Collaboration without borders for a Vibrant World through the Wholeness of Things

Part 1: The view from the basement: technology infrastructure for the Internet of Things

Let me introduce you to Matthew Madden, General Manager, Corporate & Enterprise Markets, Nextgen Group. Matthew and I met a few months ago. Since then we have been sharing some thoughts and perspectives around The Future of Work and Business from the positive disruptive power of the new Third Platform Technologies to organise work and community around the wholeness of things, not the parts.

Nextgen Group are a Telecommunications Infrastructure company who own a very large national fibre optic network across Australia. Nextgen has just commissioned a sub marine cable from Port Hedland to Darwin to serve the needs of the oil and gas platforms off the North West Shelf of Australia which has huge deposits of gas and oil.

Nextgen also has a Data Centre business. I asked Matt to tell me what Data Centres are?

Matthew:

‘We have one centre in Brisbane, two in Sydney, one in the Illawarra, one in Canberra, two in Melbourne, one in Adelaide and two in Perth; that’s our data centre footprint. The reason I emphasis this is that these data centres, along with the network, are the underpinning basis of The Internet of Things.

The Internet of Things, such as The Cloud, Data Analytics, Social Media; all have got to get the information from somewhere to somewhere. So Nextgen positions itself as the secure transport and secure housing of that information back to designated locations.

A Data Centre is like a big hotel or apartment block in which computers can live. Not for a human, you wouldn’t want to live in a data centre because there are no windows. It is conditioned air that goes through there. It is optimised for humidity and heat. Data Centres are rated from Tier 1 to 4. For example, a Tier 3 is rated as being able to operate with no single point of failure. If the power grid is switched off, it has generators to operate the equipment. Tier 4 means that there are two of everything.

All up in Australia there are around 27 Tier 3 Certified Data Centres either certified on the design or by the build i.e. it is in place and been tested thoroughly. Currently, 11 data centres have been certified as built. We - Nextgen - have 5 of them. We have a view on design excellence - we build things for clients who don’t want things to break e.g. Oil, Resources and Gas.

Remote Mining Infrastructure is an example. We run services for Roy Hill which enable them to do remote mining. It’s like a kid with a remote control car, except this thing weights 9 tons and is being operated from say Perth Airport. We live in the world where it is all about communication and connection of things at scale. Where we come in is that at some point, these connections hit fixed line communications like fibre optics and that’s what Nextgen does’.

So what is the connection between what Matthew does and what I do in my work to open up enterprise cultures to take advantage of The Internet of Things as living ecosystems connected and collaborating for social good at scale?

Mathew, along with his colleagues at Nextgen, provide the foundational infrastructure for The Internet of Things. So why is the Internet of Things vital for the Future of Work or #fow? 

The real purpose of the Internet of Things is to support the Future of Work #fow as a connected ecosystem, deploying the power of Trust without Borders at scale

#fow sees individuals, groups, enterprises, industries and societies connected to generate and innovate new opportunities and solutions for city, national and global issues which require the whole system to be collaborating on the designs of the future. Before you can collaborate, you need to be connected, stay connected and grow these connections. That’s what the Internet of Things does; it connects the parts to the wholeness of things.

The Past of Work was about the experience of seeing from the Parts of Work, with the consequences that we operated in our silos and did work up to our limited horizons and boundaries. Data and information - which is what data turns into when it is useful in our work - was fragmented and broken and often didn’t talk to other bits of data or information. And this information was used by a few people in our workplaces, not everyone. So we never got the full picture or the potential solutions. The bigger the issue, the less we saw and the less we used because we were set up for the fewness of things.

The Past of Work was about seeing from the Parts to survive. The Future of Work is about seeing from the Whole to be Vibrant

So in our information and workplace silos, we all went about solving problems and coming up with solutions which looked at the parts of things, not the whole. Exec teams did it in their corporate bunkers, doctors did it in their separate surgeries, teachers did it in their separate classroom lessons and farmers did in in their separate fields away from supermarket buyers who did it in their offices away from the farmers.

The Past of Work kept everything separate, including information and its potential to do so much more if only we would open up and look up to connect with others from the wholeness of things, not the parts.  

Technology has always led change; what we are now calling disruption. But that word by itself is such a misnomer and inadequate descriptor for what is really happening in the transformation of work now as The Future of Work.

#fow is about harnessing the power of the new Third Platform technologies to connect people at scale equipped with data and information at scale to imagine and co-create a better, more Vibrant world from the wholeness of things at scale. By Vibrant, we mean that which gives the greatest life and vitality to human systems.

In the past, we have kept information separate and we have kept people separate in order to work on the parts of things, not the whole. And so we resorted to fixing things in our own back yards of work with the information to which we had access. We have tended to hang onto and even hoard this information (which we call IP) for fear of others taking it from us in a world set up for deficit based competition.

But human systems, such as economies, health, cities, transport, agriculture, water, employment, education, construction, are themselves part of a bigger whole. These systems are universally in crisis as they struggle to cope with siloed information sharing, hierarchical, single enterprise management and individual job description based work designs and union agreements.

The new Third Platform technologies of Social, Digital, Analytics, Mobile and Cloud are open technologies, designed to connect and analyse information at scale to see more in order to restore and extend Vibrancy in our economy, cities and human systems. But whilst our technologies have become connected and people are connecting through social media, our workplaces and enterprises remain closed, siloed, separated, hierarchical and horizontal.

Picture source 

Only by restoring and extending the wholeness between things will we see new ideas, opportunities and possibilities emerge for Vibrant economies, Vibrant cities, Vibrant health, Vibrant societies and a Vibrant world.

For example, the huge potential of Big Data and Analytics to see more in order to do more at scale is being limited by our default mindset that puts this information in the hands of the data scientists, marketers, sales account managers, product developers and the multi-national makers of things. But this is temporary; this is the old part based way of sharing information. But #fow leaders are emerging like Sacha Romanovich, CEO of Grant Thornton UK - who are calling for the restoration of wholeness in the way we open up, share and use information to create a Vibrant Economy and a Vibrant World together. 

In November, Grant Thornton UK is facilitating the City of Manchester’s first every whole human system in the room event. The City is coming together to start a process of inquiry, generative ideation and design prototyping for a Vibrant City economy by improving health and social care in Manchester. 

The Internet of Things will be at the centre of this experience as an enabler for a living ecosystem to discover, extend, reconfigure and refract the data and information about its combined strengths from the lens of the wholeness of things, not the parts.

We need more initiatives like this one and they will come because the Internet of Things is reconnecting people to the Wholeness of Things. When you experience this as a human being, you reconnect to the way things should be which is what it means to part of something bigger than yourself; where the behaviours of giving, sharing and connecting my strengths with yours uncovers new possibilities, hope and what’s next for a better world.

Thanks Mathew and the team at Nextgen for your outstanding contribution to making the Internet of Things possible and available - we are in your debt.

If you'd like to have your enterprise or organisation experience this type of #positive disruption to build your future story as the wholness of things from the internet of things - then by all mean's happy to chat. Please contact me on emotionaleconomy.net@gmail.com