chieftech's blog - Filed under 'australia'

March 2, 2010

SI Camp - a tool for social entrepreneurship

This weekend I'll be attending the first Australian Social Innovation Camp. On Saturday and Sunday, I'll be playing the role of a roving 'mentor', moving between the teams offering feedback, encouragement and advice where I can.

I also plan to do a lot of observing and listening, because I want to better understand the perceptions and expectations of participants of how they see the ideas from this weekend evolving into sustainable initiatives, that have a real social impact.

To give you some context - I've heard and read about Cheryl Kernot commenting on the state of social innovation in Australia on a number of occasions and I tend to agree with her that it is time to introduce a stronger vein of social entrepreneurship. While I've seen plenty of passion and goodwill in the SI Camp community for social good, I'm not quite sure we yet have enough entrepreneurship in the equation. This is broader issue than SI Camp itself and Kernot is quoted in this summary of a presentation at a recent mental health forum as saying (or words to the effect) that:

the social landscape is seeing huge social change away from reliance on charity and grants- much more about creative income generation. We need to let go of non-profit and profit distinction but how can we harness profits that put back into the social community, there needs to be a reassessment of “Not for Profit” terminology.

For me, the exciting thing about SI Camp is about using it as a tool for social entrepreneurship (and one that make use of the inherent attributes and capabilities of Web 2.0 technologies in a number of ways), rather than simply as an event where these ideas just become an expression of the good will that exists in the Web 2.0 community. A subtle, but important difference.

Photo Credit: From the Dignity in Care: Enabled by the Web (Set) CC-BY

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Filed under // australia cheryl kernot social entrepreneurship social innovation camp

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January 11, 2010

The nuts and bolts of Macquarie University's Gmail deal to manage staff email

The agreement is significant to Google as it has spent more than two years trying to court the university to adopt Gmail for staff members. But the university was hesitant to move staff members on to Gmail due to regulatory and cost factors.
They were concerned that their email messages would be subject to draconian US law.
In particular, they were worried about protecting their intellectual property under the Patriot Act and Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Mr Bailey said.
"In the end, Google agreed to store that data under EU jurisdiction, which we accepted," he said.
The university had to comply with state laws, which mandated that data had to be stored in NSW.
Google was not going to build a local data centre anytime soon so Macquarie had to maintain an offline archive of data at the university, he said. In the past, Macquarie was concerned about the cost of relaying large files to and from the US, where Google's data centre resides. But this been resolved thanks to the Australia's Academic and Research Network (AARnet), which the university is a member of. "AARNet peered with Google (and Microsoft) which means it won't cost us anything more," Mr Bailey said.
A $2 million limited liability was increased to $10m in case Gmail stopped working. "You need proper recourse if your free email service stops working."

via theaustralian.com.au

Its important to note how Macquarie Uni resolved their concerns about moving staff mailboxes to Gmail... a combination of getting their off shored data managed under a more friendly jurisdiction, creating their own archive to comply with local law, data peering and risk management through increased financial liability provisions. A good checklist for other large Australian organisations that want to go down the same path?

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Filed under // australia email google outsourcing risk management web 2.0

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September 30, 2009

Mashing the Aussie State: Geocoding Medicare office location data

Just for fun(!), I geocoded the Medicare office locations released as part of the 'beta' data.australia.gov.au initiative and then put it on a map:

Unfortunately I don't have anywhere to host the map itself (because of the script, I can't post it here), however the raw geocoded data is available via Google Docs.

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Filed under // australia data geocoding government 2.0 mashups

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September 29, 2009

Examples of innovative corporate IT in Australia: Jetstar and CSC

I picked up a copy of the August/September edition of Australia's CIO magazine while stuck at Melbourne airport last week. A couple of positive Web 2.0 related stories grabbed my attention (and it does make a change from the usual scare mongering or lame vendor case studies about CIOs spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on some piece of new obscure piece of hardware):

Jetstar

First, discount airline Jetstar have started to virtualise servers and desktops. This has resulted in a shift in how they regard PC and laptops, which they now treat as commodities. Apparently most users have admin right's to their computers and can install what they want. The IT department has a policy of trouble shooting user's computer problems for 15 minutes and if it can't be fixed they simply reimage it back to their original standard operating environment. To counter act any security issues user maintained equipment creates they are now focusing on addressing this threat at their network level rather than the user's desktop.

I like this quote from their CIO, Stephen Tame:

I can see a future where you join a company and they say 'Congratulations... Where's your laptop? And, by the way, here's a 16 gig SD card that contains our SOE'

Clearly inside Jetstar it isn't quite a Web 2.0 environment yet (virtualised with thin clients etc rather than Web 2.0), but the attitude of the CIO is on the right track.

If you happen to work for Jetstar, I'd love to know how this environment works for you in practice.

CSC

I've talked about my old friends at CSC on this blog in the past, who have been working for some time at putting enterprise social computing into practice. There is a good interview with CSC Australia CIO, Ben Patey, who talks in more detail about their global implementation of Jive's SBS platform. Remembering the CSC is a massive IT services firm, Ben describes CSC's initiative (called C3) as tackling all the "classic business problems":

The ability to find people and things in an organisation of 90,000 staff around the world;
Reducing the risk of intellectual property being lost when people walk out the door;
To help with the 'on boarding' process for new staff; and
To attract new staff, as C3 demonstrates that CSC is an innovative company in practice.

C3 is still being treated as a pilot, but through a viral marketing approach has managed to attract over 20,000 users. Ben says:

"The general feeling is that it's a great gap filler and is hitting a sweet spot," he says. "One guy said he went from a sceptic to a convert and that it really makes you want to get involved, and that this is just what we have needed for a long time to truly connect. It's much easier, and more fun. Another critical success factor is the senior executives use of the tool; in CSC Australia our local CEO, CFO and VPs are actively blogging which is a tremendous indication of the power of C3."

Both Jetstar and CSC are companies that take the bottom line very seriously... so its really is refreshing to see stories like this coming out of the Australian corporate IT sector. New Web inspired approaches to supporting the needs of corporate users aren't just consulting waffle, they have a real and important impact.

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Filed under // australia csc enterprise social computing information technology management innovation jetstar

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September 19, 2009

Social Innovation Camp Scotland 2009 on film

via sicamp.org

Social Innovation Camp is taking place in Australia next March, with initial meetup events taking place around the country. But what exactly is Social Innovation Camp all about? Watch this video from SI Camp Scotland:

Social Innovation Camp (Sicamp)is an experiment in creating social innovations for the digital age. The third Sicamp took place at Saltire Centre in Glasgow on Friday 19th June to 21st June 2009 and proved a huge success. Over 60 people joined in to turn six back-of-the-envelope ideas for web tools to change the world into real social start-ups complete with working software - all in under 48 hours. This video is a quick summary of what took place over the 48 hour period from beginning to end.

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Filed under // australia events scotland social innovation camp video

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September 15, 2009

Australian business decision makers full of FUD about wikis

Since it is unusual to see this kind of research locally, I downloaded a report on the barriers to wiki adoption in Australia from Queensland-based analyst firm, Longhaus the other day.

While I'm not entirely convinced by their conclusions about the longer term value of wikis being data- and process- orientated in order to better fill the gap where portals failed (although I agree wikis have great potential as the interface for an enterprise mashup platform, but there is more to it that the front end), their survey of 51 CxO level people from medium to large Australian enterprise is worth a look if only to understand the FUD in the business community.

My own analysis of the 14 odd barriers they list (ignoring the last 'other' category) groups them in to four broad types of barrier that I've listed in order of frequency:

1. Ignorance of enterprise wiki technology options;

2. Lack of familiarity of the wiki concept;

3. Uncertainty about the value; and

4. Internal barriers (e.g. business culture).

We're constantly told that that issues such as understanding the ROI from social computing and business culture are the major barriers to implementation, but it would be a real shame if these were really underpinned by a lack of knowledge about the actual technology options and the capabilities of enterprise-grade wiki solutions!

The survey also asked about the benefits (knowledge management benefits rated highly, but it was good to see mention of improvements to workforce cohesion, communication and information management too) and their intent to use enterprise wikis in the future, with 12% of medium-to-large Australian firms having already implemented wikis and a further 44% in the process of planning or considering their use.

Barriers to enterprise wiki adoption: understanding the wiki-portal continuum, published in May 2009, is free to download but registration is necessary.

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Filed under // australia enterprise wikis research wikis

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August 17, 2009

Tom Worthington's advice to the Government 2.0 Task Force

My initial advice to the task force was that one of the major lessons of the we and Internet to government is that you have to actually do it to make it work. Also you need to look to the academics and the private sector to see how it can be done. The third is to makes use of the policy and rhetoric from the USA, UK and other government but not necessarily their implementation. I am not sure that the taskforce members at the meeting understood the point I was making.

via tomw.net.au

I have to say that I agree with all of Tom's points here. The only thing I might add is that they should look to the academics and private sector plus the non-profit sector to see how it can be done.

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Filed under // australia government 2.0

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