Do you need a better distributed network?

Are you looking for a better way to connect distributed locations?

 

About 6 years ago, we were struggling with a consistent way for communications to stores in a cost effective manner across our locations in 4 countries.

 

We were working with 6 telcommunication providers for store data connections in 4 countries providing their their own connectivity methods. At the time, Canada was a very fragmented market without an aggregator.

The best solution back then was a private IP network with each provider and try and merge the routing.

 

For us, this wasn't sustainable and it had a number of problems. The main issues were:

1) The providers controlled the routers in store which limited our control and connection monitoring.

2) The solutions were all very expensive.

3) There was no backup solution and you were limited to a single data provider.

4) It did not provide split tunnelling at the store locations (internet/corporate). This meant that all transactions had to go back via a corporate aggregated location.

5) There were no white or black lists of IP addresses which meant your filtering must occur at that centralised location.

6) Integrated EFTPOS was a problem as the gateway had to be at the corporate office.

7) Speed limited. Most global private IP solutions at that time had very limited speed 512/512 was about the best even though ADSL 2+ had been public for quite some time.

8) It was challenging to implement wifi technology in the store which would route inside and outside the network.

 

We went to meeting after meeting with telecommunications providers with the consistent result of 'its not possible' or 'its too expensive' to fix.

 

So we partnered with Juniper (a network hardware provider) and built our own network. It took 2 years to design, configure, build, test and then implement globally on our 300 stores and it works very very well for far less than $2000 capital cost per store.

 

The Juniper router takes any network connection and a fail over 3/4G modem (from a different telecommunications provider for redundancy), plugs in a high grade wifi access point all for much less than $45 per month with no data limit and removes all the problems above and provides a robust wifi service in store.

 

It is also compatible in every country we operate in. One configuration managed centrally.

 

 

The result?

Integrated EFTPOS is now available with a gateway in each store.

Faster internet for store operations for direct secured internet access.

Faster corporate applications (One data transmission process went from 30 minutes on average to 6 minutes on average).

Firewalled white and black lists for internet access.

Separated internal and external wifi.

Redundancy. We can now unplug our primary data connection and failover is set to 15 seconds. This enables refits and temporary locations to only require a power connection and no data connections. We can have up to 3 mobile data sticks from different providers merging the 3G/4G streams for throughput if required. We haven't found a good use case for this, so we just stick with the one backup stick from the different data provider. 3/4G is fast enough to keep our stores operating during primary link failure or temporary kiosk situation.

Have a great day!


Ross.

 

 

Will the CIO role survive?

It takes a sad heart to write this, but I am getting the distinct feeling that the CIO role as we currently know it is at risk for some organisations. The trend is to place business executives with some IT knowledge in charge of the IT team and call it some merged business title.

To the left of me and to the right of me I am seeing businesses removing the role of CIO. 5 major Australian roles gone in the last couple of months and it made me contemplate.... why?

Technology today has become the focal point to the future success of every business/public service. That is an important statement which no one can deny. It is more important than ever, so why are the roles being removed?

Most CEO's are extremely savvy individuals and can see this social/digital change happening. They also have had their 'A' team in place for many years who are their 'go to' team to execute strategy.

My question to you is: 'Are you on that A team' or are you just the IT girl/guy?"

The CEO now needs their A team to be in control of the IT team, otherwise they can't get what they want executed in the time frame they want. Unfortunately now, every strategic initiative requires IT components.

You need to be on the 'A team'!

The second question is:
"Is this just a transitionary phase?"

My answer is YES. Putting business teams in charge of IT and lowering the highest level of IT knowledge down to a non strategic role can only be temporary. How can you properly define strategy over areas you have no knowledge. I expect this will be a temporary strategic mistake, but one easy to make.

So if you are a super technical CIO who lives for looking after servers, I would be concerned about your future reporting line and title. For those of you CIO's who have already started migrating into the business, that trend will continue!

Have a great week!


Ross.

Will traditional banks fail?

Are traditional banks going to fade away?

Being the first eldest son in 4 generations to defy the family tradition of banking for the last 120 years, I am beginning to feel that was a wise decision.

• When the company providing you your milk and bread is providing banking services and insurance.
• When the Telco's are providing mobile bank accounts through things like M-Pesa deposits and skipping the entire banking industry.
• When the local Australian banks are hampered by having to comply to all the ADI and APRA regulations.
• When the inflow of global payments technology threatens the bank's acquiring business through Paypal now, Bitcoin, Square, Google, Amazon, PromisePay, Apple and other global payment platforms that are entering the market.

Large non banking corporations are using the communities of loyalty customers to provide services and generate additional revenue to the detriment of our traditional banks. This is occurring initially in payments and insurance but loans is just starting to emerge.

This will continue! Those large corporates will continue to target slow moving highly profitable institutions and will continue to poach that business from banks. The first step is to poach the banking CIO's to get the fundamental platforms in place. Mmmmmh, has anyone been watching the CIO and high level IT exec movements in the last 12 months?

Although the traditional bank still earns the majority of its income through a margin on home loans, the fringe products do provide significant ebit. These traditional fringe products of insurance, transactional banking and financial services are being eaten away by smart large corporations leveraging their customer base to create digital revenue.

Now, you might be thinking that the bank's reported profit figures are actually ok. But the underlying problems are being hidden by the substantial (10% per year for the last two years - sourced from the ABS) growth in housing prices leading to a jump in lending and inflated revenue in their core business, but not an increase in customers. I challenge you to look behind the numbers.

Their response is to try to buy customers using traditional means such as low interest balance transfers, but they have missed the bigger problem. Lack of innovation within their customer base and sticking to their core products. They are failing to innovate.

The bank that is able to transform and engage with their customer and provide a wider range of services (currently the bank know more about you than you realise) will grow in the next 10 years. The others will stagnate or be consolidated.

It will be interesting to see how they rise to the challenge.

Got an idea?

Getting an idea to production is easy these days. You just have to love crowdsourcing!

I personally think you should do all the work on the business plan (although you can crowd source it as well), but after that:

Product visual design (to display on funding sites)
www.freelancer.com

Product funding
https://angel.co/ , https://www.kickstarter.com (plus about 4 other good ones)

Logo and web design
http://99designs.com.au/

Product specification (scrum/waterfall)
www.freelancer.com

Product build (two of a hundreds of small quality international dev houses)
http://versatile-soft.com/ , http://dhanushinfotech.com/

Free hosting service for tiny apps (for dev/test or until success comes your way)
http://aws.amazon.com/ or http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/

Product testing
http://99tests.com/

Marketing
Lots of interesting options here... Something for you to look at!

After that.... What you want to do with it is up to you!


Ross.

PS. That isn't an exhaustive list and you probably have your favourites which aren't listed, I am just pointing out how the world has changed in the last 3 years.

Competitor Analysis?

Quite some time ago, I was involved with a company that was expanding their business into a completely new territory. I was the most senior technologist in the company and had a voice at the highest level.

A significant body of work had been undertaken prior to entry into the new market. It was very comprehensive, but after analysis I noticed one glaring omission in my opinion. There was no competitor analysis. For me, this was deeply concerning.

At the next stakeholder meeting I strongly recommended undergoing a complete competitor analysis otherwise I considered the company was going into the venture partially blind. Unfortunately I wasn't persuasive enough as the organisation wanted to move quickly. After struggling for several years, something I consider fairly predictable, they eventually conducted a thorough competitor analysis.

Fortunately throughout our operations at Michael Hill, competitor analysis is part and parcel of ongoing business. Having a deep understanding of the competitors business model and the cause of success is essential in my opinion. This approach has benefited my current organisation greatly and some of our greatest knowledge has been learnt from outside the industry.

If you find yourself reviewing a proposal without a thorough competitor analysis being completed, don't let it go ahead without one. Use this as ammunition, especially if the initiative is of strategic value.

For your own personal growth, I do recommend spending time gathering a deep understanding of other companies business models outside your industry and considering the effect of their application to your current organisation.

Have a great day!

Ross.

Trusted peers in 2001?

New to being a CIO?

It was 2001 and I had just been appointed to the CIO role for a moderately sized multinational retailer called Michael Hill International. It was listed on the New Zealand stock exchange with the global head office based in Brisbane.

So, what now.... I had a lot of great ideas on how we could drive the business forward and there was plenty of literature which could guide me, but where could I get real world mentoring from CIO's who had been doing the role for some time. Were my thoughts prone to the unknown, risky or just going to be expensive and difficult to achieve. One of my favourite phrases is "you don't know what you don't know".

I needed that sounding board and Brisbane in 2001 wasn't full of CIO groups. In fact there were none.

The digital landscape was different back then. Digital hubs where either in their infancy or non existent. There were no online tools for collaboration no linked-in groups, CIO collective or council. The vendors back then tended to keep all of us completely separate and isolated.

So what did I do...

I started a group myself. I cold called the few retail organisations I knew in Brisbane and within 6 months there were 6-12 CIO's meeting regularly talking through vendors, ideas, obstacles and anything else on our mind.

Need something? Just do it!