Author Archives: jrubinsztein

Time to reclaim our privacy?

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I was very pleased to have one of my posts from the recent TEDGlobal I attended in Rio de Janeiro published in Business Review Weekly – Australia’s most prestigious business magazine. You can read the edited version here on their site but I’ve pasted the full version  below…

“As the internet turns 25 we have mostly lost the idea of privacy itself.”

Is privacy dead? Andy Yen strongly believes it isn’t and with a new email platform he co-founded last year called Protonmail, he hopes to turn the tables on how government, industry and society generally think about privacy and secrecy. Speaking at TEDGlobal in Rio de Janeiro this week, his radical new concept of how to protect our privacy has important ramifications for consumers, businesses and security agencies alike.

andy yenAndy Yen isn’t a technology developer by trade, but a particle physicist (hence the name) at (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland. But as the full implications of the Snowden revelations became clear, he and his colleagues became concerned at the way that people’s privacy had become a commodity no longer respected by organisations, particularly intelligence agencies or online advertisers. Our personal email, secrets, intimate thoughts or intellectual property were being traded in the open market without our consent.

“We have largely lost control of  our data and privacy.”

So along with colleagues working in the CERN canteen, Yen developed Protonmail, a unique mail service that encrypts your email at the browser level, rather than at the server level. This is important because it means that Protonmail has no access to your account or mail. This not only locks out Protonmail staff themselves, but everyone else from government agencies to hackers or industrial spies.

The service has clearly hit a raw nerve, with over 250,000 users so far, and more than USD$500,000 in crowd sourced funding from Idiegogo – a record for a software project.

But the service is of course controversial. PayPal quietly froze Protonmail’s account when they became concerned that the company didn’t have permission to encrypt users’ emails. Set against a sensitive security climate where the Australian Attorney General is seeking additional powers for ASIO and concern rises about the way that companies like Google and Facebook access users’ content for advertising purposes; the service will continue to polarise. However at the heart of it all lie the questions: what is privacy, what responsibilities do businesses and governments have to protect it and why should we give it up now that technology exists to protect it? Yen’s Protonmail has certainly put the cat amongst the privacy debate pigeons.

 

TED: Davos for Optimists

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Hello, my name is Jonathan Rubinsztein and I am a TEDdict. A TEDaholic. A TED junkie. But I suspect I will never be cured, and don’t want to be.

TEDLike any dependence, I crave the high I receive from TED conferences. As I sit on the plane to Rio for my 6th conference in as many years, I mind drifts back to my first. Unlike many addictions, the high I receive from each hit is as good as that first one.  Also, unlike most dependencies, the elation I derive from the profound insight, inspiration and – most importantly – ideas is worth every penny I spend… I have no regrets.

For those who have never been to a TED conference, I hope to share with you some of the experience. Most of you would be familiar with the TED videos on you Tube – there have been more than a billion views – and almost everyone who has must have been touched in some meaningful way by a TED idea. For me, for instance, this video by simon simek profoundly changed the way I view my own business. And yes, that is an important point. I am a managing director of a multi-million dollar IT consultancy employing hundreds of people across Asia and I have no problem prioritising 5 days in Brazil for this conference. The value I can contribute back to my business as a result will be immeasurable in terms of return on investment.

Imagine a fully packed schedule from early in the morning to late at night with 22 minute presentations crammed into the every space of the day. Music, performance, conversation, food and incredible conversations that constantly pushing and stretching the status quo and challenging your world view. The presenters and audience are both as fascinating as each other and you’re immersed in this pool of amazing, talented, interesting, people having dinner, lunch and breakfast with you; interacting, discussing the previous presentation or insane event. After five days of such creative binging I usually come back exhausted and yet exhilarated; with enough intellectual and emotional fuel to last me  months. It takes even longer to fully digest or integrate the insights and ideas

Why not just watch it on You Tube? Because the real benefit of the experience is as much about the audience as the speakers. While the calibre of speakers  extends to such luminaries as as Bill Clinton, Jane Goodall, Malcolm Gladwell,Al Gore, Gordon Brown, Richard Dawkins, Bill Gates, Bono, Mike Rowe, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and many Nobel Prize winners – they also make up the audience!. It is the discussions after the presentations that are as valuable as the presentations themselves. To only watch the presentations on You Tube is as deficient as watching a concert on mute. For instance, one of my more lasting memories is a thoroughly scintillating business discussion with Jeff Bezos in LA that helped to revolutionise my business. I cannot think of another event that could afford me that kind of access to brilliance.

I have often heard TED described as Davos for optimists, and although the tagline is “ideas worth spreading” this is often much more than ideas and it really is about the people who are changing the world for the better. Throughout the coming week I will try to download some of that experience here. I hope you can join me and maybe even become fellow addicts yourselves!

UXC Red Rock heading north!

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We made a very important announcement this month marking a huge step forward in our expansion into Asia. We were to close a deal to acquire asset-lifecycle management player Convergence Team Ltd. Visit the press release on our web site for the details: http://www.uxcredrock.com/news-events/red-rock-in-the-news/878-uxc-red-rock-consulting-announces-acquisition-of-convergence-team

fran-foo-thumbnailBut on the basis of the deal I spoke to one of Australia’s leading IT journalists – Fran Foo, Deputy Editor at The IT section of The Australian newspaper about our plans, and here is the coverage we received as a result:

UXC Red Rock to expand in Asia

ORACLE software specialist UXC Red Rock has acquired asset life cycle management provider Convergence Team as it seeks to further expand into the Southeast Asian market.

UXC Red Rock will absorb about 30 staff from Convergence Team to add to its 600 staff in 11 offices in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and India.

Brisbane-based Convergence Team will be folded into UXC Red Rock’s consulting practice and led by asset life cycle management industry director Stuart MacDonald.

UXC Red Rock CEO Jonathan Rubinsztein declined to reveal financial arrangements but said the company had been working with Convergence on a project two years before the ­acquisition on a few projects in Asia-Pacific.

“It’s (the acquisition) a good opportunity for more growth in Southeast Asia … it will allow us to grow in asset-intensive industries,” Mr Rubinsztein said.

He said the deal would extend the group’s capability to cover more Oracle applications. UXC Red Rock is the software giant’s largest partner in Australia.

It will also help UXC Red Rock make further inroads into engineering, construction, mining and utilities markets, he said.

UXC Red Rock is a subsidiary of ASX-listed UXC and counts Blackmores, Coca-Cola Bottling, Indonesia, Corporate Express, Wotif, Heinz Australia, Lion Nathan, Australian Vintage, Bis Industries, Engineers Australia, SEQ Water Grid Manager and New Zealand fertiliser co-operative Ravensdown as customers.

Convergence Team has clients across a range of industries such as chemicals, ­financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, hospitality, power and energy, and oil and gas.

They include ExxonMobil Chemicals, Shell Chemicals, Unilever, GE Wind, Veolia Water, Constellation Energy, Keppel Energy, Western Container Corp, SingHealth, Singapore Land Authority, UOB Bank, Resorts World Sentosa and Marina Bay Sands.

Solution providers for Oracle rival SAP are also experiencing consolidation. For instance, Victorian IT services company Viatek earlier this year acquired CN Group, an SAP consulting specialist in Sydney.

We need to focus on Data Basics before embarking on Big Data

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bigdataI got incredible response from this post on LinkedIn, with more than 3,000 views, 224 likes but more importantly 27 comments. You can read the comments here at LinkedIn:

Here is the post in its entirety, I’d welcome more comments and discussion here also…

With the proliferation of software-as-a-service applications across most organisations, it is likely that many organisations are suffering from a fragmented data environment. This is a problem because just at the time that most organisations need to homogenise their data strategy to take advantage of Big Data learnings, the opposite is happening: data decentralisation and even chaos.

In many cases, organisations have been focussed on data storage and not data quality. Just managing the demanding growth of data volumes for the last 15 years has been enough of a challenge for CIOs. Rapidly scaling data storage infrastructure – including software and networking as well as hardware – has been overwhelming and all too often the actual quality of the data has not been good. How many companies can genuinely claim their database was sound, that their CRM data was clean and that the insane complexity of spreadsheets was under control let alone consolidated? The age old adage “garbage in, garbage out” scales in severity with the size of data volume.

Yet as data storage now decamps to the cloud and the focus moves to Big Data strategies, it seems that data quality is still not a priority. I wonder if the industry – here in Australia as well as globally – is doing enough to enhance the human data skills rather than relying solely on Hadoop et al to do all the work. I’ve written before on the disconnect between data technology and human data skills. There is a lot of talk about “Data Scientists” but is that nothing more than just a fancy title for BI analysts?

Bona fide Data Scientists are like real life scientists. They have a hypothesis, they test this hypothesis againsts different sets of data and validate or disprove their hypothesis. Then they try and look for further causation, correlation and then they might come up with some real insight and a discovery. But in our a commercial situation, the data scientist might invest a lot of time in developing a hypothesis but then find that the data isn’t available or is too messy to use. So what then? (It is worth reading this New York Times story on “Data Wrangling”).

Organisations need to work out – strategically and operationally – how to collect data appropriately, what data they need and then what they might need to look for. There are data scrubbing tools, deduping tools and analytical tools but if the raw data is not in an appropriate state, obviously it isn’t possible to scrub or dedupe data that doesn’t exist.

So it is crucial for CIOs to look initially at their overall application architecture and work out the data flows and how they integrate, and then what insight we might need and operationally what data is needed and where it can be sourced. This isn’t difficult but it requires formality and strategy rather than ad hoc evolution. The current trend in SaaS proliferation and services bought ad hoc on the credit card at the departmental level is haphazard and making data increasingly difficult for CIOs to manage. Not only because the data is decentralised, in different clouds, but because there are now different data models that are often quite difficult to access and often quite complicated to understand.

If organisations want to truly benefit from the Big Data opportunity there needs to be some sober and disciplined thoughts about data analysis skills, data quality control and data strategy before the kind of frantic technology acquisition that the media and vendors promote and discuss. Otherwise we are going to get no closer to any kind of data optimisation than we are now – we will just create more data mayhem and the Return on Investment will remain just as elusive.

Picture credit: bigdatapix.tumblr.com

Forecast is Cloudy with the chance of Pain

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weather-icons-headerI am continually frustrated with the way that the IT industry has sometimes embraced cloud computing in a manner that I can only describe as naive and short-sighted. I wrote earlier this year about this, questioning whether CIOs are really considering what the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of their cloud investment is as they leap onto the cloud bandwagon at the behest of vendor and media hype.

Well I have been forced to put pen to paper again this week as I question whether enough thought has been put into the future roadmap of all the integration required to pull all their various ad hoc and short term cloud deployments together.

Rust Report: Cloud has come of age, but now it’s time to grow 

It has led me to try and draw a map of what I think the future of the cloud industry looks like and who I think the key cloud players will be. This should help any speculative investment decisions I think because it identifies where the real value is going to come from. I think we have moved out of the first phase of cloud – its childhood if you like – and it will be interesting to see how it matures into a fully grown industry from here. 

Just like any adolescent, this industry could learn the lessons of its past and adapt according to how the world needs it to develop; or it could completely go off the rails, neglect its study and concentrate on the partying! I certainly hope for all our sakes it is the former…but to mix metaphors, I think the forecast will get worse before it gets better.

[Picture Credit: nature.com]

Rackspace on the Rack

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RackspaceThere’s nothing like having your opinion validated and this week I read that comments I made in an article last month in the Rust Report about the travails of IaaS Cloud provider, Rackspace, have been totally echoed in non other than…Forbes Magazine!

In the Rust Report article I talked about how Rackspace simply could not expect to compete in a world dominated by players such as Microsoft, Oracle and Google who command vast amounts of capital, benefit from huge customer bases and demonstrate equal amounts of ruthlessness. I drew analogies with the airline industry where ultimately as the service became increasingly commoditised the result was brutal market consolidation.

Then this week I found my view was reflected by Forbes’ Mike Kavis, who writes today:

“This is why I chuckle when new comers to the IaaS game unleash their PR machines to declare they are throwing their hat in the ring and investing $1B to enter the market. Their competition is investing more than that every quarter.”

So as Rackspace exits IaaS and will now focus its efforts on Managed Services, I wonder even how that will go. Managed Services is itself a crowded market, equally dominated by big players like IBM, HP, EDS etc. Their corporate story is more proof yet that unless you continue to innovate your offering, the market will eat you for lunch. A radical pioneer only a few years ago, it seems Rackspace is today perhaps running out of room to move?

[Picture Credit: Forbes]

A Rock Solid Strategy!

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10ReasonsInfoG_smallOne of the more exciting ventures I’ve ever been involved in in my career has been participating in the evolution of a business called Rock Solid. Working closely with its founder, Tony Bain, together we have been able to fundamentally disrupt the business of SQL Server Database management. No matter what space you are able to disrupt, it is always exhilarating and exciting – I can highly recommend it!

Rock Solid’s story was covered this week here in The Rust Report.

Tony has been able to innovate a tool to manage and monitor SQL Server databases that can slash the cost of their management – up to 60 per cent of traditional costs – for clients. Now, as that message has begun to get across, the growth of that business is exponential.

This has brought its own challenges for us of course, but ones that we welcome. Managing huge demand and scaling a business to meet that rapid demand are good problems to have! The next challenge for the team is to capitalise on this exciting opportunity now, international expansion, more growth, innovative partnership and so on. But the experience has also proved for me that the incubator model is powerful – as Tony himself explains well:

“[Red Rock] shared the vision and understood what our objective has always been…they have allowed us to heavily invest in our technology, putting us at a considerable advantage in terms of our capability to rapidly grow the business.”

Start Ups need capital of course, but they also need direction, advice, resources and so on. This venture has helped me realise that the incubation sector in Australia should be expanded and this is maybe something Government should help more with? 

The 3 Tenets of Design Thinking Culture Change

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Earlier this month, I was very pleased to be involved in the Remix Sydney event where I joined a very prestigious panel to discuss one of my favourite topics: Design Thinking.

DT may not be a totally new idea but it is a greatly misunderstood one and one that organisations would do well to pay more attention to. As the world is more rapidly disrupted by new ideas and technologies, business models are coming under increasing stress and pressure; Design Thinking is a methodology that can hold more answers than it is often given credit for.

remixsydneyJoining me on the panel were impressive thinkers from organisations such as IAG, SAP, AMP and Deloitte Digital; all organisations which in my mind that are leaders in this space. IAG in particular is – as an Insurance Company – can perhaps be considered surprising in the adoption of radical ideas but nevertheless is being quite aggressive in the way it is embracing Human (or User) Centre Design into its strategy.

So what is Design Thinking? It is described by one of its pioneers as “matching people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and viable as a business strategy” (Tim Brown, CEO IDEO) and sees the principles of design brought into the wider field of problem solving in business. Principally it involves a blend of empathy, creativity and rationality in innovation. It is particularly useful in solving problems that are more complex, such as “what will my business look like in 3 years” when the answer is impacted by a multitude of variables impossible to predict. These are known as “wicked problems” that are “difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements.”

My recipe for organisations thinking of adopting this approach – as I outlined in the panel discussion – involves the following key elements:

  1. Listening: an organisation is required to be humble as it listens to its employees’ many voices. The kind of hubris where leaders imagine they know more than anyone else is the antithesis of Design Thinking. This kind of open mindedness is key to adaptation.
  2. Customer centricity: true to its origins, Design Thinking must place the customer or end-user at the centre of all creativity – the customer or the user after all knows the most about what they need and this is where innovation must begin.
  3. Agility: Commensurate with the precepts of The Lean Start-up, an organisation must prime itself to “turn on a dime”. As iterative and incremental improvement is becoming a common tennant in business, like sharks you must keep swimming or die. Reacting fast to what Design Thinking throws up is key to harnessing its power.

So this does involve a difficult culture change that will challenge many organisations. Those that do not embed these characteristics into their fabric will struggle to adapt to the new energies it generates. Ultimately, organisations that do not pair cultural change to a change in planning methodology will find only new problems as conflict arises between those practicing Design Thinking and the rest of the organisation.

Ultimately, a departure from the past is what is most important and this is why the young – who are not bound by the legacy of the past – can play such an important part in a Design Thinking revolution:

Five “Bezos-isms” that Inspire me

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Anyone that knows me knows I’ve always been very influenced and inspired by Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos. I was lucky enough to meet him once, which is a story I told in my recent Keynote presentation to the Red Rock Leadership Forum in March – which you can view here:

In it I speak mainly about the importance of corporate values (a favourite topic of mine) and how – as Simon Simek explains in this TED video – while companies are usually focussed on telling customers about the what and the how of their business, those customers only want to buy the “Why”. That why is “Purpose” and is my addition to the previously Five Ps of Marketing. That business of Purpose is why we have invested so much in our Corporate Culture and Values .

JR 5 P's

But I also tell the story about how I once had the opportunity to speak with Jeff Bezos at a TED conference in Oxford a few years ago. After some initial clumsiness by me, we got talking and I happened to mention to him during our conversation that my team had coincidentally been in negotiations with his people to secure a licensing agreement and that the process was slow. Before I awoke the next morning, I had been copied on an email from Jeff to his Head of Corporate Services requesting an update.

JR at TED

This inspired me not only because of the excellent responsiveness it displays, but at a broader level it was a great example of a Leader “walking the talk”. Putting the Customer First is an essential Amazon value and it was clearly one Jeff himself personified.  In fact, I have learnt that Customer-centricity is obsessive at Amazon and Jeff used to bring empty chairs into early Amazon meetings to represent the unheard voice of the customer. The company now employs trained specialists who role-play innovation scenarios on behalf of the customer.  From that develops the first of 5 other important “Bezosisms” that have inspired me, and I hope inspire others:

  • “Determine what your customer needs, and work backwards” – as a thought process this is a fantastic model to help strategy development. It has driven us in many of our most successful directions, including our recent move onto Jeff’s own Amazon Web Services platform to host cloud services for our customers.
  • “Have backbone: disagree and commit” – Amazon is famous for its adversarial culture but any friction is purely in a good cause – to not accept too easily, to question everything and not to agree merely for the sake of being agreeable. As Business Insider describes it: “Bezos can’t stand ‘social cohesion,’ the cloying tendency of people who like to agree with each other and find consensus comfortable.” I’m a contrarian by nature, but agree wholeheartedly with this maxim!
  • Be Patient – “If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people”; the point being that very few people take the longer view and by so doing you are competing with far fewer people”. We certainly believe in playing the long game at Red Rock and are already looking to the next 5 years in our business planning.
  • “Your margin is my opportunity” – Another way he has put it (as quoted in Forbes – number 4 ) is: “There are two kinds of companies: those that try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second.” With the business environment more dynamic today than it has ever been it is crucial not only to continually question your own model to ensure it offers the best value to your customer; it is also important to always scrutinise your competitor. Unless they are doing the same they will leave opportunity on the table ripe for the taking.  This ethic of constant scrutiny has definitely sharpened our approach.
  • Embrace failure – I’ve written before about the problem that Australia has with failure. We have to learn to process it better. Jeff Bezos has famously said: “If you want to be inventive, you have to be willing to fail.” To understand this better, it is worth reading this blog post by Tren Griffen  about how Amazon practices “Optionality” as a rule – that small potential downside is worth massive potential upside. As Griffen puts it, “Harvesting optionality *requires* failure. It can’t be avoided since failure provides information that enable success.”

Which “Bezosism” have influenced you? If not Jess Bezos, which leader has the most impact on the way you do business?

 

We need a better climate for entrepreneurs in Australia

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Last week I had an article published in the Rust Report about Australia’s attitude to innovation, risk and entrepreneurism:

Rust Report: Why are we taxing risk instead of rewarding it?

investorI urged the Federal Government to relax some of the tax rules around share options to encourage more investment and risk. The argument for this has been made most strongly by Business Spectator journalist Paul Wallbank in this article earlier this year: “Is Australia Open for Start-up Business“. I spoke to Paul on Twitter about the topic and he referenced a blog post he had also written about investment capital investment, entitled “Counting the Cost of Investors.” In it he wrote: “For founders, the tricky balance in raising enough money to achieve their objectives while not giving away a controlling interest.

He makes an excellent point about another general malaise in Australian Innovation – short-termism among the investment community. I agree with Future Fund Chairman David Gonski who told an Australian Securities and Investment Commission dinner last year that “Sadly, in Australia, we live in a world of Short Termism”. This is where we also differ from the far preferable climate in The Bay Area and Silicon Valley where companies are able to take a much longer view around building their product, proposition and customer base before being required to return gains. They also have far greater controls over their destiny – it is my undertanding that investors there prefer to advise more than control.

We need to give our entrepreneurs more room to move for them to succeed and without that room it is far harder to achieve what is already a difficult challenge.

As a post-script, this is an interesting article by Marc Andreessen about how the investment culture of Silicon Valley versus elsewhere in the US: Beware Non-Silicon Valley Investors.