Successful IT Today... with Kevin Bloch

Successful IT utilisation underpins todays business.  IT advancement is relentless.  Every CEO, Board, and Senior Executive must understand how their business leverages their IT including managing the risks and potential advantages it offers.  Kevin Bloch, eminent advisor and ex-Cisco CTO (Australia), offers insights into his 3 key IT areas that every business leader needs to understand and leverage now and into the future.  Learn from Kevin how to leverage and deal with Cyber Security, Infrastructure-less connectivity, and Generative Artificial Intelligence.

For more information relating to the podcast and how you can gain access to advisory services to assist you with your business, see www.lseconsulting.net.au

Transcript

CEO Thinking. Episode 5.
'Successful IT Today' with Kevin Bloch

Welcome to the CEO Thinking podcast. I’m Philip Belcher, successful CEO and CEO Mentor, advisor and business consultant. On this podcast I provide insights to inspire ideas for CEOs, directors, and senior managers to use as they lead their businesses to achieve outstanding results. I have applied these ideas to start, grow, turn around and successfully exit businesses, as well as to mentor my clients that have achieved great results. 

I regularly host eminent special guests who share their experiences and ideas to inspire CEO Thinking. If my guests and I can use these ideas successfully you can use them soon. 
 
 

Thanks for joining me on this episode of CEO Thinking. The purpose of CEO Thinking is to contribute to the business community by providing CEOs, senior executives, and businesspeople in all forms of business food for thought to develop their ideas to underpin their success. 

It’s designed to inspire leaders in all forms to business, so as business leaders it’s mandatory to continually explore better methods to enhance performance. Effectively utilising technology is essential for being competitive in these days. Today I’m honoured to have with me Kevin Bloch as my special guest to share some of his key perspectives on using information technology for business advantage. 

Kevin has a very, very, impressive career and I’m going to share that with you. Kevin is the founder and principal of Bloch advisory. Bloch advisory provides tactical advice and strategic guidance to help its clients in both the current business climate and the long-term. It delivers research and insight to the following constituents: End user IT and network managers, vendors of IT hardware, software, and service; and members of the financial community looking to invest in innovative technology companies. 

Kevin was previously the chief technical officer for Cisco, Australia and New Zealand for over 12 years after nine years in other senior technology roles, including leading engineering in the region across Cisco’s entire technology portfolio. He also held leadership roles at Lucent, which is now Nokia, J. N. Almgren Telecommunications, a fine Australian telecommunication company, and OTC, the Overseas Telecommunications Commission, (which is now part of Telstra), where he was involved in research and development, then satisfying the infrastructure requirements of a who’s who of major Australian organisations.

Kevin is the author of six technology books, holds a Bachelor of Engineering with honours, Bachelor of Science, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Telecommunications from University of New South Wales.

PB: Kevin, that’s a pretty impressive career. Welcome to CEO Thinking and thank you for joining me here.

KB: Thanks Phil, it’s a pleasure to be to working with you

PB: Kevin you’ve got a rich background in technology ,and you’ve seen a lot evolve over your career, I’m sure our listeners are interested in how you came to be a luminary in the application of technology and business. Can you give us some background on how you came to be doing what you’re doing now?

KB: Sure, I guess I’ll start with starting at university. At the time, which was very early, I’m talking about the late 70s, I thought that this thing called the Internet was going to be a big thing. I was studying computer science and Elec Eng and UNSW was really at the forefront of a bunch of things including Unix and the Internet. And to me, this was not just about my career. This to me was going to change the world and I wanted to be a part of it, and so literally every day from then on, I’ve spent, even until today, focused on connectivity and providing ubiquitous connectivity around the world. 

So that kind of set up my career because the first company I joined, was OTC (Overseas Telecommunications Commission), so the first part was about study. When I joined OTC they sent me to Siemens for a couple years where I did research and development. When I came back, this tiny little company called JNA (JN Almgren - and privately held) knocked on my door. I had some expertise, it was pretty rare because of, I guess probably from being in Germany, and they wanted to open that up which became the foundation of the EFTPOS business in Australia. A lot of packet switching, which was the precursor of the Internet protocol, got me to a point where that company really flourished. We did R&D, we had about 150 R&D engineers and then I/we also developed the system engineering or system integration business

Interestingly, as an Australian company you need to supplement your income so we did Consulting and that grew into quite a big business, so I would jump from one to the other. They didn’t actually call me the CTO but that’s kind of the role I was playing across the two.

So that was R&D and then we eventually got to a point, and again this was a message for a lot of Australian companies, where we had some great technology, we were profitable, but we felt the need to that (It wasn’t a matter of cash. You could’ve given us 200 million cash). It was really about time to market and we wanted to get to the global market. We had to get to it quickly, and the answer was distribution. How do you get distribution set up quickly as a small company, you can’t; you’ve got to go with a big brand and so we put ourselves on the market. Long story short we got bought by Lucent which was the largest telco company in the world. 

They were doing $32 billion at the time of GSP, (the global service provider business) and we sold to them which I guess was great for the engineers.  I stuck with them for about 14 months and Cisco approach me to help them set up their telco business.

So now I’m into the third phase which is about selling technology. So first was about study, you know, what I’m trying to do. The second one was this research phase, and the third one was “how do we really sell technology?”, and I think the gold standard in sales is Cisco or they certainly were, and so I learned to, as an engineer, a tremendous amount in terms of how to sell. Often times, they didn’t have the best product, but they still sold. They always punched above their weight; did very, very well and so I was there for 21 years. 

I’m a big believer in synchronising your career with your personal life. It was time for me to get out of the corporate world which I’ve been in for nearly 40 years. And so I left. I just really had really had enough for a number of reasons and I thought “I’m not sure exactly”, I had a great job so wasn’t about Cisco. I just wanted to get out. It was during Covid, so I put in my resignation and a few people came to me and said “Hey Kev, what are you doing? You want to help? You know, we’re doing this..” Long story short, we didn’t set up Bloch advisory and it’s essentially an advisory firm, leveraging all the skills and everything I’ve done in the past so that the full key phases of my life. 

I’m now in the advisory phase. 

PB: Excellent and it’s been a fantastic career on the way through. I have to, in full disclosure say that I worked with Kevin for a short period of time at Cisco and absolutely saw that his technical capabilities and his ability to relate to people and translate the technology into usable solutions to people was outstanding.

So I really appreciate your being here, Kevin, thank you. And I paralleled you at JNA, except I was more on the sales side of things at another company another Australian company, called Datacraft, and we were sold similarly because it got to the stage where it needed to be part of something larger.  

KB: Yes.

PB: Which is a little bit of a shame for Australian companies, but I guess that’s the way it goes. So thanks, thanks, for that Kevin.

When we discussed coming in and talking about this topic, you highlighted three areas that you felt people who were going to use infrastructure, IT infrastructure, for the business advantage need to be considering. You called on the three areas of cyber security, infrastructure (and how you either buy or take that on as a service), and then finally the generative artificial intelligence side of things or everyone’s talking about AI at the moment. 

So out of these, and all of the things that you could’ve talked about, what made you choose those three things Kevin?

KB: Okay. Let’s start with cyber. If you look at the last few years in our business, the technology, business, everybody has been pinning their ears back to digitise everything. Even take the NBN, which is trying to provide ubiquitous broadband to every single household and every person in the country and that’s fantastic, and there’s lots of economic papers on why that’s good for the nation. 

At the same time as you are allowing these electrons to flow from people to machines what you’re also doing is you’re exposing them from a cyber security perspective. So as you get better at digitally, transforming a country or organisation you’re actually increasing business risk. And it’s only going to get worse. So it’s interesting, even though I’ve been involved in cyber for a long time, when I set up my practice, I tell you, more than half of my clients are involved in cyber security, in the last two or four years, here and in the US.

And that’s just because cyber is hot and it’s the scales are completely in favour of the bad guys, and it’s really difficult for the good guys to keep them out, right, and so this is not going to go away. It’s going to be there for a long time. And if you go back 30 odd years, and you talk to a Board to talk about risk, digital technology inside it wasn’t there, today it’s right up there, it’s number one. So that’s the first point and I think, I say we had our Optus moment, but a year ago and I think what Optus did for the country was to really make everybody sit up and listen and to really get the point that this is serious, even though other countries may have discovered that a few years ago, Australia woke up. So that’s the first one. Whenever you are going to build digital infrastructure, you need to mitigate your risk and you need to put the right controls in.

The second one is about infrastructure. Again our industry tends, especially companies like Cisco and many others in the past like HP, and there’s dozens of them, and we sold a lot of infrastructure. We sold a lot of infrastructure in particular to the enterprise and they would buy a lot of infrastructure from us, sometimes even in the billions and that’s the world that was, and what’s happened as we moved forward is some of the technology and I’m going to cite two or three of them, has kind of made the need for building your own infrastructure superfluous and in particular 5G. 

Why am I picking on 5G? 5G delivers to a human being and to every endpoint, let’s say, at least 50 Mb. Beyond 50 Mb a human can’t detect the difference. If you go to 100 meg from 50 Mb they won’t know the difference, right. Machines can, but humans can’t. We’ve really broken through the, I guess, the critical point of 5G becoming ubiquitous, I’d say it was 21/22. Now it is ubiquitous, there is well over 1.5 billion users going up to 6 billion in the next two or three years. It is by far the dominant technology, connectivity technology, in the world. And you know what? 4G wasn’t that bad either, so it wasn’t like desperate. So now we’ve got this technology that’s available to everybody and we’re all used to it.

So you’re a banker or large government organisation, and your end user and your end devices can already get 100 Mb+ using a 5G connection. Why do you have to build all this infrastructure, because that’s a big cost? You need people, you need money, you need operations capability. It’s very complex, you need to secure it. It’s very complicated. 

And I would argue that up to 5 years ago you had to do a lot of the stuff yourself.  Today we’re moving to a world of an infrastructure-less world and I’m not just talking about cloud where everything has gone into the cloud. So you don’t need your own data centre, you actually don’t even need to build your network.  Now. I guess there are always going to be some reasons why you do, and I get that, but if if you look at a CTO in five years time, they’re going to look at an infrastructure-less environment, right, even the traffic patterns have changed because of cloud, so we are now going from wherever we are to the cloud we’re not going to the corporate network. So that’s the second point infrastructure-less IT if you were.

And then the third one is GenAI, and you know, when I said to you when I was at university, I thought Internet was going to change the world. If I was starting uni today, I’ll be saying the same thing about GenAI. Somebody said it’s our modern day electricity and it doesn’t exactly tell you what the application is but it’s like electricity, it powers the world. And GenAI now is set to literally transform every business, government, and human being in terms of how we live, work, and play. 

So those are the three key areas and, as I said, if I was a CTO and I had to put myself in (what’s it now 24?), say 2029, look backwards, those are the three points that I’d be really, really focused on.

PB: Interesting, interesting. And there’s a lot underneath each one of those that those CTOs of organisations need to think about, but also as individuals, as people working for organisations too. I guess there’s a big impact at the corporate level but there’s also an impact for the people who are using these technologies as well. 

Kevin it’s interesting that you say that if you went back and said the internet’s going to be something that’s just going to change everything. Like you, I used to wander around making presentations when I was at Cisco saying “The Internet will change the way we’re going to work, live, play and learn”, and the reality of it is: it has. 

And the ability for the businesses and the communities to withstand the pandemic. A lot of it was built on the digital backbone to the extent where now there is a struggle to get people to go back to the way things were prior to that because now it’s demonstrated. They had to have people working remotely and being connected by the Networks. 

So do you see that… The only thing that I wonder about is is that when I was making those sort of presentations, that was back at the turn of the millennium, and it’s taken really that 20 to 25 years to really get embedded into the way everyone does things, do you think that each of these, the cyber security, the outsourcing of all of the infrastructure, and the GenAI, are all of those things going to impact much faster than the Internet did in the first place?

KB: Well, certainly GenAI is, and GenAI can actually speed up the other two. The reason I say that is because of what has already happened. So if you look at Chat GPT going to 100 million uses within months it’s the fastest uptake ever

PB: So with regards to the uptake of these technologies, and how quickly they will be implemented, I get from you Kevin that whilst they’re talking sometime to permeate the way people did everything what I’m hearing is is that this uptake, especially using your example of chat GPT, this is going to be way faster and AI is even going to increase the risks for cyber and it’s also going to increase the adoption of outsourced infrastructure. 

KB: Yeah, I think GenAI has already proven that it’s sped things up a lot. If you look back at the time you were talking about the Internet in the mid-90s, when the web came out and then we had the “.com boom” and the bust, right, what happened was there were a lot of believers and nonbelievers and a lot of circumspection and there was also very poor business cases, In other words, yeah, there was eyeballs and sales, but there was no profits and things collapsed which made a lot of people sit back and say I told you so this is garbage and that they were all wrong, because clearly it wasn’t garbage, it was just looking for the right business case in the right business models and it took, let’s say, 5 to 10 years for that to materialise. 

If we now look at GenAI, I mean AI itself has been going on (I studied at university, so we’re going back 40 years ,right) and it’s gone through what they call several winters, but I think the real inflection point was when Open AI announce Chat GPT and went up to 100,000,000 uses within a month or two - fastest uptake of technology ever. And it’s just been an unbelievable run since then, because following on from Catch GPT, a lot of other companies, like Google, like Microsoft, have announced their own large language models and other permutations of it and it’s just that’s been within less than 12 months. Unbelievable right? 

And in fact, a very good example of how things sped up is Open AI’s recent announcement of Sora, which is a text to video capability that is unbelievably good that most people with lots of expertise and lots of knowledge said would not be possible before 2025, even 2026. Guess what? It’s out now and on top of that the other interesting element of all of this is these people are making money. You’ve only got to look at Nvidia, to take a look at their last financials, beside the share price, okay, their share price has skyrocketed and so on. Look at their numbers. Look at their profitability; they’re doing a 74% gross profit. It is an unbelievably profitable business and they’re underpinning a lot of this, and then sitting on top of that you’ve got companies like Microsoft and Google who are extremely profitable and so I think we’re at a point with there are enough proof points to show this. GenAI thing is not as bad as what some people thought the Internet was in the late 90s. It’s proven and it’s going, it’s going, it is kicking already, so I think we’re speeding up.

One of my clients wrote this really good paper which investigated large language models that many of its clients were about to use and they were trying to do some analysis of these models and all I can tell you is it was an excellent paper written by excellent engineers and within two weeks it was out of date.

PB: That’s amazing, isn’t it! So this total acceleration of technology that’s enabling new applications, that I guess maybe we don’t even quite understand at this stage, this creates the question for me and for the listeners: “Right, so I understand that the digitisation of everything is increasing the risk to organisations and potentially to the individuals, this is now available ubiquitously with technologies like 5G enabling high bandwidths to everybody, not just to the privilege few as it was in the past, and now with this artificial intelligence…?” 

Can we talk through some of the things that our listeners should be thinking about and let’s take those kind of one at a time. Can we go through the cyber side of things? What are some actions that people should be taking in that area?

KB: Okay so before we do that, let me give you a model that people can use in their mind. So, imagine a triangle and each of the vertices you’ve got Applications, Connections and Data.  Applications, Connections, Data. 

Under Applications, you’ve got things like AI and they’re going to drive many of the businesses business applications, going to drive connectivity to the customers’ internal operations, supply chain, and there’s going to be a lot of GenAI coming through that. 

On the second vertex there’s data and that’s really important because GenAI and the rest of your business is not going to operate well unless you’ve got a good set of data, some of which you will create internally and some which you will curate externally. So that’s the second vertex. 

And the third one is Connectivity and I believe that, and again we are talking about an infrastructure-less world where I believe connectivity is going to be dominated by 5G as well as LEO (low Earth orbit) satellites. Now LEO satellites we haven’t spoken about but it’s where LEO satellites are really kicking in is for the rest of the planet. I remember doing a presentation not so long ago that said something like 90% of the planet has zero internet access. Talk about Maritime routes, farms, communities, remote communities, mines, that sort of thing, and LEO stepped in to bring down the cost of good low latency broadband to the rest of the planet. 

So connectivity, and governments here in Australia are really looking at Starlink, and Kuiper, and things like that to provide that. So you got that triangle now, you got data and connectivity and then in the middle I think what people need to think about is the governance of all of that. So how do you govern it? And governance is not just how do you operate it. it also touches on things like bias, the ethics of what you’re doing and a whole lot of other subheadings that fit under governance. 

I think in the centre of the triangle is cyber security and cyber security touches on not just ransom-ware but privacy, data Integrity, breach, DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks, all that sort of stuff. So that’s the kind of framework that I use a lot when I’m talking to my clients, you know, to just say this: “Do you agree with this or not right?” So when you’re looking forward in the next 4 to 5 years and you’re a senior person in a large organisation those are the points, if I was them, that I’d want to own. Those are the control points, if you will, on my infrastructure. 

I want to control my business applications because that’s going to differentiate me.  I have to control the data because it’s going to feed my application. I’ve got to connect because, as you said, a lot of my staff aren’t even working here anymore. They’re at home; my customers certainly aren’t, and I’ve got to connect to them, so I want to make sure that I’ve got rock-solid contracts and capabilities in those three areas. And by the way, all that is governed by my governance process, and secured by my very strong, cyber security capability inside it. So that’s the Model that I use.

PB: What a wonderful model Kevin, and I think that anyone listening to this that is concerned, and they have to be concerned, about their business and the health of it and the digitisation of it, and I will go back to the earlier statement when I used to be out there and talk about “the Internet changing the way people work, live, play, and learn”, there was another tagline to that, and that was “You will either be bricks and mortar or clicks and mortar, and if you stay bricks and mortar, there is a fair chance you won’t have a business”.

KB: Yes.

PB: So everybody, it doesn’t matter how big or small your business is, you’ve got to come to terms with this digitisation and that then takes you into that risk, so that model that you’ve got there Kevin, I think people should absolutely go and get in touch with Kevin and understand that better.

Kevin, it quite often is that there are these models that people come up with, and they get taken as gospel and put on a wall somewhere and then forgotten about. It strikes me that when you are articulating that, anyone that’s listening to that needs to think “Kevin’s on the money there with each of those points!”, but the real value in it is “Now, what does that mean to me and what do I need to do in my situation, my business, my customers, etcetera?” Would you agree with that? 

KB: Yeah, I think that, again, the technology industries is very guilty of over complicating thing, sometimes due to just incompetence, and they’re not able to articulate it. And sometimes, totally inadvertently, look, I’ve worked for some unbelievable companies, and I’ll give an example. 

We used to get incredible internal information in Cisco about products. I’m talking about the best slide-sets in the world in terms of what this product does so that anybody in any country that Cisco operated in (there was about 100 countries) could pick up the slides and say “Yes, I get it. I know what this router does. I know it’s capabilities”. Here’s the problem. The problem was that those slides were written by engineers (or product managers) - for engineers, and so I’d catch the ball on this side of the ocean as an engineer, and I’d understand those slides. The question is, “Can I use that to a customer?” Absolutely not, and I can really argue that a lot of my time I would spend taking thousands of Cisco slides and rewriting them into one or two or three slides so that the customer could understand what we were trying to do here. Now clearly, as any good leader knows, if you can convey the big picture and you know what you’re talking about, your customers’ got better confidence that you’ve got the substance. If they wanted the thousand slides, boy did I have them. I had 10,000 slides, right. And if they wanted me to bring the engineer that wrote the code, we could do that, but that’s not what they’re after.  

I always say vendors often forget they think all the effort is in getting the sale. From the customers’ point of view, actually the effort only begins on day two because buying something is easy. Putting it in an Australian national network or a global network and making it work and have a business outcome is far harder than buying it. So if you as a vendor can show that you can help them with day two, in my opinion, that’s more important than showing them all of the features of your product. I think it’s more important to show them once they bought the product how it’s going to help them and their business and how it’s going to not just maybe increase their top line, but definitely not make worse the bottom line. I think the industry does overcomplicate things and that’s probably one of the things I’ve done all my life is trying to absorb complexity and turn it around and make it simple and digestible.

PB: Kevin. That’s fantastic. As I headed up sales here in Australia New Zealand and then the Enterprise Line of Business across Asia Pacific, your work was invaluable to us because we were the intermediaries-between trying to take this technology and take it out to the customers and sell it, and the minute you started to talk about ‘bits and bytes’ and ‘speed and feeds’, their eyes glazed over. You have to put it in terms of how will this help the business. 

I did have a situation where we did sell (and I won’t use the name of the organisation) but we did sell a big backbone infrastructure for an airline. We had a celebration and it was with all the people involved in providing the technology and the customer. I asked a senior technical person at the customer “So I am credentialed frequent flyer. So this network, what does it actually mean to me as a Flyer?” And you would’ve thought I’d ask him to spell backwards some ridiculous word. He looked at me, then he said “That’s a really good question!” Then I said “Does this mean my flight gets there better on time, or does it mean that I get a lower cost airfare? What does it do? He looked at me and he said “I really don’t have an answer for that question”, he said “I know we’ll have a faster network”. And I said “Well you’ve spent a lot of money here. I hope it actually gives me a better flying experience”.

KB: And I can tell you back to you, and that is to me, one of the characteristic of the good sales Guy/Girl is knowing not just your technology, is really have a clear understanding of what problem this solvs for the customer and that’s what you were doing 

PB: There you go, and in my mind it was always about that. Having said that, I had to make the numbers and my team had to make the numbers.

But I did ask you the question earlier about each of these points, Cyber, Infrastructure, and Artificial Intelligence. What would you say, let’s just take those one at a time? What are some steps that people who are responsible for an organisation should be taking now with regards to cyber Kevin?

KB: So let’s start with Cyber. I have, as I said, a number of clients in cyber and I ask them this, and it’s not a trick question, but I ask them “If you were the CEO or chairman of the board of company, big company, non-technology company, and you’ve heard about all this ransomware and data breaches and you wanted to know, and you wanted some guidance, as to what should you do with your business? Who would you turn to?” and I get all sorts of answers. They say “I’d turn to the CSO (Chief Security Officer) but I said say “Hold on, you haven’t got a CSO yet”. [so they say] “I would go to my technology reseller” Ah, wrong, because they’ll sell you technology right?”

Anyway, cut a long story short, the answer is you go to your lawyer. You go to your lawyer, and the reason for that is as a chairman or director, CEO, there’s really three drivers or three keys to being successful. You want to increase your top line, you want to make sure you got your costs under control, and you want to stay out of jail. And the cyber about staying out of jail at this point because the government has ratcheted up the regulation where it is now quite a serious penalty. Besides that you could seriously wreck your business if you get attacked as we’ve seen from Optus and many companies following that, so I think the board gets that but the problem now is where do they get the advice. 

Well, you need to know what your legal obligations are. What your regulatory obligations are, and by the way, they are different if you’re in banking, to utilities, to transportation, to a Retailer so we’re going back to the law now and saying “Well, this is what the law needs you to do or not and these are your legal obligations” and I would start there and once you’ve understood that it answers a lot of questions in terms of your risk.

That would be the second port of call. What’s my risk and that’s where maybe the Big Four and those kind of people do a lot of work, and have done some excellent work and risk management and assessment and mitigation. Insurance is another issue. Notice I haven’t spoken about technology yet. How much money are you going to allocate as out of your budget to this cyber securing your business and now you’re starting to say now I’ve got some money I can hire some people and then you’ve got to look at things like all the lawyers told you, you’ve got to follow these technology cyber regulatory standards, so you need to get across that and money has got to be allocated to that. 

So we haven’t spoken about our technology yet, we’re still at the top level, trying to work it out from the business risk point of you, and once you can get all of that sorted out and you’ve understood all of those business elements, that’s when you start engaging the technology side. And again, what I find in the business, in the cyber security business is, I’d say 9 out of 10 of those cyber security firms don’t get that. They think that the companies, just today for the first time, they had this flash of brilliance to come talk to you about cyber security. But actually the lawyers have been in there before, you know in most cases, so now once you, as a seller or cyber security, it’s very important you understand where this is all coming from, how much budget, lawyers, risk manager, standards, etc that there are and now you could start sort of leading into “Oh, okay so your biggest problem is data breach.  If its data breach, let’s look at your current controls and now and now there’s a story underneath it. 

So, that’s a mouthful but I’d start with the legal obligations. 

PB: Getting back to our earlier conversation there Kevin really what you’ve done with those steps is you’ve looked at the application of that organisation out to its users if you like, it’s customers and built your way back in so by getting that legal advice, you can say “What’s our risk out there and then you’ve built your way back in until you end up at the technology not the other way around.

KB: Exactly so that all your money is well planned because there’s a one-to-one mapping between a dollar spent on a firewall all the way up to what your legal obligations are in the particular sector 

PB: But then you can actually aim at the right points in your business to get your cyber the way, it should be starting with the legal perspective and working your way through. That’s great. 

So this next area Kevin, this ‘infrastructure-less’. What are the steps there for people? What should they be thinking about here? 

KB: I’m reading an excellent book on Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, and the interesting thing about Musk and his factories is he tries to eliminate every single superfluous item in the rocket. And if I was to run and lead the technology business in an organisation I would look at eliminating every single superfluous piece of technology. Get rid of it. Get rid of it, and I would set a goal and the goal would be. I want to be infrastructure-less. I don’t want to own all of this infrastructure, that’s not my business. I’m a bank, I’m a post office, I’m a government agency. I’m not in the business of technology. I’m happy to buy a mobile phone for people, right, but I don’t want to know what’s behind it, right. I want those phones to enable my people, my customers, to do whatever they need to do. 

So, I’d be saying to my team, we want to get rid of all of the stuff and do it obviously in a sensible very governed measured way with back up so we would always have to have redundancy and all that stuff but it can be done today. 15 years ago you couldn’t do it, very good reasons why you could not do it. Today there are fewer and fewer. You can even slice in a 5G network so you got higher quality of service for certain types of business application. You can provide a number of security controls for Zero Trust that will default deny, in other words, you’re not allowed into anything until there are… 

There are so many new technologies, not even so new, technologies around so I believe it is eminently feasible. By the way. I’ve had conversations with customers who are already thinking in this way one of which said to me we’re going 5G we’re not even going down the SD-Wan path, we’re going to jump over that. It make a lot of sense. Everybody can have almost 1Gb to their hand, right, to the desktop. Anywhere you are, right. Obviously within reason, and where you’re out of town and you really need that connectivity, we can connect you into a network called a LEO satellite network, right, so I think it’s eminently feasible today to start thinking of an infrastructure-free world. 

And much the same as we’ve gone cloud first, and I think most companies are moving in that direction, is it going to be 100% public cloud now? Will it be 100% infrastructure-less connectivity? Probably not, but for many businesses it actually will be. For mid-size businesses, I see no reason why not, right. For larger businesses with other regulatory requirements, there are reasons why they may need their own infrastructure, but I’m talking about the bulk of the investment in the IT industry moving to infrastructure-less and I would set the goal from five years, work backwards and doing an Elon Musk on the infrastructure, saying “Get rid of it!” Why are we doing this it’s not why are we doing? It is why are we not going infrastructure-less?

PB: Yes, interesting. Again it comes back to ‘focus on the business and the best way of doing it’. Not focus on building some golden interior network and saying “We’re protected here because we’ve got our own”. In a way having your own, then gives you the problem of “But is it actually up-to-date? Is it secure? or Is it being well managed? etc” as opposed to your infrastructure-less way using best quality providers, you’re in a much better situation.

KB: I’ll give you a little story and this is two years ago, AT&T outsourced its entire core network to Microsoft. AT&T, a leader in network connectivity has given the game away to Microsoft because they do a better job?. 

PB: That’s amazing isn’t it?

KB: And if they are doing it, if AT&T is doing it, why aren’t smaller companies in Australia? Jeans companies, retailers, chemists; they think they can do a better job than a good technology company? Good luck!

PB: Good luck indeed!  So that brings us on to the third point. Kevin, what should people be doing with regards to artificial intelligence?

KB: Good question. I’m actively engaged in helping clients with this right now. First step, and I’m telling you this first-hand. So it’s not like I’ve just thought off the top floor, we’re actually implementing it now. 

The first step in my view is what do you currently know in your organisation about AI or GenAI? Do you have anybody in your organisation? Don’t go to a McKinsey, BCG flip it over the fence and tell them because it’s like one hand clapping, they’ll tell you they’ve got some real experts, but if you’ve got nobody to catch the ball on the side, then your toast, you’re wasting your time. So the first thing I would do is build, if you haven’t already, a centre of excellence or core confidence, not just AI, but in particular in GenAI, because that’s really where we’re heading. We’re past, sort of the phase of classification, we’re now looking at the generative side of transformation, transformers so core team.

The second thing I would do is look at your strategy, business strategy, okay, with that as your Northstar. Go back inside your business and say “Which part of my business can be helped by using Gen AI that will have a material business outcome in line with our Northstar?” and willingly repeat, I would just keep doing that. 

Now alongside that you need to have data, so that’ll spin out the question of where is the data coming from, but you don’t just do it willy-nilly, you do it with the business objective. How are you going to use GenAI to do that? Put a core team on it, it’ll say “I need this type of data” and you get that going. And then you measure the outcome, and if that’s working, do it again, and do it again and again and again. And by the way you don’t have a lot of time because your competitors are doing this and as I think you said earlier, time’s not in your side with this. You’ve really got to invest in this because companies that don’t do it, within five years won’t be around.

PB: Interesting Kevin, so from an individual point of view, so the person sitting at the other end of the terminal or whatever the equipment is that they’re using it’s almost, I take from what you’re saying there, that they need for themselves, whatever they’re doing, to think “can I use this for myself”? Would you agree with that?

KB: Absolutely.  Again, it depends. I think everybody, to be relevant, needs to learn and this is all new so we’re all learning. And the question you’ve got to ask yourself is, and I get a lot of engineers are “I’m changing jobs what do you think?” and I’m encouraging people to go into GenAI. And then the next question is “Well I don’t have much background?”. Well there are heaps of courses and there really are. I just read that An, one of the leaders in AI, has educated 8 million people on his courses at Stanford, for example so clearly people are getting educated on AI and obviously it’s ‘horses for courses’ so if you’re an engineer you want to write code and APIs into large language models is a different sort of strategy you take but I would argue that even at board level if you’re not familiar with what ChatGPT can do, just sign up, play around with it. Ask them dumb questions that you be asking people but ask.

I remember presenting not so long ago to a CEO and his team and I actually went to ChatGPT and asked “If the question you’re asked me as your advisor this is it and he was ‘gob-smacked’. He sat there and he said “Are you kidding, that machine told you that?” I said “Yeah”. I mean you know you need to get across this because ladies and gentlemen, this is like well over a year old now, so you know, it’s happening fast. 

Now, there’s another side to your question that I think is very, very important that we haven’t touched about and that is “So where do humans fit in all of this, right”? Where is the human and this is where whether you’re a child, whether you’re an adult, whether a worker, a mother, whatever it is, I think it’s very, very important to work out the difference between what a machine can do, and what a human can do and ride the back of the machine. But like in the old days using a calculator, pull your calculator out if you’ve got to do a log or something, use it, right. But if you want to explain how to use it that’s a human element. It’s all-around creativity, right? It gives humans more time to do what humans can do that machines can’t do very well right. 

And I think every person, especially from a career point of view, needs to think about their job. What can they spin out into some sort of large language model, and not do themselves, to give them enough time to do more of what the human can do, because clearly there’s no question. I’ve got some really good numbers now that GenAI is definitely wiping out jobs, clearly it’s wiping out tasks. Businesses will be silly to continue to do things without using it, absolutely, but then you sit back and say “Okay now I’ve got more time for people”. I’ve got a cyber security company who are hiring people and I’m saying to them well that’s fantastic because leverage Gen AI to do some of the more mundane, repetitive stuff that actually computers can do much better so it gives you more time with your existing staff and maybe you don’t have to hire another 15% new staff, you only need to hire 10% new staff, right, but the key is to understand the difference, and it’s becoming harder I should point out, the difference between what a human can do, and what a machine can do. 

PB: Great advice, Kevin, thank you. It reminds me that every time someone says these technologies are going to take away a whole lot of jobs, there’s a whole lot of new employment and vocations. They’re not just, it’s not jobs per se, it’s vocations where people get to creatively apply what they’re doing. So yes, there’s some things that go away but we’ve seen technologies over the eons that have taken away jobs in mundane things but then they open up careers, and they open up the opportunity for people to apply their intelligence, and this is probably another instance of it, but we’re in the middle of it and we’ve just got to work out how to deal with it.

KB: Yeah. It’s interesting, we’re on Zoom now and I remember Cisco, 20 years ago with telepresence and people saying “We’re going to wipe out the airlines, why do you need to fly?” Guess what, I think air-travel’s never been booming as it is today, right, and we’re all using Zoom, and Teams, and WebEx and whatever. So we’ve just worked out other ways of doing things but we’re still travelling more than ever and you know, the same’s going to happen here. 

PB: It’s a great point. It really is a good point, well, thank you Kevin we’ve come to the end of where we started out and I think there’s just so much rich information there that people can apply to their businesses, and to themselves, with regards to using information technology for their business advantage and also for their personal advantage 

Your pyramid model. I think people really need to understand that again and they need to follow you up on that and find out more about it and especially how it applies to their situation. So Kevin how do people get in touch with you if they’d like to talk to you more about you coming in and talking they’re organisation etc. 

KB: Easy. kevin@blochadvisory.com You can go to www.blochadvisory.com and you can contact me from there. Very easy.

PB: That’s great, thanks Kevin. I really appreciate you taking the time to deliver this great advice to the listeners and to me. I’ve enjoyed it greatly if anyone would like to contact Kevin, I’ll just repeat that again. It was kevin@blochadvisory.com or you get in touch with Kevin, I’ll be happy to pass anything through. So thanks Kevin, really appreciate it.

KB: Thanks Phil enjoyed it and thank you for your very intelligent questions too, I appreciate that.

PB: Great, thanks Kevin.
 
 

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