Category Archives: Opinion

Boardroom Boo-boos Beggar Belief

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Questions being raised over the standards of corporate governance in Australia are a timely warning to boards and CEOs on this side of the Tasman.

The shock departure of ex-All Black and Kiwi Rhodes Scholar David Kirk from Fairfax demonstrated how far the rumblings of discontent in Australia about executive and boardroom performance have spread. With commodity prices on the wane and a global recession lapping at Australia’s shores, corporate decision-making has come under more intense scrutiny. Until now shareholders have enjoyed booming profits and were happy to go along with board decisions on strategy and governance. Only now are they being awakened from their stupor.

David Kirk may simply be a scapegoat for an industry struggling to come to terms with the proliferation of web based media services that have nibbled away at a previously dominant market position. But there are probably more fireworks to come. Outspoken Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo might have a blowtorch turned on him after his antics in Canberra estranged the new government and resulted in Telstra being excluded recently from bidding in Australia’s broadband network lolly scramble. Colourful Qantas board member and recently retired CEO Geoff Dixon might also be in the gun having presided over an alleged collusion scam with other airlines, the costs of which have yet to appear on the books.

Episodes like these raise serious questions about accountability and shoot dead the concept of sacred cows when it comes to board appointed management. In New Zealand we only need to look as far as our largest exporter. Fonterra chair Henry van der Heyden in a recent radio interview calmly discusses shareholder value offsets and the non-impact of San Lu on the company’s overall global strategy. No mention of the enormous human cost due to poor management practices inherent within China’s milk supply chain. For $4 million per annum in salary, you’d think their CEO would have taken a more active interest in how quality control and risk would be handled in their China venture.

Opening Fonterra’s share register to the public would be one step towards greater accountability and it would allow the wider public to participate directly in one of our few truly global entities. Fonterra’s farmer shareholders seem unlikely to sanction for change however, even though their conflict of interest as both suppliers and beneficiaries smells rather like a fresh cowpat. In that kind of perverse culture, it is unsurprising that the company has been all but silent on the fallout in China.

Boozy Sportsmen – “It’s Not OK”

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In the last week or so at least three prominent New Zealand sportsmen have hit the headlines with their out of control drunken antics. So why do our sports administrators continue to tolerate boorish behaviour, wife beating and ongoing alcohol abuse amongst their players?

Perhaps part of the answer to this question is that most of those administrators have emerged from the same ranks as the players and have themselves witnessed or been involved in the odd indiscretion in the past. Punishments handed out to players for drunken escapades seem to be light and sports managers frequently appear to be apologists on the basis that these incidents are just “young men letting off a bit of steam”. Judges are complicit in that they hand out meaningless sentences such as “diversion” whereas ordinary mortals would be dealt with more sternly.

The embedded booze culture and bad behaviour of our sportsmen (and their sports presenter cronies) is a blight on our society which continues to be swept under the carpet because of their hero status. But it is their status that makes it all the worse. Sports players are role models for others. Players who pull on a jersey with a silver fern and accept lucrative contracts carry their nation’s pride upon their shoulders and are public property 24/7, whether they like it or not. Publicly tolerating anti-social behaviour sends a strong message to society that the implications of drunkeness and violence are minimal for the perpetrators.

It seems bizarre that after a continual stream of embarrassing incidents over many years, only now is the Rugby Union considering behaviour clauses in player contracts. Clearly, sports administrators do not take this problem seriously. Perhaps they should accept some advice from the television media. Wayward TV personalities get dropped like hot potatoes after Court appearances because the industry understands that perception is everything and damaged reputations cost ratings points. Broadcasters also receive large sums of advertising money from politically correct government agencies determined to stamp out domestic violence by waging a guilt campaign on ordinary citizens. Perhaps those agencies are focussing in the wrong place.

2008 Round-Up and Festive Cheer

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I’m pleased to report that (in stark contrast to 2007) this year was filled with achievements and a reaffirmed sense that our ideas on knowledge sharing and community building have even more relevance than ever before. This year also saw some big changes on the political landscape and darkening clouds of recession wrought by the purveyors of greed who suddenly found the debt taps had been turned off.

On a more positive note, with the mainstream embracing cloud computing and social media, there was mounting evidence of a paradigmatic shift towards conceptualising the Internet as an all encompassing virtual operating system. The hope is that creative digital enterprises that generate real value will survive beyond the nuclear winter.

Teaming up with some talented guys to form domain industry technology services provider ideegeo was certainly the highlight of the year and the fulfilment of a personal ambition of mine. The new company is an umbrella for a number of interesting spinoff projects, the first of which is iWantMyName our global domain registrar site. Strategising how we use this venture to leverage the aforementioned paradigm shift will occupy much of my time in 2009.

I was also invited to join the Unlimited Potential committee and was consequently able to put my organisational skills to good use helping another talented team to bring several key projects to fruition. UP is Wellington’s leading provider of live networking events to the technology community. I obtained a huge amount of satisfaction from project managing our wonderfully successful final event for the year – Wellington to the World and establishing a template for future advances.

But despite being rich with all this enthusiastic talent, New Zealand continues to suffer from being somewhat removed from the global epicentres of technology investment. Sometimes we are so busy even that we forget to chat to our neighbours and colleagues across the fence. We hope UP events in 2009 will continue to build a sense of community in the technology sector and catalyse new connections and creativity. We hope too that the change in government will result in the development of a truly inspirational national blueprint for innovation that retains incentives for research and development.

Most importantly, 2008 has been a year for many new friendships as a result of participating in the business and being actively engaged in community events and even social media channels like Twitter. Best wishes to all readers and their families. Keep safe and be well over the festive season.

Did Govt. Squander Economic Transformation Opportunity?

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Prime Minister Helen Clark has often called for New Zealanders to “back themselves” in business with the same enthusiasm that we support our sports teams. But after nine years in charge, Labour seem to have run out of ideas on the economic development front.

To be fair, I agree with the points made by Infometrics economist Chris Worthington in this weekend’s DomPost. Dr Cullen’s boring but fiscally responsible twin planks of repaying government debt and instigating a universal superannuation fund has put the economy in a strong position to weather the global economic storm and cope with future demands on resources from an ageing populace. On the downside, the oft quoted aspirational goals, regarding climbing the OECD ladder, will not be met anytime soon. Equilbrium is the best we can hope for.

I suppose a mediocre economic performance and low growth is better than a meltdown. But our greatest failure has been an inability to put capital to work more productively. There is no shortage of ideas in New Zealand on how to leverage innovation. However we are simply not good enough at attracting capital and executing on those ideas. Even addressing basic infrastructural issues such as broadband and roading seems about as easy as wading through treacle – yet almost everyone agrees that these are urgent issues. We can’t afford to wait until near the end of each election cycle before committing to such projects.

The Labour government had a burst of enthusiasm in 2001 when it backed the Knowledge Wave Conference. A lot of good ideas sprung out of this event and there was initially a great deal of goodwill generated amongst business movers and shakers. The Growth and Innovation Advisory Board (GIAB) was established shortly afterwards with an impressive looking group of influential business people involved. But nary a word has been heard since. The last press release from GIAB itself was in 2005 and a number of promising initiatives such as the ICT Taskforce have been quietly subsumed as attention drifted once again back to the primary sector as our economic saviour.

Lately independent thinktanks and commentators have been attempting to fill the void left by the lack of government leadership. But there is not a coordinated effort. Auckland seems to benefit increasingly from government largesse in terms of technology and innovation programmes at the expense of other regions. Hence the incoming government needs to think seriously about developing an equitable national innovation blueprint that will drive progress on these issues.

So why didn’t Labour propose a Fast Forward styled initiative for the ICT sector for example? Aspirational goals are fine, but if we are to overcome the disadvantages of geographic distance from capital and consumer markets and an over-reliance on tourism and primary exports, we need some radical solutions. We also need the commitment to back ourselves, as the PM often states. Half measures and programmes that only nibble at the edges of the problem simply don’t cut it.

Yes there are competing calls on government budget; but how are we to pay for improving health, education and superannuation in the future if we cannot earn a crust in the world and remain competitive? Now, I don’t think Labour entirely squandered the opportunity during their tenure, but they failed to generate and support a really powerful and vibrant leadership vision for how innovation might strongly underpin economic growth.

The scary part is that the blue squad seem to have even less of a clue on how to go about it. Certainly the prospect of having living fossils like Williamson, English and Brownlee sitting around the Cabinet table is not an appealing one in terms of ideation. Other small nations like Singapore, Malaysia, Ireland and Finland have backed themselves with investment and forward thinking public initiatives on innovation. Why can’t we?

Now the Unions are Quashing Political Freedoms

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1984_apple1.jpgStanding as a list MP candidate for the ACT Party seems rather like an exercise in futility, but does anyone else find it hugely ironic that New Zealand’s most powerful union has reportedly suspended an employee for political activity?

OK, the gentleman in question may have been a bit naive in how he went about it. Records show that he did raise the possibility of his parliamentary candidacy with the union, but there seems to be some confusion over whether or not he had received their permission. But irrespective of this, since when can employers dictate what political beliefs their employees may hold? The union objected to the behaviour simply because it did not align with their own ideology. If the guy had been standing for the Labour Party or Greens, you can guarantee nobody in the union management would have been the least bit concerned.

I have a huge amount of respect for Andrew Little and what he has achieved with EPMU by dragging it out of the dark ages and making it relevant again. I went to school with him way back when. He’s a very smart guy, so I’m surprised he dropped the ball on this one by playing into the hands of his critics. Unions have an important role in civil society but it is not their role to restrict political freedoms.

Anyhoo…at least the EPMU story is a welcome diversion from the tedium surrounding the Winston show. The scary part about Slick Winnie is that his geriatric fanbase demographic grows bigger every year. Despite his many indiscretions, he is likely to remain a thorn in the side of future governments for some time yet. The guy gets way too much airtime and yet contributes very little of real value. Consequently, in this election year, the rabid media are neglecting to challenge politicians on the REAL issues such as crime, education, health and economic growth.

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Entrepreneurs Epilogue

ideegeo continues to make progress as we build developer capacity and deal with all the administrative issues that go with a brand new business. It’s my role to look after the admin stuff so that the developers can get on with what they are good at doing. At present we need to find a balance between consulting and product development, but we always expected this would be the case to begin with.

Consequently, we currently have some developer bandwidth available to help out with web-based enterprise application development and implementation. The skill set includes experience in Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby plus we are exploring Erlang which we think is the next big thing in web-based application development.

We specialise in transactional environments requiring high volume and low latency. Experience operating in MySQL and other commonly deployed databases is a given of course. Our lead tech guy has held CTO roles in large technology organisations offshore and already has an impressive CV of New Zealand projects under his belt, including trouble-shooting legacy software.

If we can help out on a project, drop me a message: paul (at] ideegeo {dot] com

Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon

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birdsnest.jpgDissident Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei, employed by a Western firm to design the iconic “Birdsnest” Olympic stadium in Beijing, exclaims that he now hates the stadium because it symbolises China’s relentless march toward modernism. He says that the carnival atmosphere of the games masks what is really going on in the world’s most populated nation and has called upon others to boycott the games in protest.

There’s no doubt that the 2008 Olympiad will be the biggest and most impressive live stage show in history and China quite rightly wants to put on a good performance for its coming out parade. But lingering concerns remain that the games hoop-la is simply a facade beyond which there lies an overbearing state machine that has made little real progress on human rights and environmental issues since it secured rights to hold the the games. I have already read several media reports of foreign journalists being shadowed by plain clothes police who then used standover tactics to dissuade ordinary citizens from being interviewed.

Games officials are ecstatic that by removing a million vehicles from Beijing’s roads and shutting down dozens of factories, they have reduced the airborne particulate matter concentration to a mere three times that of recommended World Health Organisation  standards. They also proudly advise foreign journalists that there will be no blocking of Internet websites from within the Games media centre. But the irony of such concessions is probably lost on the more affluent members of the local populace who can afford to attend and are completely absorbed in nationalistic fervour.

And who are we to criticise anyway? Where else on the planet could such an economic transformation have taken place so rapidly? When the Chinese take on a project, they really commit! Our plodding Reserve Bank gnomes would send interest rates through the roof if New Zealand enjoyed even a miserable 4% GDP growth. But growth rates twice that are ensuring that China is rapidly making up for the previous half century of disengagement.

I could also name a few Western nations that haven’t exactly been shining examples of democratic freedom themselves lately. Bush’s swansong swipe at China’s human rights record was enormously hypocritical when you consider America’s appalling disregard for its poor and homeless, its record on air bombings of civilians and the suspension of civil rights for terror detainees.

The dragon is awakening and there is no question that China will rise to become the most powerful economic and military force we’ve ever seen. The recently signed free trade agreement between China and New Zealand may well be largely symbolic, but symbolism and relationship both mean a great deal to the Chinese. Furthermore, it is only through trade and dialogue that small nations can hope to influence change.

It’s Life Jim, But Not As We Know It!

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“Fire when ready”It’s not enough that we’ve had to suffer appalling weather lately. But now my week is going from bad to worse, and it’s only Tuesday!

My tribbles began when I found out at the weekend that my walking buddy has finally acquired herself a Betazoid boyfriend, which means I won’t be hearing from her for the next six weeks whilst she boldly embarks on an intergalactic lust quest with the new beau. Alas, shared coffees at Chaffers Marina and brisk walks around Oriental Bay quadrant will soon become a distant memory.

My grief was then compounded by the realisation that my poorly researched piece on “almost free software” may have caused some offence to software purists in the audience; when in fact I was attempting to acknowledge the important contributions made by both the Free Software movement and the Open Source community. Next time I shall stick to a topic I actually know something about. One good thing came out of it though. I received strict instructions on the correct etiquette to use when in the presence of the eminent Mr Stallman, when he favours us with a lecture and challenges us with his views on software copyright next month. Suitably armed, I should be able to keep my foot out of my mouth for a change. Puts a completely new spin on the term “software royalty”, doesn’t it?

Speaking of feet, to top it all off I discovered that my toes had succumbed to a dose of some unpleasant cling-ons that had obviously been lurking in the public showers at work last time I visited. It’s life Jim, but not as we know it! There was one piece of good news however. My enterprising little son has promised to save his pocket money up and buy me the new Star Trek fanzine and DVD for my birthday, bless his heart. Both Star Trek and the Free Software movement have sought to influence thinking and to bring about social change with advocacy, although through the use of different media. The Ferengi with their obsession on acquisition and profit would certainly not approve of this comparison however. Trekkies do have a few characteristics in common with Stallman followers…but let’s not go there.

Have a good week and in the words of an ancient Gorn proverb –  “may your three toes remain warm and dry”.

New ICT Body Kicks Off

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phoenix We seem to be awash in a sea of forums, networks, industry bodies and think tanks these days, all of whom have opinions on broadband and the state of the ICT industry. Will we ever get a consensus?

After a lengthy debacle, in which ICT industry players failed embarrassingly to score any goals, the government has stepped in with a solution that bundles the picked over carcass of ICT-NZ with that of the decapitated body of the Digital Strategy. Hopefully increased gate takings in the form of new digital sector funding and some firm direction from the game’s governing body can breath life into Digital Development New Zealand (DDNZ).

Minister Cunliffe announced that the new team will comprise a partnership between industry, community and voluntary groups and will focus on issues of national importance. In the meantime another more commercially oriented organisation has reportedly sprung Phoenix-like out of ITANZ. This group will also have representation at the table of the digital sector body as will TUANZ, NZCS, INZ, LGNZ and WIT – to mention but a few of the team members. A group of prominent business people and heavyweight telco players has also established the independent Broadband Industry Forum to channel ideas on scoring better broadband for New Zealand.

DDNZ is tasked with “providing policy advice and delivering on strategic goals”, although the groundsman has not yet set up the goalposts. I must admit that I’m also left back wondering how well DDNZ can actually function as a team, given the wide spectrum of views represented on its founding board and the lack of industry alignment in the past. Perhaps that’s why Fran Wilde has controversially been engaged to referee the council.  Wilde is a consumate political animal with a history of driving difficult projects forward. It may not matter that there is no consensus.

Notably absent from the DDNZ council are representatives of the academic community. Given the nature of comments on innovation by sports columnist Stuart Corson in a recent Unlimited article, I trust that these new bodies will move quickly to establish links into academia. Considering the absence of academics on New Zealand tech company boards, the shortage of technology graduates and the general paucity of informed debate on the broadband issue, it behoves the industry to finally substitute some representation from the university community onto the playing field. In my experience, contemplative intellectual types are generally the last people chosen to join sports teams. In this case it may prove to be a mistake.

Thank-You So Much for Waiting

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Why does it take a major telecommunications provider eight days to rectify a simple fault on a phone line in New Zealand? No. it’s not a bad joke, it really happened to me last week.

A couple of weeks ago I noticed there was a lot of background noise on my phone line. About the same time, my home office ADSL broadband began to get mighty slow. Eventually I lost all access to the Internet, although my phone remained working, but with even more noise. So I set about eliminating all the possible causes of the fault including swapping the router/modem, replacing the cabling and testing wall socket filters. No joy, so now it’s time to call the helpdesk.

Now when you call the helpdesk you first have to navigate the voice activated interface which (if it works) places you in a queue to speak to a real person. That’s fine, they play some cool Kiwi music that I like whilst I wait (Liam Finn, Anika Moa etc). Any moment I will get to speak to a technician who can resolve my fault – wrong. After a few minutes a lovely Filipina lady called Maria answers and we go through all the standard questions like, “have you turned your modem on and off?” She’s very polite, so I play along. When this fails to solve the problem she decides to put me on hold in order to speak to her supervisor. More music. After ten minutes in the holding pattern I realise she has lost the call.

Second attempt to call helpdesk, virtual receptionist then more music. Then I get a charming fellow from Manila called Arvin. He’s a bit more technically savvy and we talk about testing and swapping filters on all the wall jacks (I bought new filters and a very long cable in anticipation of this conversation). Still no luck. But Arvin agrees there is a line issue and kindly books me a service call with “Advanced Broadband” the division who actually fix the phone lines back in New Zealand. Next day I wait at home for the scheduled call. Nobody calls.

Then I have some meetings and don’t get to follow up. I use CafeNet in the city to check my email and do a bit of business online. Couple of days later I try again. Another call patched through to Manila and the same music whilst I hold. Another lovely lady re-books my technician call, “thank-you so much for waiting”, she chimes. But the technician again fails to call the following evening. Why is this is taking so long? I head off to bed tired and annoyed. The next day, an early helpdesk call, more holding music and then a very sleepy sounding night shift worker in the Manila call centre. We both manage to remain polite. He books me another service call. This time the technician calls as per the agreed schedule. The technician agrees there is a line fault (told you so) and promises to contact me when he is at the local exchange. He makes good on his promise and cheerily calls back to report that a small wire-end was loose at the exchange. Back in business.

So I guess my first question is: why does it take eight days, five phone calls and two hours of my valuable time to resolve a simple fault? Now to be clear, I received very polite and helpful service at all times from the call centre workers and the technician. The problem is the system and how it is managed. Outsourcing call centre work is a great way to lower costs, especially so given that recruiting locally is also getting harder. But if the helpdesk staff do not have authority to make any decisions it reduces their role to that of triage and placating the customer. Furthermore, when they do take action, better make damn sure that request is followed up locally or risk alienating the customer.

I have long maintained that broadband speed is not the issue in New Zealand. I can run my consulting business from home on 500kbs or 100Mbs line speed or anything in between. There are other more pressing problems like international connectivity. And as long as we have a monopolistic situation we risk the continued imposition of high prices and poor service levels for broadband. Bring on the competition.

My second question then is this: if it takes eight days to reconnect a loose wire, how long do you reckon it will take to build and support a nationwide fibre network?

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Epilogue of Enragement

gunmen

I don’t normally speak out on such issues, but I am growing tired of political correctness and can hold my tongue no longer. A father of three young children has died as a result of another armed robbery by three bandits in South Auckland. [Subsequent to first posting this article, an 80 year old Asian woman has been beaten to death in the same area and another Asian businesswoman intentionally run over and killed in a carpark.]

I hope Tapu Misa, who attempted to rubbish a recent controversial research paper by Greg Clydesdale on Polynesian social , educational and economic underperformance, will visit the family of the shot man and apologise for the way both Maori and Polynesians continue to be overrepresented in the violent crime, child abuse statistics and in the prison population. I hope she will explain the reasons why the adoption (by some) of L.A. style gangster culture has led to an increase in drug taking, teen promiscuity and gun ownership. 

I hope she will also write another editorial detailing why some members of her community feel they are somehow exempt from aspiring to contribute economically apart from in the colourful street markets of Otara or mopping toilet floors at nearby Auckland airport.

Clydesdale’s research was not anti-migrant and neither is my argument. The victim in this attack was a migrant, a family man who came to New Zealand and was prepared to work hard for a better life. His attackers were young Polynesian or Maori males probably born and raised locally. The issue here is that we are growing a brown underclass and nobody seems to want to talk about it nor acknowledge the likely downstream consequences for our society. If embarrassed government agencies try to shut down this discussion, how can we possibly find a solution?

Forget broadband or taxation. This is the real election issue debate we should be having because it impacts on our collective economic futures and our prospects for ongoing social cohesion – irrespective of our skin colour.

Why Email Must Die

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Talk about the death of email may still be a little premature. But the fact that some very high profile web entrepreneurs are even having this discussion is portentious.

When we think about the loss of productivity and the damage that has been wrought by bogus email and embedded nasties over the first fifteen or so years of existence of the Internet, it is surprising that nobody has entirely solved the problem of wayward emails. Even more surprising is that desktop software providers have retained email client applications within their offerings, because the writing is on the wall – email must die.

As long as email remains free of any cost, and networks are largely unfettered, there will always be some idiot quite happy to steal your address and use it as a proxy to send out a million ads for pharmaceuticals. The Internet has always been a double-edged sword in this respect. It offers huge potential to scale a business for both good and bad purposes.

So what are the alternatives to email and are they safe? When I set up my consulting business in 2002 I found an ISP that could both host my website and offer me a webmail service – great. I’ve never used Outlook since. What was not so great was that during 2007 my ISP had a major server meltdown and somehow managed to lose 5 years worth of my email. Had they not heard of system back-ups? Fortunately I have heard of backing up and had long sent all my active mail and a list of email addresses to a separate account. So the loss was minimal, but the nuisance factor was considerable.

That episode got me thinking about how trustworthy all sorts of hosted applications and automated services really are. Banking, sharemarket, any e-commerce or eftpos transaction, even this blogsite…we trust that the provider has sufficient resource in place to deal with our precious data. But how can we really be sure? When we consider where email is likely to go in the future, there is still some cause for concern.

Some young people don’t even use regular email any more. Why would you do so when you can create your own social network online and be specific about who you choose to invite aboard? It is surely only a matter of time before someone builds a really useful networking site targetted at enterprise. Gmail is great and I have to admit I have yet to see a single piece of spam through my Gmail account. So why can’t I have a secure, low cost Gmail style hosted email system that only lets in only those who I invite but which can be personalised to fit my business brand?

 Bookhabit Authors Competition – Last Orders Please

Speaking of leveraging the Internet for good purposes, we are entering the last weeks of the Bookhabit.com authors competition. Know any budding authors out there? Have them upload their unpublished work onto the site in time for a crack at $5,000 in prize money. Popular selections from each week go forward to the final panel. For readers there are now over two hundred e-books to choose from, selling for as little as $2.50. Bookhabit is further evidence of how the Internet is continuing to change the way we live our lives and that a sensible idea well executed is worth a great deal indeed. Enjoy!