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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least another five and possibly ten years to upgrade my broadband from 2MB to 10 or perhaps even 40 (on their current unpublished, un-thought-about plans).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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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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Digital Scotland and The Royal Society of Edinburgh

Just returned from the Next Gen ’10 roadshow in Edinburgh.

The most interesting thing for me ( which I had compeletely missed before I went there) is that Scotland has approached this whole problem of upgrading the broadband network by commissioning the Royal Society of Edinburgh to look at the problem afresh.  Unlike The Royal Society (based in London), the RSE has maintained the “Scottish Generalist Tradition” and have brought an eclectic set of wise folk to apply new thought and rigour to working through the issue of broadband in Scotland so that it serves the wider context of society and the economy.  Technology is a means to a greater end, not an end in itself.

The Digital Scotland interim report can be found by first clicking on the RSE logo below and then clicking on the link right at the bottom of the page “Read Interim Report”:

Unlike the Digital Britain report which was written in the time of a dying administration by economist-politicians, bureaucrats and quangos, and then attacked by the new administration to become a nearly totally ineffective set of recommendations, Scotland has approached the problem with refreshing renaissance-style method that only a body like the RSE can do.  It is an elegant combination of mathematical logic combined with rounded, objective reasoning – and moves the debate forward so that Scotland might well take the thought-leadership position when it publishes its final report once the current comments have been digested.

One conclusion that I came away with is that the whole debate about where fibre goes should be re-focused around Fibre to the Community.  Many of the more rural areas in Scotland would benefit tremendously by digging a single fibre into the community.  The current ambitions of Jeremy Hunt and the Con-Lib coalition government for the UK to become the leader in Europe for broadband by 2015 – without any central government funding – becomes even more challenging when one compares us to Finland – which was very well articulated by Professor Michael Fourman in his detailed analysis backing up Digital Scotland at the conference.

One of the strange things is that the interim report talks of Fiber, not Fibre.  I am not sure how this American English has managed to get into a perfectly good Scottish-English Language document.  But Hey Ho – the world moves on!

The Scots, Edinburgh and the RSE have a long tradition of great invention and enlightened thinking.  This blog will keep a keen eye on developments North of the Border.

(P.S.  The talk that I gave on Sir Patrick Geddes will be put onto this post once I transcribe and edit it.)

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When the Pipe is Blocked

Most of the past week has been taken up with me trying to connect my right leg back to my body.

However, my leg has not been cut off – nor have I been involved in any domestic violence or serious accidents.

Let me explain…

Last Thursday, I had been suffering from a cramping pain in my leg for over a week.  The leg had been swollen for a while and felt quite detached from the rest of my body.  So I decided to go to the doctors on Friday – just before the long Bank Holiday weekend.  He suspected some sort of Thrombosis (or a blood-clot in a vein) and I started a course of medication to thin the blood.

A scan on Tuesday confirmed that I had Deep Vein Thrombosis or DVT.  The sort of things they get worried about when you are old and go on long-haul flights.  So I am now on blood-thinning medicines for 6 months to get rid of the clot.

Picture from: http://heartstrong.wordpress.com/2010/03/30/march-is-dvt-awareness-month-are-you-at-risk/

I suppose it is strange to you that I am writing about such a personal experience on my blog, but this blog is designed to make you think.  It has certainly made me think hard about the more important things in life like family, friends, fitness and general work-life balance.  Even my own mortality!

I have always taken good health for granted and I have not had to go to the doctor for anything serious for years.  But, more importantly, I was thinking how important good circulation or FLOW is in any organism….and I started to wonder what “Organisational DVT” might look like.

If you look for natural flows in an organisation, then there is deal flow and cash flow and the flow of information to fix a problem.  There is also the flow of planning information to coordinate future plans and get everyone (especially suppliers and customers) in-sync.  If things really go wrong, then we can end up with burst pipes and oil disasters.

So the concept of one of these flows within an organisation getting blocked becomes quite interesting to me in the work that I do.

In many ways, if things are flowing, then life is as it is meant to be.  If things are blocked, then life becomes a struggle and the consultants get called in – both medically and managerially!

So if the analogy can be taken further, then it is interesting to wonder what the equivalent of blood-thinning agents are to organisational DVT…  One of the most important is cash – and if you can’t borrow it, then parts of the organisation will surely become blocked and unhealthy.  But there are probably many more examples.

Now I know what is wrong with my leg, then I hope it will start to reattach itself to the rest of my body, as it were, so that I feel whole again as the clot dissolves.

After all, you only have one body – and selling-off parts or divisions to the highest bidder is not the answer in this particular case!  That is where the analogy between human bodies and organisational bodies perhaps starts to break down.

All the same, it is an interesting analogy and one that I may well explore further in future Thursday Thoughts.

As before, all comments welcome!

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When it’s Time to Quit

This is the first of a new series of “Thursday Thoughts”.  Please do sign up for future editions by completing the form on the THURSDAY THOUGHTS? tab above and I will send you an email in the future every Thursday to stimulate your thoughts!

Having spent a few weeks struggling to master a state-of-the-art Web 2.0 marketing package costing me several hundred dollars in monthly service fees, I decided, this week, to stop the subscription, clear the decks and start again.

In the high-tech world, times like this are both scary and exciting.  You press the “delete button in the sky” and all the work you have put into the old system is gone.  This is particularly true with cloud-based applications – where you have not only put time into configuring – but much the more valuable time of actually learning the system.

The good news is that in the past 24 hours I have managed to re-create a much better integration with my existing website and blog than I ever managed to achieve with the old system – at about a tenth of the ongoing monthly expenses!

The buzz in the past few years might well be right concerning Cloud Services, Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, On Demand etc. etc. as being the next big thing.  But some things don’t change.  INTEGRATION is absolutely key to creating a smooth flow of work between the various application stacks in any company.  This is where the workarounds and exceptions and “knowledge of how things work” becomes the expensive items in any organisation – whether in the Business or IT.

The corageous pioneers of this new cloud-based world will make many mistakes in the early days when choosing which platforms and applications should (or should not run) their companies.  It smacks of the pre-ERP world where integrators made a lot of money from bonding “best of breed” packages.  It was only because of the high costs and failure of many of these projects did  the big ERP vendors like SAP and Oracle make the move to mop up by presenting pre-integrated suites of applications.

From my experience, in the early days of developing anything new, you have to keep it REALLY SIMPLE, find applications that are already well integrated with other things you use.  So often we are taken down a blind alley because some hype or salesman has schmoozed us about all the exciting features in XYZ application – many of which we will never use – however competent we become.

In the past 36 hours I have re-taught myself that when things are simply not going right, it is often a big relief to “call it quits”.  I was pleased that I could at least extract the latest data sets of customers and products that I had on the old system and make an elegant withdrawal from the complexity, confusion and cost that it had given me.  It strikes me that a lot of politicians and civil-servants must be thinking the same about whatever their particular problem is at the moment.

Finally, I always think that the basis of a good decision is whether, 24 hours later, you regret making the change or not.  I am glad to say that today I am very happy with my choice of simplifying and getting back to basics.  Interested to any of your thoughts or stories that support (or counter) this, the First Thursday Thought!

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