A minute in the life of......

I came across a snapshot of a single minute in the life of our data driven world.

Facebook.  208,000 photos uploaded.

Twitter.    350,000 tweats. 

 YouTube. 100 hours of video uploaded.

Google.   3.5 million search queries.

And those numbers are going up all the time. 90% of the data which currently exists was created in the last two years. 

You can ring my bell

Over the last few weeks I have been kept busy working for a company called Infinis Energy. It is a pure UK renewables business so was right up my street. It has performing assets in three different technologies; landfill gas, onshore wind and hydro. What has been different for me is that I was approached to be Chairman as part of the preparations for a listing on the London Stock Exchange. I have never been through an IPO (initial public offering) before and found it very interesting and, at times, frustrating. It involves a cast of thousands. I counted five different investment banks, three law firms, two corporate finance advisors, a specialist adviser on landfill gas and one firm of accountants. The conference calls, which at times were running at more than one a day, had so many people on them that I thought they might crash the system. 

It is also a very bureaucratic and legalistic process. The company had to issue a 250 page prospectus which amongst other things includes a very long list of every possible risk, to the extent that I thought we should have included the risk of a meteor hitting one of the Infinis sites. We had to have a number of Board meetings and I dread to think how many trees were sacrificed to produce all the papers. Everyone seemed to be issuing comfort letters to each other and everything had to be verified. 

On top of all this the business had to be marketed to investors. I got involved in something called 'pilot fishing', a term which seems tautologous at best as it involves initial discussions with potential investors and then the Management team spent nine days on a roadshow covering the UK, the US and Germany. They had over 40 one to one meetings as well as group lunches and video conferences. At one point the database of investor contact had over 700 individual fund managers being tracked.

This all came to head on 20 November when Infinis became the latest company to list on the London Stock Exchange. The management team were invited to a nice little ceremony to mark the start of trading, like the bell ringing ceremony in New York. They kindly invited me and it was a really good way to mark the end of the IPO process and the beginning of life as a quoted company. 

As a result I know find myself the Chairman of a public company board. Will I have to grow up now?

The Seven Ps of Effective Travel

I gave a key note speech at a conference on Scotland's clean air initiatives last week and it got me thinking of the hierarchy of travel options. I have used as my guiding principles the need to reduce both carbon emissions and air pollution, particularly in our cities. I have come up with a travel pecking order of 7 Ps:

1. PEACE. It is always best if we can avoid actually having to travel in the first place, partly because it can waste so much time. Modern technology like video conferencing, skype, face time and conference calls should always be the first option we think about.

2. PEDESTRIAN. I feel a little guilt promoting this one as I have a bad leg which makes it difficult for me to practise what I preach but for our local travel it should always be an option.

3. PEDAL. The second active option we should think about. Every time I go down to London I notice an increase in the number of bikes on the streets. The 'Boris Bikes' have made cycling easy for ad hoc journeys and Londoners are responding.

4. PUBLIC.  If we can't use our own energy to get around then the shared options are the next best. We have to use modern, digital, technology to make public transport easier to use. Apps for journey planning and real time data feeds are obvious steps we need to take. Maybe Edinburgh, with its new tram, can take a lead here. 

5. POOLED. The other shared transport is car pooling or lift sharing. Businesses should give incentives to staff who car share, like reserving the best car park spaces for their cars.

6. PLUGGED. New vehicles are being developed all the time with all electric cars, plug in hybrids, hydrogen buses and LPG fleets having a role to play. These have lower emissions than conventionally fuelled vehicles.

7. PETROL.  Our final choice, the last resort if you like, should be the private car (be it petrol or diesel). All too often, however, it is our first or default choice.

The challenge for policy makers and organisations is to make options 1 to 6 easier to adopt more often and then we will use them more often. If we just hit the car user over the head or in the wallet we will not get the sustainable behaviour change we need. 

An Element that changed the world

I have just finished John Browne's new book, 'Seven Elements that Changed the World". It was the last section, on silicon that really struck me. That humble element has changed the world in four different technological areas; three of which are still having a profound impact today.

Firstly there is glass, whether it is the highly decorative ornamental glass from Murano in Venice or a common window we tend to take it as a given. However, it was only in 1845 that the window tax was abolished in the UK and the use of glass started to transform our built environment. This was given a kick start by the Great Exhibition and its Crystal Palace which contained 300,000 panes of glass. Glass hasn't just changed our homes and cities, it also changed our view of the whole universe when Galileo looked through his telescope and realised that the Earth wasn't at the centre of the Universe. 

Secondly, we have the use of silicon in photovoltaic cells to produce electricity. The scientific breakthrough came from Chaplin, Pearson and Fuller working at Bell Labs in the mid 1950s. As Browne puts it, this discovery was so important because " in one year, more energy reaches the earth's surface from the Sun than will ever be extracted from all the sources of coal, oil, natural gas and uranium. In one day, the earth's surface receives 130,000 times the total world demand for electricity" Whilst in the UK solar is still only a niche product it is revolutionising the lives of people in sub Saharan Africa who don't have access to mains electricity.

If that wasn't enough then silicon forms the base material of the integrated circuits that are at the heart of all modern computing, including the iPad I am typing this entry on. The forerunner, the transistor, another product of Bell labs, won for its creators Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain a Nobel prize and after a period of development up until the mid 1960s "the exponential rate of increase in computing power and the consequential reduction in the cost of that power has been going on ever since." As a result, Browne points out, the typical smartphone contains more computing power than at the whole of NASA when men landed on the moon.

Silicon is transforming one last part of our lives; communication. The use of fibre optic cables is the backbone of the internet which connects more of us everyday to more and more data and information. I can be half way round the world and download vast reams of Board papers in seconds. At times this doesn't feel like progress! But when you stop and think of the revolution in communications we have seen in our lifetime it is incredible.

If the 18th to century were the Carbon age then the 21st century certainly feels like the silicon century.

The Missing Chapters

I have just finished a book that should be required reading for all Government Ministers: "The Blunders of our Government" by Anthony King and Ivor Crewe. They describe the differences between mistakes, errors of judgement and blunders and arrive at the following definition of the latter; "an episode in which a government adopts a specific course of action in order to achieve one or more objectives and, as a result largely or wholly of its own mistakes, either fails completely to achieve those objectives, or does achieve some or all of them but contrives at the same time to cause a significant amount of 'collateral damage' in the form of unintended and undesired consequences".  

They then go on to analyse an impressively frightening list of blunders of the last thirty years; the poll tax, personal pensions, the child support agency, the ERM, the Millenium Dome, individual learning accounts, tax credits, the asset recovery agency, payments to English farmers, IT procurement (particularly the NHS debacle), the London Underground PPP and ID cards. The second half of the book then describes the author's views of the reasons behind these blunders dividing them in to human factors such as cultural disconnection, group think and prejudice and then system failures. The following quote sums up this second group of factors "the weakness, despite appearances, of Number 10 [Downing Street], the speed at which ministers are moved from post to post, the pressure on ministers-and ministers own desire- to be constantly active, the lack of effective individual accountability in the system, parliament's near irrelevance and the absence in Whitehall of sufficient quantities of relevant and essential skills. But there is another feature of the British system- or rather a non-feature- that is worth noting. There is at the heart of the British system a deficit of deliberation."

I have to say that my experience of dealing with Governments over the last decade or so is totally in accord with the analysis and conclusions of the book. Here is just one illustration; in my nearly eleven years as an energy company CEO I dealt with nearly eleven Ministers of State for Energy (nearly as the last one was shared with the Business Department). In fact my only negative reaction to the whole book is that two chapters are missing; one on the two energy efficiency schemes, the Green Deal  ECO and one on the whole electricity market reform process. I am sure they will be in the second edition!

The age of big data and collaboration.

I was sent an interesting article by Ron Kasabian about big data. He talks about the stages in typical technology developments where, after a 'peak of inflated expectations', we usually enter something called the 'trough of disillusionment'. He argues that, as far as  big data is concerned, "there is fact substance behind the hype". I would agree. The amount of data that is available is growing every day and we are finding increasingly creative uses of it to change our perceptions of how things can or should be done. Kasabian offers four useful tips to avoid disappointment.

1. Think even bigger. He argues that the more data sources you have the better and that increasing the data by a factor of ten is the answer. I suspect he is right, the key is to think bigger rather than smaller. 

2. Find relevant data for the business. The key is to know what data will make the biggest business or societal impact.

3. Be Flexible. As he says "we are in a phase of rapid innovation" and, as in any field of endeavour, that requires pilots, trials, rapid learning and multiple iterations.

4. Connect the dots. I believe that a real prize in the big data revolution will come from exactly this. It will be about combining data from different sources and different organisations to give insight that would elude the individual silos where that information currently resides. This points to increasing cooperation between organisations in both the the public and private sectors. 

We are entering the age of big data but also the age of collaboration and together these two themes can offer us a path to more sustainable economic development. 

C-: Could do Better

The road to true sustainable development really depends on two things; what we build (the engineering challenge) and how we behave. It is this second one that many of us struggle with. Last week the Scottish Government published its report on the ten key behavioural areas that should be addressed. There is a wealth of data in the report and it can be accessed through this link.  http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2013/10/3267. The behaviours cover four topics, energy, transport, food and waste. A few of the statistics I picked out were:

- 47% of people in Scotland monitor or, in simply keep an eye on their home energy use which means that over half of us don't.

- only 66% of homes with cavity walls have actually insulated them and only 45% of lofts have adequate insulation in them. 

- less than a quarter of Scots turn off heating on unused rooms.

- 57% never turn the TV fully off overnight. 

- around 30% either walk, cycle or use public transport to get to work. That proportion has stayed pretty constant at that level over the years. 

These society level statistics are all very interesting but what really matters is what we do as individuals. So I decided to do a little thought experiment. I scored my personal performance on each of the ten behaviours out of ten giving me a theoretical maximum of 100. I scored 48. What was interesting was that on a few areas I scored well, we do, for example, keep our thermostat low, but on other areas I was hopeless. I scored myself 0 out of 10 on healthy eating, my love of curry and chips beats apples and carrots I'm afraid. I don't do well about dependence on the car but I have significantly improved my MPG by both car choice and less speed. 

I shared this with a group of leaders in the Scottish public sector and two things emerged. Firstly, we all recognise that we aren't perfect and our individual performance is mixed. Secondly, what counts is gradual and incremental improvement. So my challenge is to get 48 up to, say 60 in the next year. If we aim for perfection we might as well give up but we can all aim to get better.