Keynote: Building Business in a Connected World

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Tomorrow morning I am giving the keynote at City of Port Phillip’s inaugural Breakfast Briefing session for the year in St Kilda, Melbourne, on the topic of Building Business in a Connected World. Here are event details and registration.

Below are my slides for the presentation, which is almost entirely based on our Success in a Connected World visual framework launched earlier today.

The usual caveats apply – the slides are NOT intended to stand alone but to provide a visual accompaniment to my presentation, so these are shared primarily for those who attended my keynote. However others may still find them useful or interesting.

Note that the presentation is intended primarily for individuals and smaller businesses. It’s a completely different presentation for large enterprise.

Building Business in a Connected World

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Infographic: Building Success in a Connected World

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Last weekend I was musing about the elements of success in a connected world. Something clicked, and I was able to pull out of it a visual representation as below. For my keynote tomorrow morning on Building Business in a Connected World I will just run through this diagram together with commentary on how to approach each of the key elements.

Success in a Connected World
Click on the image for full size

This diagram brings together the foundations of success in a connected world: Relationships, Visibility, and Execution, and how to achieve these.
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Breakfast keynote on Building Business in a Connected World in Melbourne next Wednesday

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The majority of my keynote speaking engagements are to executives or managers within organizations, or at large conferences, so there are relatively few opportunities for people to come see me speak (aside from on our collection of keynote speaking videos (which we will be adding to shortly)).

However next Wednesday the City of Port Phillip in Melbourne has engaged me to give the keynote at the first of their business breakfast series, intended for businesses in the region. The topic of my keynote is:

Building Your Business in a Connected World
The spectacular rise of our hyper-connected world offers fabulous opportunities for those businesses ready to seize them. As bandwidth grows, smartphones and tablets take off, and social media such as Facebook become commonplace, the way customers find suppliers and successful businesses operate are rapidly changing. In this compelling keynote Ross Dawson will provide specific advice on how to tap three vital aspects of business in a connected world: the valuable tools of cloud computing, the power of personal branding, and the extraordinary resources available through crowdsourcing.
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The REAL transformative package: iPad plus wireless keyboard

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The iPad has changed my life. It feels like I have been waiting for it since I became conscious.

However the iPad alone doesn’t do the job. It is the iPad together with a wireless keyboard that has transformed my life.

Two years ago tomorrow I wrote a blog post saying It is totally INSANE that you cannot use an external keyboard on an iPhone. For some completely inane reason Apple crippled the Bluetooth on the iPhone so it couldn’t be used for external keyboards.
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Notes on the future of distributed work and organizations

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I am sitting in the lounge at Sydney airport, about to fly to San Francisco. It is the ease of the iPad that allows me to put up this post on the fly.

I came straight to the airport from a media panel organized by Cisco to follow up on their Connected World research study. Below are the notes I managed to catch on my iPad as we spoke..

The panellists were:
Senator Kate Lundy, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister
Jacob Murray-White, Head of Salmat’s Customer Solutions at Home Programme
Fernanda Afonso, National Chair of Australian Psychological Society and Specialist, Freehills.
Ross Dawson, Futurist

Les Williamson, Managing Director of Cisco Australia, told the story of how Cisco was born from love. Two academics at Stanford University were in a relationship, but worked on opposite sides of the campus. They created a multi-protocol router to communicate, started building them commercially in a garage, got funded, and grown spectacularly since then.

Below are live notes from the panel. I haven’t attributed them as they sometimes bring together comments from several people or my interpretation. It was a fascinating discussion.
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Six trends for 2011 and beyond on how businesses can tap the power of the web

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The very dynamic Adam Franklin and Toby Jenkins of Bluewire Media recently did a video interview of me, asking me about the trends driving how the web will shape business.

Here is the video, with a summary of my headline points below. (Also see Bluewire Media’soriginal post of the video , which has my comments written up in greater detail.)

What do you see the future of the web being for businesses?

The fundamental trends include:

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Will tablets take over enterprise work? More than half of large companies say yes

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It wasn’t long ago that one of the most solid and unquestioned assumptions of enterprise software was that users sat at a desk in front of a desktop (or sometimes laptop) computer. As such, maintaining a fleet of almost exclusively Windows-based computers was sometimes a larger task than selecting, developing, and running the enterprise software on which work was performed.

The rise of tablet computing, still less than a year now from when the iPad first become available, may significantly change that scenario. Morgan Stanley has just released the results of a survey showing that 51% of CIOs of large organizations expect to be buying tablets for their staff within a year, with another 16% expecting to support staff using their own tablets on the company’s network.


Source: Digital Daily, Morgan Stanley
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7 critical aspects of Tibbr’s big step forward for enterprise social software

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Earlier this week I gave the opening keynote at the Sydney launch of Tibbr, the new social enterprise offering from TIBCO. I hope to have the video of my presentation up before long.

Before the event I summarized some of the very positive commentary on Tibbr since the San Francisco launch two weeks ago.

It’s now time to offer my own thoughts. Here is what I think is most interesting and important about Tibbr.

 

Social media-style interface.
As many have commented, the Tibbr interface looks very much like Facebook. The familiarity of the interface makes it immediately easy to use and understand for almost anyone. Marc Benioff of Salesforce once asked “why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?”. If you agree, your time has come, given Tibbr provides exactly that style of front end to virtually all corporate activity.
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What is the future of the IT department?

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The future of enterprise technology is a massively important theme, which impacts organizations, vendors, governments, and indeed society at large. Taking each of these perspectives provides a different view on how the space is evolving.

One of the most interesting perspectives is from the very center of the fray: the IT department itself. It needs to deal with the minutiae of technological change as well as the macrotrends shaping organizations and their shifting place in the global economy.

I’ve teamed up with the outstanding strategist Greg Rippon of NetFocus, who I first worked with back in 1999 on a broad-ranging scenario project for a major bank, to create a one-day workshop for IT departments who want to take a structured look at the future and what it implies for their current strategy.

Click on the image for the flyer for the workshop on the future of the IT department.


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Conversation on the future of books and publishing

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I am at a lunch organized by book publisher Blurb with Robin Goldberg, SVP of global channels at the company and a variety of authors, journalists and photographers. Blurb’s focus is on personal self-expression such as photography, travel journals, wedding books and so on, so they largely print on hardcover in full color. Blurb has been running for four years and did $45 million in sales last year.

One of the interesting differences between Blurb and some of the other print-on-demand suppliers is that Blurb doesn’t take any cut from the markup that authors choose to put on the sales price of the book.

Below are some of the many discussion topics at the lunch (some with my own thoughts and perspective inject), in no particular order.

  • Does anyone read purely on digital devices any more? One person at the lunch, Stilgherrian, says he rarely reads on paper, and he intends to get rid of any books he hasn’t touched in the last six months. Some others in the group are rarely buying books. I am rapidly shifting to buying e-books though I expect I will still buy some physical books. We’ll see.

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