The Sharing Economy

Welcome to the first edition of my blog. 

I decided to create this blog as a way to share my passion for two things I really believe in.

• Digital Transformation with a real passion for the Digital City, and 
• Passive Optical LAN. 

For those who think this is just another arm chair warror with an opinion to share or a box to sell, you are welcome to move on. If you want my help, reach out and ask questions, this forum is not about selling things. It's about sharing ideas, education and helping people understand what is possible. Yes I absolutely sell this stuff for a living, but hey they tell me its a good thing to make your passion your work right?.

I have been around this space since before it was a buzzword, spoken on the international stage for NZTE in Korea and Australia, in Shanghai at World Expo and in Beijing for clients, along with a host of Australasian conferences. And I have watched the discussions go around and around, soaring to the dizzying heights of strategy and board papers, only for them to plummet to their death time and time again. I have spoken on the technology for Smart Buildings, Transportation, Measuring Environmental Impact, Health in the IOT era and more and the underlying challenges people face all around Asia Pacific are the same. When you strip away the politics and the agendas, we all have the same issues. Affordability, Scale and then Monetisation.

I am looking to use this to bring my real world learnings and my thought leadership to those who want it. For reference that real word deployment consists of:

• 20+ years in ICT - (yes I am getting old but that's how you get battle scars and learn lessons)
• 10 years presenting and providing input to Digital Transformation strategy across APAC, 
• Network Outsourcing the ICT of two of  NZ's largest power utilities to drive their Digital Transformation (valued at over $150MNZ)
• And in the past two years, 
• Five council Passive Optical LAN deployments along with,
• Six other enterprise businesses including a sports stadium.

All of these have different agendas, but all with the same outcome, developing and implementing a very flexible, scaleable, open connectivity architecture that will enable the delivery of many many services right around their facilities, regions or district as their Digital (City) strategy comes to life.

Now you may ask how these two things go together, and thats a fair question. The answer is that they don't. Not as a package anyway, but they are complementary.

The first is a journey, one that will take some time as the different portions of your strategy come to life, the second is an enabler. It allows anyone with a spread network (WAN Stretched LAN, Campus network) to overcome the single biggest obstacle to getting a complete digital strategy underway, which is the cost of infrastructure and connectivity. Some of you will not agree with this statement and thats ok, we are all approaching this from different angles. 

Some will address this as a data mining exercise, "If I have data I can sell it and use it to target services to customers". Others will look at this from an infrastructure viewpoint wondering how they can leverage what they have, or buy to make the leap to e-solutions, and others still will be thinking about the end user experience and the application layer. 

The key message as it always is, is that not all of these things are created equal, and that not all of these things are going to be right for you and your journey. Whether or not they work comes down to you answerng a few questions.

1) What does becoming Digital mean to you.

2) What are you trying to achieve.

To get you started, lets use the approach I prefer which is to think about more than just services or a way to save costs. I have lost count of the number of meetings, workshops and presentations I have been in or done, where the conversation goes straight to whats the cheapest, how to get free wifi for everyone, or how much money will it make me and how long will it take. 

Think instead about how you want your services to be delivered, what social or service outcomes would you like to see that until now have been difficult to deliver, and how you want to see your customers or community engaging with you. Throw away all the rules, the playbook written by large infastructure vendors has been ripped up and is now used for lighting the BBQ.

A few years ago we used to think about regulatory frameworks, Public Private Partnerships, tax incentives and how to get WAN capacity at an affordable price. These days, none of that applies, and we can focus on the future without the complications. Technological advancements like Passive Optical LAN have transformed the ability of a business or a region to bridge the digital divde, connect people and to deliver services in a way they have never been able to, and all for an investment profile that only 5 years ago, was unthinkable. 

Why do we need Digital Transformation?

1. By 2050, the global urban population (those who live in our cities and towns) will increase by 75% to 6.3 billion (i.e. two thirds of the world population). The challenge of developing and maintaining attractive, inclusive and safe environments, and then delivering these people services and products to live their lives has to be met on multiple fronts. Stakeholders are local governments, city service providers, industry, and of course the rate payers.
2. Mobility as a service will be centre point in this journey. It will continue to benefit from the increasing will of citizens to participate in the "sharing economy" and to allow them to innovate and contribute to your success. This does not mean rush out and deploy 5G, we will cover this in a later post. 5G has a place but it is not where the advertisers want us to think, at least not in NZ.
3. Besides their traditional role, businesses (councils in particular) are increasingly organising and exposing data, especially in real time. Big data along with analytics and machine learning improves engagement and inclusiveness of people and visitors. 
4. Augmented and virtual reality are another facet of exposing or simulating data from the past, present or future, and are increasingly common place especially in large format retail, advertising, navigation and tourism. How to monetise of these services will come in later blogs. 

So here is the challenge:

To bring this all together the “Business of Tomorrow” will have to reinvent itself, from todays “keeper of information” to tomorrow’s “facilitator of information”.Information from all sources, consumed by all people, on any device, in any format.

All businesses (but Councils in particular as the largest guardian of people’s information outside of central government),  will have to adapt to becoming a real time consumption portal. This does not mean online shopping, massive cloud deployments or big server farms, it just means working smarter with what you have and using the technology available to drive better outcomes. No person, entity or organisation can do this alone, and the old strategy of massive capital investment is long dead. 

The way the services of the future will be consumed has not even been invented yet. An example of how your customer interactions might change in the next two years can be gained from looking at the market segment we call Zoomers or Gen Z.  This group is far more social than the generation before and have adapted to the online world and social networking as easily as the “Baby boomers” might write a note or make a phone call. 

Gen Z comprised 32 percent of the global population of 7.7 billion in 2019, nudging ahead of millennials, who will account for a 31.5 percent share, based on Bloombergs analysis of United Nations data, and using 2000/2001 as the generational split. 

Yet most of what we do today is still aimed at the Boomer. 

Businesses that are embracing this journey are taking a Digital first approach to everything, they are creating digital innovation hubs that focus on delivering new and creative services in Tech, Wellbeing, Finance, Cities and Industry.

WELCOME TO THE SHARING ECONOMY.