A couple of weeks ago I compiled SmartCompany’s annual listing of the 12 most influential people in the Australian technology industry. It’s a difficult task, and regardless of the criteria set, leads to agonising decisions as to who makes it on, and who doesn’t. As such, you can only be certain that the people who are happy with it are the 12 that make it on.

It was also noted fairly quickly however by Angela Priestley from Women’s Agenda that as a representation of Australian technology influencers, it was heavily weighted in favour of men, with only one woman, Telstra’s Catherine Livingstone, making the cut. This was an issue that I grappled with while compiling the list, and there were many female contenders who for one reason or another were eliminated. Suffice it to say, leaders such as Microsoft Australia’s Pip Marlow and Intel Australia’s Kate Burleigh were high in the list of contenders, but didn’t make the final 12. Angela has since compiled a comprehensive list of influential women in IT, which you can read by clicking here.

The lack of women in positions of influence in the Australian tech industry is – sadly – nothing new. And it is possibly getting worse. While it is great to see women running four of the local branches of powerful multinationals (Burleigh at Intel, Marlow at Microsoft, Angela Fox at Dell and Maile Carnegie at Google Australia) there are few running locally-domiciled tech companies. The start-up scene is also bereft of female leaders, and with the retirement of AMP CIO Lee Barnett, we lose one of the few remaining women in senior leadership roles in the user community.

The issue has also been thrust back into the spotlight recently thanks to several stories detailing the discrepancy between the pay earned by men and women in the industry for performing equivalent tasks – something that needs immediate correction.

The sad fact is that young women are simply not choosing technology-oriented degrees to the same extent as young men, and the result is a technical cadre which is heavily biased towards men. Thankfully the team at Digital Careers have taken up the challenge of trying to bring more women into IT, as part of their overall mission to raise student uptake of technology degrees. It is also true that many technology leaders have come into the industry from non-technical backgrounds, with finance being a common qualification amongst modern CIOs.

But the truth is, until we see greater representation of women in IT, we are never going to have an IT industry that is as strong as it should be.

Technology is a rich and rewarding industry to work in. It is fast paced, pays comparatively well, and provides a wealth of opportunity for personal and professional development. And with technology so thoroughly embedded into our lives, its importance within society is surely only going to rise.

The importance of the technology industry to Australia is also hard to dispute. Which should be a worry to us all, when as an industry we are barely tapping into more than half the available talent.

For the past couple of months I’ve had the pleasure editing and writing a set of pages for Business Spectator under the theme of Paths to Advantage. While the pages are sponsored by IBM, I’ve had free reign to speak to anyone, about anything, provided it is in relation to the concept of business transformation.

My view is that transformation is essential within Australian businesses if they wish to still be around in 2050. Its is fairly evident that the way many businesses operate and the services/products they offer will look very different by then, and it may take more than just gradual change to get them there – especially when the likes of an Amazon or Uber pops up to disrupt their market.

But where do they start?

So when kicking the series off, I had the chance to dive into one of the topics I’m most fascinated by – business culture – and the extent to which it drives or retards business transformation.

Peter Drucker nailed it when he wrote ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’. What became clear in speaking to people for this article was that if the culture is wrong, it doesn’t matter how good the strategy is – the right people won’t get behind it, and it won’t happen. Its like the mission statement that everyone recites and no one believes.

Hence in writing this story, I examined the cultural factors that can lead to a successful business transformation. You can read the results by clicking here, but based on the many conversations required to research this story, my summary is this:

It all starts with a goal. That goal need only be partly defined – being too prescriptive upfront limits the eventual possibilities.

Strategy is important, but can only succeed if the culture is right. The best cultures emphasise cross-functional collaboration.

Culture is the product of behaviour. If management wishes to influence culture, it must behave in accordance with the culture it is trying to create.

Behaviour is driven by incentive. Rewarding people for the wrong behaviour will generate the wrong culture. This usually means rewarding people against new metrics such as customer satisfaction, rather than just sales growth.

Incentive is set through management. Therefor management must understand what behaviours to reward in accordance with its goal.

Get all of those things right, and transformation just might be possible.

I’m fascinated by how emerging techniques in data analysis are opening up new ways to improve business processes. But it is not just the business community that is benefiting from the concepts behind Big Data. Useful data can be derived from just about anything – even oysters – and used to improve processes. The application of data analytics to environmental management forms the heart of the Sense-T project in Tasmania, and that project is the lead example in my first posting for The Guardian’s Australian website. But even this ambitious project represents just the earliest stages of how we might wield data to make a better world.

Often the talk around cloud computing focus on business issues such as cost reduction or security. Rarely it seems does the experience of end users actually receive much consideration. But the tiny lags that seem commonplace when loading web pages can grow to be major frustrations when the occur in the context of a business application and are experienced thousands of times a day.

This article for IT Pro was a chance to look into the problem of latency and the effect that it can have on user experience.

Late last year I was asked by the editor of CPA Australia’s INTHEBLACK magazine to look into the issue of digital assets and how they are valued in modern organisation. The truth, as it turns out, is that they generally aren’t.

Current accounting standards apply valuations to physical assets such as plant and equipment or inventory, but intellectual property, databases and software-based processes barely get a look in.

Which is odd, because some of the worlds most valuable companies, such as Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, have asset to valuation ratios of around 4 per cent. They have very few physical assets backing their massive valuations.

Rather, it is intangible assets, such as digital assets and brands, which make up these valuations. These are often classed on ‘goodwill’. All of this means that in most instances the only way to value a software or data-oriented company is based on its earnings – and even that is a fairly crude measure, especially for a start-up. In the end, most valuations simply come down to what the market is willing to pay. Which in an era where the use of data is what sets aside a business, makes no sense at all.

Anyway, you can read more of my researching into this topic in this article in INTHEBLACK.

A few weeks ago I had the chance to catch up with Amazon.com chief technology officer Dr Werner Vogels. I first met Werner two years ago when Amazon.com was making overtures to Australia’s internet start-up community.

This time around represented an opportunity for me to learn more about how Amazon’s retail operations make use of data. The whole company is essentially a data company – Werner describes it as a technology company that happens to do retail. The company doesn’t make a decision without data, and when it does make a decision it watches the response in terms of changing data patterns and decides whether to stick with that decision or do something else.

It is a model that is the extreme end of the spectrum in terms of data usage maturity, but still holds lessons for all companies. In recent presentations I’ve been describing how all companies are essentially data companies, and that it is how well organisations collect, manage and utilise data that will set them apart into the future. If your business has customers, then you can be guaranteed that your customers generate data. But for most businesses, that data is never collected, let alone put to use.

Anyway, some of his thoughts made its way into this story for CMO.com.au.

We all have to work – well, most of us, anyway. But the way that we work is changing. The internet is changing the way that we interact with the workplace, and where we chose to work from, even across national borders. Human ingenuity is also reshaping how we work, and who we can work for.

In the days before the Industrial Revolution we were mostly all small businesses or freelancers, with relatively few people employed by governments or large agencies. Often companies were formed specifically to complete a purpose, such as a voyage of exploration, and then disbanded. Employment contracts were far less common than they are today.

Perhaps this older model of employment – one where each person runs their own personal small business – is the more natural mode of employment? Perhaps our education system – which gears students to become employees – is wrong? Maybe we are better off taking care of our own needs, rather than expecting our employer to do that for us?

I don’t know the answer to these questions, but its a topic that fascinates me. As someone who has worked as a freelancer for the past 10 years, I have enjoyed a huge amount of freedom, and a fair dose of frustration. But I’m in no rush to re-enter the ranks of full-time employment. And it seems that the ranks of those who feel the same way I do are swelling.

In these two articles for BRW I had the chance to investigate the changing nature of work. The first – click here – looks at what it means to be an employee. The second – click here – looks at the increasing trend of workers taking control of their own destiny.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.