Category: Opinion

The Metaverse; What matters most will be trust…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Metaverse, Opinion, Technology, Transformation

There’s always a technological development lauded as the ‘next big thing’ that will change our lives forever, after huge financial expenditure, of course. One such is the metaverse which, according to Gartner, will not reach the ‘mature’ phase of its evolution  before 2030. The Badger admits to having an objective scepticism about the metaverse, ostensibly because ‘next big things’ often fail to meet their hype in anything like the forecast timescales. Development of the software, systems, and platforms for the metaverse is, of course, progressing apace, but that’s rather different to it ultimately being embraced by the masses because it provides tangible benefits to their lives.

During a social meeting recently, a tech-savvy millennial asked the Badger to answer  the following three questions about the metaverse using the simplest possible terms:  What is it? Will it happen? What about it will matter most to the average member of the public? An academic treatise can be written for each answer, but the Badger kept his answers, below, as simple as possible.

What is it? To borrow from Deloitte, the metaverse is, in the simplest of terms, the internet but in 3D, with facilities that provide users an immersive, 3D, virtual experience when engaging with virtual environments or other users. It’s a 3D virtual world within which virtual incarnations of a user can interact with simulated environments and other people for social or work purposes without being physically present.

Will it happen? Eventually…perhaps. Aspects of metaverse technology have developed in online gaming over the last 25 years, and Microsoft, for example, has implemented avatars and meetings in virtual reality into Teams. However, that’s still a very long way from a coherent metaverse that changes everyone’s life, especially when the legal, regulatory, data security, and privacy issues  with it are much more profound than with the internet and online world that we currently know.   

What about it will matter most to the average member of the public? Trust. If the lessons from rampant online evolution over the last 25 years are not learned, then the same mistakes will be replicated and amplified in the metaverse. Today we are generally more careful with our personal data and privacy, and more conscious of online security, rampant mis/disinformation, abuse, commercialisation, and the weaponization of information. If trust is not the starting position for the metaverse from the outset, then it will be just another ‘next big thing’ that irritates rather than benefits our lives.

The Badger told the millennial that others have different answers to these questions. They just nodded and said ‘It will be dominated by those who want to manipulate or control us. If I don’t trust it, I’m not going to participate’. If this view is widespread amongst millennials, then the metaverse may stall. Time will tell.

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We must all now be warriors…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Conflict, Life, Opinion, Security

Working at senior levels in major organisations exposes you to decision makers with different personalities, motives, and different ways of interpreting a situation. You tend to calibrate decision makers, and hone instincts that alert you to circumstances where  their decisions take the organisation in a direction destined to fail. These instincts woke like never before while watching Mr Putin’s theatrics justifying the invasion of Ukraine. Mr Putin has put himself and his regime on the road to eventual demise, at least that’s what the Badger senses.

By invading Ukraine, Mr Putin has shaken democracies out of a comfortable complacency with Russia, galvanised democratic nations into unity of action, and forced the United Nations to question Russia’s membership of the Security Council. Mr Putin has ‘form’; he sent troops into Georgia and Crimea and his regime’s institutions are implicated in using a nerve agent against people in Salisbury in the UK and an opposition activist in Russia itself. The regular television pictures of him sitting at his long table distanced from others conveys an insecurity and the aura of an obsessed, irrational, barbaric, bully corrupted by power. A bully, however, can only be a bully if those being bullied allow themselves to be a victim. Standing up to a bully by not allowing them to have power over you is the best way to deal with any bully, and that’s just what the courageous people of Ukraine are doing. Western democracies are now doing this too and Mr Putin will be held responsible for his actions.

The fate of the Ukrainian people is in the balance, but their ‘fight to the end’ spirit reminds the Badger of his father’s stories from sheltering as a twelve-year old boy in London’s Underground during the Blitz in World War 2. He often said that ‘everyone believed they had right on their side, and everyone had a warrior spirit inside to fight if enemy troops arrived in London’. This inherent spirit is much in evidence in Ukraine today.

Today’s world is highly dependent on connected IT systems and computer devices, and nations across the globe have been ramping up their defensive and offensive cyber capabilities over the last decade to mitigate threats. However, although cyber incidents undoubtedly feature in this conflict, this war shows that conventional military forces with bombs and bullets are needed to take territory and supress a population. Although few people consider themselves to be any kind of warrior, the Ukrainians have shown not only that we have to fight for our freedoms, but also that in today’s world this means we must all now be warriors. The world today is different to that experienced by my father during the London Blitz. Mr Putin, however, has shown that while the world might be different, with people like himself in positions of enormous power, the world is no better than it was 80 years ago.

Meta matters and madness…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Business, Opinion, social media

The spectacular drop in Meta’s (Facebook) share price last week has attracted much comment in the media. The drop, which shows up impressively on share price charts like the 1-year one available here, was triggered by a fall in active daily users for the first time in 18 years. It came as little surprise to the Badger who’s long thought a) that Richard Holway at TechMarketView is right in saying that Facebook’s been a toxic brand for some time, and b) that this behemoth is past its prime and way too big and arrogant for its boots!

In the world of business, of course, there’s always ups and downs, crises, and negotiations of all kinds, but when Meta threatens to shutdown Facebook and Instagram in Europe over transatlantic data transfer regulations, then it’s arrogance is plain to see especially when it’s our data that’s at the heart of the matter.  This sabre rattling  received a  ‘Life would be very good without Facebook’ riposte from the EU. Together with the impact of Apple’s ad-tracking change, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the failure of its Libra crypto currency ambitions, and its risky bet on the ‘Metaverse’, it’s hardly surprising that a wobble in active daily users in core geographies triggered worry about the future and impacted the share price, especially when the company’s already a bête noire amongst the tech giants. The Badger senses that Meta’s future doesn’t look rosy unless there’s huge change.

Having had a presence on Facebook for more than a decade, changes in the way the Badger and his Facebook friends have used the platform perhaps illustrates why a drop in usage should be no surprise. A decade ago, we regularly uploaded and shared photos, registered our location when travelling, shared life events, plans, thoughts, highs and lows, interests, and funny experiences. Today, however, none of us do this. We just post something minimal very occasionally, monitor a few items of ‘followed’ content, and ignore sponsored items or adverts that the platform pushes at us. As one friend put it, ‘Facebook’s a disease we’ve learned that we have to manage to protect ourselves’. If this sentiment is widespread, then more bad news will emerge because it isn’t just younger people deserting the platform, it’s older ones reducing their usage too!

Finally, there’s a madness in society whereby Meta has the power to resist all attempts at having content and media laws that apply in the real world applied to it in the virtual world. There’s little sign of this madness soon dissipating, but at least the fall in share price is a timely warning for Meta and everyone else that no company is too big to fail. The future’s never certain, but with Meta there is a certainty. It’s unlikely to be out of the news anytime soon.

The Web at 30, and getting cancelled…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Learning, Life, Online Services, Opinion, social media, Web

There’s an interesting article entitled ‘Going global: the world the Web has wrought’ in this month’s edition of Physicsworld, the member magazine of the Institute of Physics. It covers how the Web has taken over the world in the last 30 years and the role of physicists and programmers in enabling this to happen. The article points out that the benefits of the Web have not come without tremendous economic and social dislocations, and its last sentence – ‘The world has indeed been transformed by the Web, but not entirely for the better’ – captures a truth that resonates with those whose careers spanned the Web’s progression.

The Badger made this ‘not entirely for the better’ point to a neighbour’s daughter, home from university for the weekend, and got a lecture in response! The Badger is a fuddy-duddy, apparently, whose opinions are irrelevant because his generation are responsible for everything that’s wrong and the Web has brought people nothing but good. Hmm! Resisting the urge to argue, the Badger just smiled and calmly suggested the young lady’s view might change on gaining more life experience after university. With a stare that could kill, she stormed off!

At the local supermarket later, the Badger bumped into her mother who apologetically mentioned that her daughter had ‘cancelled’ the Badger. She then said, ‘Join the club; last week she told me that I was cancelled too’. We laughed. The youngster’s mum theatrically rolled her eyes and then wryly bemoaned the amount of time her daughter spent surfing the Web. Being told you’re cancelled was a new experience, but not a bothersome one because it’s an absurdity that just illustrates the ‘not entirely for the better’ point about the transformational impact of the Web.

Many in our younger generations today seem intent on banning, reinterpreting, or cancelling anyone or anything from earlier times because it might offend. Enabling the growth of a sentiment which redefines the truth and facts of earlier eras stands out as one of the Web’s ‘not entirely for the better’ transformational impacts. Microsoft’s new ‘inclusivity checker’ in Word, see here and here,  is a simple example of the sentiment’s pervasiveness. In the Badger’s view, the words actually written by authors, songsters, and spoken by famous people in earlier times are the facts of their era and suggesting ‘inclusivity’ modifications for them just promotes the breeding of a denial and dishonesty in society that future generations will regret.

From the Badger’s experience above, it seems that all you must do to be cancelled is point out that the Web is ‘not entirely for the better’, be of an older generation, and stand up for the preservation of the language and facts of history, no matter how uncomfortable they may be in a modern setting. If that’s the case, the Web is facilitating the slide to a cultural oblivion that future generations don’t deserve.

Nothing lasts forever…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Opinion, social media

Facebook Inc and Mr Zuckerberg, Founder, Chairman, and CEO  and largest shareholder by far,  haven’t had a good few weeks.  The recent outage of its platforms irritated users globally and it seriously embarrassed the company, especially when it emerged that its internal systems were impacted too. A sizeable chunk of 3 billion users were affected leading to much press comment on what happened – see here, for example. In addition, a whistle-blower interviewed on US TV, by the Wall Street Journal, and questioned by a US congressional committee  provided an insight to the company that was both damaging and a reinforcement of the widespread perception that the company’s  overwhelming focus is on capturing users and monetising their data over anything else.

At two o’clock in the morning recently, the Badger found himself cogitating on Facebook’s woes while listening in the dark to an unrelated BBC World Service programme during which a professor frequently made the point that ‘nothing lasts forever’.  The professor’s truism struck a chord that felt relevant to the social media giant whose dominance has grown progressively since it floated publicly in 2012.    Now, just a decade since it floated and with recent events reinforcing concerns about its power, the clamour for regulation and even break-up is gaining real momentum in politicians of all persuasions. It feels like Facebook is now truly facing ‘nothing is forever’ headwinds. As pointed out here, it’s not technology that’s at the root of the company’s problems and negative perceptions, it’s the business model.  

Cogitations in the dark about the outage and whistle-blower claims crystalised into raised eyebrows that Facebook could have internal and external facing systems impacted by the same single point of failure, and ambivalence about the whistle-blower’s assertions given that truth is rarely as purported by one party in an argument.  Thoughts moved on to how the Badger’s use of the company’s social media platforms has significantly waned over the years as a greater appreciation of how the company uses and monetises content developed. Then there was a moment of clarity in the darkness. ‘Nothing lasts forever’ applies directly to Mr Zuckerberg’s roles as Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive too!

Mr Zuckerberg holds both the Chairman and CEO roles, which many will argue provides a clear line of command through the whole company. However, it places a disproportionate authority in the hands of one individual.  The two roles are different, and the best corporate governance principles hold that they shouldn’t be held by the same individual. Facebook floated almost 10 years ago and so perhaps it’s time for Mr Zuckerberg to realise that ‘nothing lasts forever’ and that the time is right for him to step back and let others navigate the choppy waters of the company’s future?  With this thought in mind, the Badger turned the radio off and went to sleep.  

All-lane running motorways and electric car breakdowns…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Electric cars, Opinion, Risk, Smart & New Technology, Smart Motorways

The Badger often flicks through the television channels before retiring for the night. It’s a habit, and it’s rare that something grabs the attention sufficiently to delay bedtime. One night recently, however, the ‘Smart Motorway Committee’ on the BBC Parliament channel proved an exception. A yawn was stifled as the channel was sampled, but the Badger was suddenly hooked when one of the politicians on the committee asked senior representatives from the Police, motoring, and haulage organisations, a clever question. It was this: ‘If your loved ones were driving on the motorway, or you were driving with your loved ones as passengers, which would you prefer it to be a) a controlled motorway with a permanent hard-shoulder lane, or b) an all-lane running motorway with refuge areas that could be more than 800 metres apart’.  

The politician asked for their personal opinion, not that of the organisation they represented. The respondents each plumped for (a), explaining their choice in terms of the human reality and anxiety of breaking down surrounded by live traffic lanes when young children, the disabled, or elderly parents are on board and refuge is some distance away.  To ensure smart motorways are safe, Highways England, of course, are currently implementing the 2020 Stocktake and Action Plan, and their recent report continues to make the case for all-lane running, all be it with further technology-centred  safety improvements. However, as the respondent’s answers illustrate, it’s obvious that people remain unpersuaded that foregoing a permanent hard-shoulder lane is wise.

Although it was late, the Badger’s programme delivery, IT, systems, and risk management experience and instincts kicked into gear with the following point bubbling to the fore.  Smart motorways were conceived mainly to increase traffic capacity and reduce congestion. It feels like ‘safety’ is being bolted on to avoid facing up to a possible uncomfortable truth, namely that all-lane running motorways may not have been such a good idea in the first place. With this point on his mind, the Badger turned off the television and retired for the night.

The next morning a chance conversation, when the Badger was told about someone’s experience of a new electric car that stopped working on a railway crossing, seem to reinforce this point.  The Badger hadn’t really appreciated the difficulty, which can get a sense of here and here, in moving electric vehicles if they stop functioning for any reason. It appears that the days of getting people to help you push it to a safer place are gone!  What will happen when the mix of electric cars on all-lane running motorways is substantially higher than today and more of them breakdown?  Even more expensive technology seems to be the answer to everything these days, but it feels like it would have been better, safer, and cheaper never to have ditched permanent hard-shoulder lanes in the first place!  

Pride…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Delivery, Life, Opinion

A long time ago, in fact a couple of years after the anti-climax of the ‘Year 2k millennium bug’, the 9/11 atrocity, and the collapse of the dot.com bubble, the Badger attended his employer’s annual international leadership conference in London.  The Badger has participated in many of these events throughout his career. They happen, in one form or another, in most sizeable organisations to ‘align’ leaders and managers with strategic objectives, business priorities, and key messages and themes for the coming year.  Such conferences often involved gathering large numbers of people in the same place, but the last two decades have seen more creative and cheaper ways of achieving the same objectives by using global video conferencing.

The particular conference to which the Badger refers was a face to face gathering with a predictable format involving lots of corporate presentations and orchestrated workshops. From the Badger’s perspective the real value of the event lay in the ability to network with seniors from around the world. This particular conference took place at a time when the IT services market was the toughest it had been for decades. The company was in the doldrums and morale across the whole organisation was extremely low.

Although presentations at these conferences are rarely memorable, at this one there was one from the Global HR Director on ‘Pride’ that stood out.  It was the best presentation the Badger had ever seen them give! Its theme was the importance of having and showing pride – that feeling of deep satisfaction derived from not only your own achievements, but also the achievements of those with whom you work – in overcoming low morale across the organisation. The message was simple, namely, stop wallowing in the gloom causing the corrosive low morale, and start celebrating all the good things that people did at every level in the organisation every day.

With a key role in the company’s delivery community, the Badger already knew about having and demonstrating pride!  Good leaders of delivery teams inherently know that you must have and show pride in your own and your team’s achievements, no matter how small or difficult they have been. Good delivery leaders know that their own success depends on their team, and that celebrating the small achievements as well as the bigger ones is good for the team morale that is crucial for success.   

Delivery is done by people who take pride not only in their personal standards and work, but also in playing their part in teams getting the job done successfully. This was clearly the case with those involved with the funeral ceremonials for Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, last Saturday. Everyone involved in producing and delivering the ceremonials of this sombre, historic, but fitting event should be proud of their individual and collective achievement.  They did themselves, the Duke, the Royal Family, the Queen, and the country proud.  

S.E.P – Somebody Else’s Problem

Posted on by The Information Badger in Life, Online Services, Opinion, Press & Media

With baby grandson asleep in his arms, the Badger sat watching the TV news and skimming his smartphone in sanguine mood. As usual, the news seemed dominated by speculation and opinion, but that is just the way it is these days. Like every parent and grandparent that holds a baby in their arms, the Badger wondered about the world that the little one will experience as they grow up.  Hopefully, it will be a better than today, but it is getting more difficult to be optimistic when misinformation, distortion, and polarization is rife and rising.       

As the Badger watched the TV, a reporter asked an ex-soldier if they had been bullied or encountered prejudice during their service. The ex-soldier paused, smiled, and said ‘No. My unit was about teamwork, camaraderie, and getting the job done. Everything else was S.E.P’.  On the mention of S.E.P – somebody else’s problem – ancient memories being an observer with some young soldiers in the back of an air defence vehicle came flooding back.  Their regiment had been deployed on an airfield to help contractors on a major systems programme understand how things worked. Talking to the soldiers – none out of their teens – proved highly informative and watching the whole set up function as the airfield was buzzed by a fast, low flying, Harrier jet was awesome!

The young soldiers knew exactly what system improvements they wanted so that, as one put it, ‘we can shoot down more enemy planes than friendlies and still stay alive’.   When asked if they worried about downing a friendly aircraft, they said that their job in a conflict was to fire on command, avoid being wiped out by the enemy, and quickly redeploy elsewhere ready to fire again. In that context, the ramifications of downing friendly aircraft were S.E.P – somebody else’s problem – not theirs!  There was a tabloid newspaper with a front-page highlighting defence cuts in the vehicle. When asked about cuts, the soldiers were ambivalent. They said the paper was a) a source of entertainment rather than news, and b) for use as emergency toilet paper!  As the baby slept peacefully in his arms, the Badger chuckled at the thought that this may still be the case for frontline soldiers in today’s digital world!

The Badger wistfully concluded that the foibles and problems of our modern online world are validly S.E.P for the baby grandson in his arms. For the rest of us, however, they are not S.E.P because unless the information we see, hear, and absorb becomes more trustworthy, we are headed for the kind of unruly future our children and grandchildren do not deserve.  So, there you have it; you never know where your thoughts will take you unless you cuddle a baby while watching TV and using your smartphone!

A dot on a magic quadrant…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Business, IT Project Management, Opinion

A friend and ex-colleague Skyped for a chat over a virtual coffee. We touch base regularly to chew the fat, reminisce, and chat about whatever comes to mind in the world of IT.  As soon as we connected, the friend apologised for the background noise from their two children, both under five years old. The Badger chuckled. Working from home may be the new normal, but the presence of young kids does not make it easy! 

Until a year ago, the friend worked for a big corporate. However, they left to join the leadership team in a small, specialist, fast-growing, software company.  One of the topics that came up in our conversation was Gartner’s Magic Quadrant . The topic arose because their company has been debating whether they would benefit from appearing on one of Gartner’s widely used grids.  Gartner,  a research and advisory company founded in 1979, has  annual revenues of over ~$US 4 billion from its consultancy, publication, and conference activities. It is influential across the IT industry, but not without controversy –  see, for example, here. There have been lawsuits from smaller companies – see here, for example – but these have failed because the courts view Gartner’s quadrants as ‘opinion’.

The Badger was asked his opinion about whether the friend’s small but dynamic  company  would benefit from appearing on one of Gartner’s grids. The Badger’s reply centred on three things. Firstly, that had always been suspicious of companies that crowed about their Gartner Magic Quadrant positioning in their marketing!  Secondly, that Gartner is itself a very big business and not immune to pressures from its clients if it wanted to preserve the scale of its revenues. Many of its clients will also appear in its  Magic Quadrants.  Thirdly, the published grids are – as the courts seem to accept – opinions derived from Gartner’s own methodology. Alternative  opinions from much smaller analysts using different, but equally valid methodologies, exist.

The Badger told his friend that, in his opinion, they should not worry about Gartner grids. Instead, they should continue to concentrate on innovating their software offerings, delivering them on-time and profitably, and achieving high levels of client satisfaction.  After all, the real benefit to the company and the real value to the client lies  in having a reliable delivery engine room, not in being a dot on someone’s ‘opinion’ grid.

The Badger’s friend nodded, thanked him for his opinion, and said their internal discussions were moving in a similar direction, with only the marketing man an outlier. The friend’s three year old then arrived, climbed onto their parent’s knee call, waved at the Badger, and asked if they could have a laptop. Not yet, was the response. The Skype session then ended abruptly because the youngster had hit the power button.  Kids – just one of the perils of working at home!

Safety on ‘Smart’ Motorways is no laughing matter…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Ethics & Regulation, Opinion, Smart Motorways

The Badger has laughed a lot recently; not due to being stir crazy because of the pandemic, but because nearly everything he read online has shown that the world is fast becoming just a comic book! One item that caused a guffaw, and which illustrates just how ridiculous things are becoming, was a complaint to the BBC about the use of the phrase ‘nitty-gritty’ by their political commentator Laura Kuenssberg. Surely no one’s cause is ever going to be furthered by complaining about the inoffensive use of phrases which our forefathers contributed to any language decades ago?  The complaint was rejected by the BBC.  Hip, hip, hurray! Someone has pushed back in a small way on the stupidities that are pervading society. Err, no offence intended, but the Badger also laughed when he saw that common phrases like ‘blacklist’, ‘master-slave’, ‘uppity’, ‘black mark’, ‘sold down the river’, ‘long time no see’, ‘no can do’ and ‘Hip, hip, hurray’ may also in the sights of the hand-wringing brigade.     

Another thing that made the Badger laugh was the kerfuffle around the language used in the 1971 ‘Dad’s Army’ film, some of its TV series episodes, and even old TV favourites of ‘Little Britain’ and John Cleese’s ‘Fawlty Towers’. The biggest laugh, however, happened on seeing that eBay banned the sale of an old  ‘Dad’s Army board game for inciting racial hatred.  The world has gone truly mad! The Badger also laughed at Google threatening to withdraw its search engine from Australia. For all Google’s bombast about liberty and freedom, this fracas shows that the company has no respect for the democratic processes and interests of nations.  Good on you Australia, give them both barrels!

There was one topic, however, that stopped the Badger’s laughter in its tracks, namely that of safety on Smart Motorways. A coroner’s finding that Smart Motorways pose an ongoing risk of future deaths  and a Police Chief’s view that Smart Motorways are inherently unsafe mean that drivers should be worried. The UK’s first motorways opened between 1958 and the early 1960s when there were ~5 million cars on UK roads. They were built with a hard-shoulder lane to act as a refuge for broken-down vehicles and to assist emergency vehicles in getting to the scene of an accident. Today there are ~33 million cars on UK roads, which begs just one obvious question.  If a hard shoulder lane was required for safety reasons with 5 million cars,  why isn’t it required for safety reasons with today’s 33 million?

Road deaths have progressively declined since the 1960s primarily due to things like better education, speed limits, car design (better reliability, seat belts, ABS, and air bags etc), improved barrier technology, and so on. Smart Motorways have not contributed to the lowering death rate, so without a hard shoulder lane they must be considered unsafe and addressing the issue with even more ‘smart’ technology is not the answer.   This is most definitely not a laughing matter.