcelona, one of Europe's leading cities for technology adoption, has started to put citizens first. In the words of Barcelona's CTO and Digital Commissioner, "we reversed the paradignm completely". Barcelona now puts citizens needs and policy objectives first. The city is also focusing on aligning data capture and information with these needs, for better informed decision making.

On the other side of the globe, in Adelaide, the CIO's team interviewed citizens and created an "emotional storyboard" to present to city leaders before agreeing objectives for their initiative.

At the same time, in America city administrations pursuing a Smart City approach have also learnt about the need to be collaborative as witnessed in recent comments from the CTO for Washington DC. "Being Collaborative is the hardest thing to do".

Whilst here in the UK, Huawei rates Bristol as the Leading City in Smart City implementation out of 20 assessed. Bristol's approach has been 3 pronged based on:

• Collaboration not just within the council but with partners and industry sectors;
• Community engagement to keep citizens central to the value of investments;
• Keeping it real so that value and savings are balanced, enabling further improvements.

Asia's Digital Dragons

Asia's Digital Appetite

According to experts in McKinsey, Asia is grabbing the opportunities available from digital to try and leapfrog traditional economic leaders in the west and compensate for historic lack of investment in infrastructure. They single out India, Indonesia and China as the countries with the most energetic approaches and the most innovation. They cite greater appetite for social media take up and openess to mobile and other new technologies as drivers to greater innovation.

This position is supported by Gartner's identification of Asia's 10 leading digital disruptors:

• Tencent
• AliBaba
• Baidu
• Ant Financial
• JD.com
• DiDi
• Xiaomi
• Yahoo Japan
• Naver
• Lufax

The interesting fact about this list is that it is dominated by Consumer oriented businesses. B2B opportunities are yet to be exploited. Even so, the power house that is AliBaba is reputed to dwarf western giants such as Amazon. So Asia is currently playing to its numbers and culture to establish scale.

Garnter recommends that western enterprises operating in Asia should consider adopting local platforms to guarantee penetration and better customer experience in Asian Markets.

Future Digital Directions in Asia

A recent survey of global CIOs by Logicalis showed that CIOs in the Asia Pacific area have been disappointed by slow progress overall in adopting digital business models. Like CIOs in other parts of the world they have seen typical barriers such as Organisational Culture, Scale of Investment, Legacy Infrastructure, Skills and Security holding them back.

However, overall they are typically planning to address them with moves to simplify and modernise infrastructure, work closely with other business colleagues to address specific opportunities, improve training, invest in culture change and generally increase security investments.

In doing so, they are preparing to lead change and more B2B services are likely to emerge, balancing Asia's digital economy.

What's Your Weakness?

Techworld recently published details on 29 of the worst security incidents to have affected UK residents in recent years. (The title actually says 31, but one incident appears to be duplicated and one really is not an incident).

Looking at this, there are no Denial of Service incidents or ransomware attacks in this class. Almost half of all attacks can be attributed to straight forward hacking. The rest come down to sloppy or inadequate management and administration.

3 of the worst arose from poor configuration and system administration. A further 3 were caused by granting or leaving open access control to unauthorised users. 1 was caused by poor programming.

6 were due to poor practice and accidents: use of live data for testing, failure to wipe data media before disposing of equipment, lost data media, lost laptops and one case of wilfully selling on personal data without authorisation.

This leaves 3 cases of inside jobs by disgruntled employees.

This reinforces the old adage that engineering a security solution is not enough. Businesses need to build in security as part of their culture and work their processes as well.