A Question of Ambition

I spent the first couple of days this week presenting, moderating and participating at the Next Generation National Broadband conference in Birmingham. I came away feeling very uplifted and inspired about the opportunities that the Next Generation of Broadband services will present to our communities, counties and country.

Before the conference, I had keenly signed-up for BT’s “Race to Infinity” campaign, believing that if we could get enough votes, we might be one of the five prize winning villages to get the next generation of Superfast Broadband and become one of the most connected villages in the Weald of Kent. How wrong I was!

When I got home from the conference, I read the small-print for this campaign. You can only win if your exchange gets 1000 votes.  As the exchange that I use only has 1100 lines, we would need over 90% of those in our community to sign-up. Add to that the fact that those with two lines per address can only vote once (and many still have two lines for business/home use or for a fax machine) as well as the fact that the BT database is sometimes wrong (i.e. the postcode doesn’t match the number) – and the opportunity to enter the race (which requires 1000 votes as a minimum) is a lost cause from the start.
If the UK really wants to have the “best” superfast broadband in Europe, then we are going to have to re-think how the final third is provided for.  This got got me thinking – what about creating our own schemes…..

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How to be Positive about the Cuts

This week is GEW – Global Entrepreneurship Week.  There have been lots of events around the world.  There are some interesting gaps and statistics from their site:

The Ambition Gap

Over 50% of the population want to start a business but only 5.8% do

The Demographic Gap

Young people (18-24) are 5 times more likely to be unemployed than starting a business

More than twice as many men start business in the UK as women (in 2009, approximately 1.5 million men and 650,000 women started a business).

The Skills Gap

Enterprise Education doubles your chances of business success yet it isn’t a staple of the education system

I also attended a meeting at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills this week.  They have cut 10% of their staff already and are about to take another 20% cuts.  With all these (presumably) senior civil servants unlikely to get another job, what a great opportunity to create a whole new generation of entrepreneurs…..and cut the National Debt.

Did You Know

A rise of just 1% in self employment (less than 300,000 entrepreneurs) would boost the UKs GDP by £22bn and cancel out the Government cuts for 2 years

One of my godsons, who recently graduated from Edinburgh University wrote to me on Wednesday and said he was looking for a job.  I wrote back to him saying that he should make a job, not take a job.  He has not replied to me yet!

If we helped both the older (retiring civil servants) AND the more recent graduates by giving them an incentive to start their own business, then we could really make a big difference in cutting our debts rather and move towards a more positive way of looking at the cuts.  I started my own business 2 years ago and have never looked back.

Make you think!  I hope my godson will be up for it!

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Comment on the DCMS Business Plan for the Delivery of UK Broadband

I have posted on the DCMS website, commenting on their recently published Business Plan for Broadband.  Interesting to see if they actually publish it.  In any case, they cannot vet what I put on my own blog – so here is what I wrote:
“A perfection of means and confusion of ends seems to characterise our age” as Einstein so rightly said.
These milestones are mere inch-pebbles…..
Jeremy Hunt’s ambition of only five months ago that: “within this Parliament we want Britain to have the best superfast broadband network in Europe” has been diluted to a set of muddled objectives and easily-achievable short-term meetings, studies, consultations and (yet-to-start) round tables.  And the heading of “super-fast” has been subtly changed to “universal” which is muddling the Universal Service Obligation with what the best superfast broadband network in Europe should really be…
Meanwhile, BT has gone public on a very effective campaign which is designed to create a very un-level paying field for Next Generation Access.  BT, Virgin Media and the other so-called ISPs will continue to compete in the same (urban and semi-urban) areas that they have on the current LLU regime.  A “completed” milestone of examined barriers has clouded the fact that the recently announced business rates regime has put more barriers in place for new networks – not removed them.  We can examine barriers until the cows come home.  We need the barriers removed, not examined!
Ambitions for open access infrastructure (ducts and poles) are riddled with practical issues that will mean BT will continue to play a waiting game.
Openreach is not “open’, yet we continue to use the word “open” without defining any new structures required for the fibre revolution and relying on old structures that were created for copper networks – simply because it is easier.
And the market testing community-led pilots are out-of-phase with the infrastructure sharing milestone – such that BT is far more likely to be able to give a compelling bid for each scheme and wipe the slate clean than if the infrastructure was truly open.  Well constructed plans need to understand that certain milestones will have dependencies on others.  The project plan needs to be laid-out rather than created as a list, so that these dependencies can be understood and the milestones phased accordingly.
We MUST get our purpose, objectives and milestones better aligned in this critical programme!  This is a matter of national survival on the increasingly competitive landscape of the global internet economy – and we have very little time (perhaps six months to a year) to get our act together.
These milestones are very unlikely to achieve what we need by when we need it.
However, not to be over-critical, there has been some good work.  The recently published Digital Scotland report for a far more ambitious and coherent plan with some great ideas on how to connect Broadband to Big Society and provide speeds much closer to what “the best superfast broadband network in Europe” might look like.  But it is not clear that Westminster can hear Edinburgh down the communication lines of two countries with different political parties in leadership positions and with Scotland coming up to  Elections and the rest of the UK trying to work out what they actually voted for!
It is time to wash-away these inch-pebbles and create a national debate and a coherent joined-up plan on this important subject with real, competitive milestones that will create a national, shared, fibre infrastructure (such as has recently been announced by Italy) as well as to bridge both the geographic and social digital divides with real connections and real training and participation rather than the political verbiage that we have become used to over the past few years.
We will be challenging the current thinking at the NextGen ’10 conference in Birmingham on 22-23rd November.
If Big Society is to happen (and be supported by the necessary digital infrastructure required), then this part of the Business Plan needs re-thinking – particularly if we are really going to deliver on the excellent ambition set out by Jeremy Hunt in June.
Thank you for being open enough to allow me to comment and please take the comments as a constructive contribution to what is a truly vital part of the government’s business plan.
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The Thought of No Thought

This morning at 11.00 many people stopped what they were doing, stood still and were silent for two minutes. I was one of them.

The first minute I thought of those I had known who were no longer here. Anthony Daly, a friend blown up by the IRA whilst on his horse in Hyde Park….and several others I will not name.

For the second minute I cleared my mind to have no thoughts – as if in a trance or meditative state of nothingness.  I thought how interesting it is to find a place where the Thought is “No Thought”. How very Zen!

And how healing it was to take a break from the visions I had of the horrors and casualties of War.

In the two minutes silence we are not told what to think – but thinking no thoughts can be very healing.

What did you think about at 11.00 this morning?

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Home Ownership in the Connected Kingdom

I got up yesterday morning questioning why it was that BT will take at least another five and possibly ten years to upgrade my broadband from 2MB to 10 or perhaps even 40 (on their current unpublished, un-thought-about plans).  I run an information intensive business from home and I need faster broadband – now.  And I am not alone!  Why should I wait?  And I thought who owns this problem anyway?

It triggered a thought.  A Thursday Thought!

In the early days of Telecoms deregulation, BT was forced to move the ownership of the (plain-old-bog-standard-you-can-have-it-in-any-colour-so-long-as-it-is-black) Telephone to the person owning the number.  Standards were created and innovation thrived with new types of telephone being connected to the network – so long as they conformed to standards.

When Openreach was created,  management of the equipment on the end of the line was handed over to other so-called “Service Providers” and (a little known fact), BT was forced to auction-off the actually ownership of about 60% of their lines – which were predominantly won by the French company, Orange.  However, for those in the Final Third, this line ownership trick is irrelevant.  We are still at the beck-and-call of BT Openreach’s exchange upgrade programme.

A few weeks ago I had lunch with the Chief Engineer at BT Openreach (George Williamson).  I asked him how it was possible to unlock BT’s investment bottleneck and accelerate the rollout of broadband to the final third.  But he simply said the current plans for upgrading would take all of BT’s resources in the next three years and that the programme put BT’s implementation teams at maximum stretch.  So there is an implementation capacity problem here too.  Which is why more local infrastructure building (with or without BT) looks interesting.  There is a market for it, if only BT Openreach were prepared to publish their plans of where (and where not) they intend to go.

So I thought, what about me owning my own line – like in the days when I ownership of the telephone passed from BT to the private sector?  What if I could then do a deal with BT (or another service provider) to pay them double to upgrade the line (rather than pay Sky to watch football).  What if I paid them treble (and not buy a new car)?  What if I bought new shares in a community bond scheme which would partner with BT (or another builder) to accelerate the rollout?  What if (like in some parts of Europe) a mortgage company will extend a mortgage to include the cost of a Next Generation connection?  What if there were people in my community who would underwrite the scheme?  What if….

So I leave the question hanging – why shouldn’t I be able to by and own my own line?  I don’t want it owned by some service provider or some company that themselves are totally dependent on a part of BT Group that is not the slightest bit interested in my line – until about 2108 if I am lucky!

Time to re-think “home ownership” and what a connected home really means in the connected kingdom!

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Digital Scotland Rocks!

I was away in Edinburgh last week at the launch of the Digital Scotland report.  A fine piece of work which creates a new way of looking at Next Generation Access in the UK by suggesting that Scotland creates a Digtial Scotland Trust with a number of internet hubs which serve 2,000 people or about 800 households.

The report was refreshing – but what I found most interesting (and at the same time most frustrating) is that many of the ideas, issues and blockages on the deployment of Next Generation Access are not new.  The same ideas were being talked about back in 2002!  Yet this time around there are a whole new set of academics and enlightened individuals in the wider society beginning to take much more of an interest because Next Generation Broadband Access is at the heart of the UK’s competitive position in the world and we are seen to be slipping behind.

Professor Michael Fourman kicked-off his talk with the report commissioned by Google which came out that day called the Connected Kingdom – which says that the UK is Number 1 for e-commerce.

So the story gets confusing as those looking at this video will say “we are not slipping behind, we are number 1 for e-commerce – which is what really matters”.

The critical next step is to find a way to educate the politicians on the benefits of NGA and wider ICT to their (drastically reduced) public sector programmes and to see if we can bridge the investment gap of about £10-15 bn to accelerate rollout to the Final Third (both geographically disconnected and socially excluded). A trivial amount for a five year programme in an industry that is worth over £100bn to the UK economy each year. We need to move from a connected kingdom to a hyper-connected kingdom which includes everyone, not just the digitally advantaged.

Although BT has committed a substantial amount of new investment, it cannot crack the problem on its own.  In many ways, the real test for success will be how “open” the so-called OpenReach really is.

The additional investment is needed over-and-above the (approximately £5bn committed by BT,  Virgin Media and the government’s BDUK division with any match-funding from Europe).  It is needed to implement the difficult bits of the 20 year programme which we are half-way through.  And it needs to be invested alongside some new thinking on business models, shared assets, shared investment schemes and business rates rationalisation.

The difficult part of the implementation (of the final third) has started.  It is time for the more enlightened thinking from the Royal Society of Edinburgh (and the August report from the Scottish Reform Trust) as well as the Foundation for Science and Technology to bring new thinking and political momentum to this old problem.  With right political alignment and the realisation that the public sector cuts can only be achieved by investing in a Hyper-Connected Kingdom the required new money will flow in to fill the gap.

As some of you may know, Scotland is (geologically) part of Canada – and only joined Europe relatively recently (in earth time). Rod Mitchell, my namesake, pointed out to me that much of the thinking that went into the Welsh Assembly Government’s commissioning of the FibreSpeed network in North Wales came from Scotland.   I hope this time around that Scotland actually benefits from its own thinking – rather than exporting the ideas without getting the true benefits of implementing them at home!

Putting the UK back at the front with the “Best Broadband in Europe in this government” is totally possible.  It is a simple matter of some clear thinking, a few politicians who “get” it and a bit of rocket fuel under the BDUK and Ofcom to tweak some of the industry structures!

Watch this space!

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Great Inventor Dies

There are very, very few people who invent truly new shapes and ideas that come mainstream and change the way people think within their own lifetime.  However, Benoit Mandelbrot (who died last Thursday) can be said to be one of these very, very few.  He both named and created the field of fractal mathematics.

Whilst he didn’t discover the basic maths of fractals, he found an obscure, almost unknown concept of exploring the world between two dimensions and three dimensions and showed its fundamental role in the fabric of the universe.

Wikipedia has a great entry on what both fractals and Mandelbrot’s other work have done for mathematics.

Benoit Mandlebrot RIP

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Powers of Ten

I have always been intrigued by numbers and dates – and on Sunday we passed the memorable date of 10/10/10 – which works which ever side of the Atlantic you live on!

Thank you, Sebastian, for reminding me of the clear, succinct and beautifully conveyed video “Powers of Ten” — the classic nine-minute film made for IBM by the legendary design team Charles and Ray Eames in 1977.

As intended with all Thursday Thoughts, this one really makes you think!

More on the story from IBM at: http://www.ibm.com/ibm/ideasfromibm/us/powers_of_ten/20101010/index.shtml

and at: http://powersof10.com/

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What Makes A Loyal Customer?

I had a interesting dinner on Tuesday night this week with a group of executives from various Telecoms companies discussing the subject of customer loyalty.  The discussion ranged from offshore contact centres through social media to large databases with customer information and “intelligence”.

How Can I Help You?

When asked to sum up, I thought deeply about what really made me loyal to the brands that I hold dear.  I have had good and bad experiences with both onshore and offshore centres.  I have seen social media used well (and badly).  I am using the emerging tools of webchat more and more to fix problems and find out information without talking to a call centre agent.  In the past I have helped to build very large databases about customers.  But none of these, for me, were the root-idea of what made me loyal.

It struck me that current trends on “fixing processes” and “KPI measurement” and “culture” also often completely miss the point by looking backwards – a bit like driving a car through the rear view mirror.

What made me loyal, I concluded was “An authentic response in the moment”.  The idea went down well.

Very interested to know what other readers might think is the single thing that helps to make them loyal to a service provider…

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The Only Thing That Can Change the World

I continue to be very inspired by the RSA’s Animate series – with fantastic cartoons illustrating really complex ideas.

The clip below has been recently released, with Matthew Taylor’s ideas on 21st Century Enlightenment.

It ends with a great quote Margaret Mead (American cultural anthropologist, 1901-1978):

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.  Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

So now you know the only thing that can change the world!

Enjoy!

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