Written by entrepreneur and leading technology lawyer Nick Abrahams, Digital Disruption in Australia: A guide for Entrepreneurs, Investors & Corporates is a wake-up call for the entire economy.

It is estimated that over 50 percent of Australian businesses are currently affected in some way by digital disruption. It’s not all bad with digital disruption revitalising the tech sector with the greatest rate of change in the last two  years. Abrahams provides a well reasoned assessment of the trends impacting Australia including:

• Media companies have been the biggest acquirers of consumer focused online transactional businesses to date but now looking to fill the content gaps
• Australia companies are leveraging the huge need in the small to medium business sector to a global audience with cloud based solutions- think Campaign Monitor and Invoice2go.
• Ad-tech has been achieving remarkable multiples
• Marketplaces continue to be popular investments
• Australian tech startups are considered attractive by US venture capitalists
• Telstra is a big buyer/investor in Australian tech companies – and a possible exit strategy so build a company Telstra wants to buy

For any company wanting to make an exit, Abrahams has useful recommendations on getting the right valuation. Other broader recommendations which I found pertinent to Chief Digital Officers were:

• Treat UX  designers like gods. Customer experience trumps and pushes government and the law (think AirBnB and Uber)
• Privacy will be tradeable. Customers will trade privacy for services and/or value

Nick also has an extremely useful table of tech contacts and a summary of the 500 mergers and acquisitions  in Australia covering the last 3 years.

While Nick is the ultimate slashie: highly regarded technology lawyer,  entrepreneur, investor, industry commentator,  comedian and Hollywood executive, he knows his stuff having worked on over $3 billion of technology transactions in the last four years.  The book is available from the usual booksellers. Recommended reading!

The post Digital Disruption in Australia Review appeared first on Digital Nation.

Mini MBA for digital agencies

Bookings now open for the intensive one-day. Key outcomes of this business bootcamp for digital workshop

1. Business Valuations – what acquirers looking for and how they value the digital business
2. Management Dashboards – how to best track the right information in your business. You will build a dashboard on the day
3. Financial Management – understanding the balance sheet, business case developments and financial ratios specific to digital

Press release follows. Valuing & Growing your digital Business press release final

The post New workshop assists digital services businesses to grow and exit appeared first on Digital Nation.

This one-day seminar on 31 March investigates how to take the best from both worlds, manage agile in a waterfall environment and still deliver ROI. It also brings together the C-suite of product, business, program, finance and legal managers.

The highly regarded speaker panel will help you deliver business by

1. Understanding what elements of agile to use – and what to leave out
2. Managing agile in highly regulated environments
3. Reviewing the need for the business case
4. Minimising legal & commercial risk of agile projects client and agency side
5. Setting up a pilot and  transition action plan

with case studies and contributions from                

Join the conversation on agile business + product with:

• Chief Digital Officers, Heads of Online/Digital
• Chief Marketing Officers, Digital Marketers
• PMO
• Heads of Digital Services
• Product Owners/Managers
• Capability Managers
• Program/Project Managers

Bookings now open for the seminar on March 31 in Sydney. For further detail contact claudia(at)digital-nation.com.au or visit the Managing Agile in a Waterfall program page.

The post Managing Agile Waterfall Business for ROI appeared first on Digital Nation.

Founded in 1997, Reactive Media was one of Australia’s largest independent digital agencies, headquartered in Melbourne with offices in Sydney, London, New York and Auckland. Highly successful, the agency has marquee clients such as Nissan, Coles Supermarkets, Tesco (UK) and most recently winning Goodman Fielder’s digital strategy.

The Reactive acquisition caps off a busy year for mergers and changes in the digital/mobile agency landscape with:

• Ogilvy Australia taking full ownership of digital agency Bullseye with over 100 staff in September
• DT (part of the STW Group) purchasing mobile engagement/games company Millipede
• Digital/video specialist Neon Stingray selling to French giant Valtech
• Digital design firm Strategic and Creative selling to management consultancy Boston Consulting Group based in Asia
• Social media specialist SR7 bought by management consultancy KPMG
• Mobile payments and marketing company Mobile Embrace (ASX: MBE) acquired online mobile performance company The Performance Factory for $3.2million

The Reactive sale won’t be the last of course. Not all agencies want to sell; some want to keep their independence. But as a founder or shareholder wanting to exit, what can you do to ensure a successful sale?

Developing your exit strategy

Corporate advisor and workshop leader of the MBA in a Day workshop on digital business training Matt Costello, Director of Fit4Sale, provides advice to digital agencies looking for an exit strategy.

Matt Costello, Director, Fit4Sale

1.  Concentrate on core assets: technology, talent and client base. Stay cutting edge, but don’t be locked into any specific technology platform. Have a dedicated and diverse talent pool and be a place people want to come to work. Reward and hold your best people through equity or profit participation. Cultivate diverse ad sticky clients that you can expand your services into, and try not to have one client representing more than 15% of your revenues.

2. Scale. Unless you have a very valuable piece of IP that isn’t quite commercialised yet, a large buyer (like Accenture) can only improve their own performance through acquisition, by buying revenues (and client base) in excess of $20m. If you’re not there yet, think about merging with someone in an adjacent market so you can both deliver new services to existing clients. This will have a compounding impact on shareholder value. You can reduce costs (premises, accounting/admin etc), combine revenues and accelerate revenue growth by cross-selling to the other’s clients. Once bedded down, the combined entity can offer a broader service set to larger clients who are often mindful of the size of their services suppliers as well as wanting to minimise the number of suppliers they deal with.

3. Manage risk profile. Don’t lose sight of the underlying risk profile of your business. In the fast paced digital agency landscape, you really should always be ready to field an offer. This means your shareholder agreements should be in place, your client agreements should be signed and filed (it’s amazing how many contracts only have one signature or even none…if they can be found) and your employee agreements should be consistent and complete (and signed and filed and contain an IP, confidentiality, non-compete and no-poach clauses). A clean data set for due diligence can make or break a deal and could add significantly to the valuation you achieve.

Ultimately the key to maximising the value of your shareholding is to focus on the quality of your business rather than what your exit valuation is. The less you worry about who is going to buy you, the more time you have to work on your business fundamentals. At the right time, the exit will take care of itself.

Bookings now open for MBA in a Day Sydney on 12 May and for MBA in a Day Melbourne on 14 May 2015.

The post Maximising the value of your digital business – and heading for the exit appeared first on Digital Nation.

According to the article in Ad Age the company is applying a “70-20-10″ rule, meaning a standard performance-based compensation for the 70% of work that agencies are most used to doing. In addition, agencies can take advantage of  a guaranteed minimum bonus for the 20% of projects labeled “evolved” or the 10% for projects being tackled for the first time. Plus, there’s the opportunity to earn another 5% of the guaranteed minimum in Coca-Cola’s new agency bonus structure.

I wrote about similar programs with local digital agencies in this post on choosing the right billing method.

What Coca-Cola calls “value-based compensation”, the term that is also commonly used is value pricing. Value pricing gives the agency/developer an opportunity to benefit from adding significant value to the client. Often the agency will charge a small retainer to cover costs, so there is some sharing of risk. For it to work, the the values of the agency and the client need to be in complete alignment.

Digital agency Tectonic has a couple of clients on a performance basis, where they are remunerated based on a percentage of sales. Richard de Nys, Tectonic Founder & Production Director says, “In principle it works well as the upside is good. In practice these projects can be pushed to the bottom of the pile behind clients who pay immediately, when there’s a lot of work on.”

“We consider it on a case by case basis.”

Are there any other compensation models you’ve seen operating in Australia?

The post Coca-Cola rewards agencies for truly innovative work appeared first on Digital Nation.

With so many agencies and developers claiming mobile expertise, it’s hard to know who has the right stuff.  There are some great developers who deliver a great app or service. And then there others who are jumping on the mobile bandwagon, and deliver an inferior product. Based on vetting quite a few mobile apps developers over the last couple of years, here’s what I look for…

Choosing a mobile apps developer – essentials you need to know

First of all, choose a developer who specialises in the type of app you want to build. Do they have experience and a track record in  either games, utility or marketing apps? These require very different skills, so make sure they align with what you need. Some other questions you may want to ask:

• What is their experience? Can they provide case studies and testimonials?
• What are their core strengths? Beware the one-size fits all approach – that sends alarms bells!
  

• What development skill set do they have in house? Do they only do native (iOS, Android, Windows or Blackberry), responsive/adaptive or cross-platform?How do the developer/agency manage older versions and make sure the current app is backward compatible?
• What cross platform tools do they use? Are they well understood? Best practice?
  
• Is what they’re developing backward compatible, i.e. accessible by older versions of the operating system?
• Who will be working on this development – who is the project team? How experienced are they?

• Can they assist with promotion? What ideas can they offer?
• Do they have a direct line into Apple and Google? How successful have they been in getting their clients app of the day?

• What performance incentives do they/can they propose?
• Do they have UX/design capabilities in-house?
• Are they performing all the work in-house and in Australia? Or are they using overseas developers? While that’s not a bad thing, outsourced development requires people on the ground with a great deal of experience.
• What are the hosting/maintenance options – and how much will it cost? Who will be working on maintenance? Is it the junior developer who’s using this as a training opportunity?
  
• What is the warranty period they’re offering?
• Who has ownership of the assets at the end of the campaign?

Let me know if there are any other criteria to add to the above.

The post Choosing mobile apps developers – a checklist appeared first on Digital Nation.

Tim Parsons, Mi9

In the Academy Award-winning 2010 caper Inception, a crew of technicians enter each other’s dreams in a dramatic quest to plant an entirely original idea in the mind of an industry scion, that they hope will change the world.

Inception is an example of a group of people adapting in real-time to circumstances, each person bringing all their abilities, imagination and drive to the problem: no passengers. Inspiring, thrilling stuff.

Now think of your development team: developers, data folks and designers. Do you see them operating like the crew in inception ? Or more like their polar opposite: passive drones who look + feel like they’re lost within a huge corporate structure, projects grinding on through massive requirements documents towards unsatisfactory and under-performing end-products. If your answer is, truthfully, yes, then you need to take a long hard look at yourself, how your org is doing things – and consider the Agile development approach.

Agile Development – plus its parent Lean, and flavours Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP) – are methods to make it easier for a group of people working together to collaborate and make decisions, and deliver working products. Sounds pretty good right ?

Crib notes: the ‘agility’ part comes because the Agile process is based on short-cycle ‘time-boxed’ iterations which incrementally lead up to product releases. The approach values people interactions over documentation, process adaptability over fixed requirements: being iterative means it can adapt to changing requirements. (Yep, in the real world, business requirements are constantly changing!) Lean Development – originally a ‘just-in-time’, order only-what-you-need philosophy pioneered by Toyota – has evolved to become “build minimum viable product (MVP) -> test on audience -> adjust and extend MVP -> repeat test-cycle” – discipline to capture changing audience requirements via open prototyping. XP is a software-specific version of Agile which adds in transparent collaboration, keyboard-sharing co-work, unit-testing and planning . Scrum is a more general form of Agile which can be used for any kind of project.

Agile Dev is not easy

You need to have solid, respectful, supporting relationships between stakeholders and teams, and lots of new ways of working together to make it deliver. Unlearning old habits is very hard, especially if you’ve been used to working alone, or in a more waterfall manner. Also, if your office environment is already toxic, then you’ve got lots of culture work to do: a key principle in Agile is visibility/transparency, which is hard to achieve if there’s a culture of blame. Finally, Agile is also not complete – you need to adapt it and add in doses of Lean, XP and Scrum to make it work.

Agile improves project success rate

But it’s worth it. According to respected US software performance think-tank The Standish Group , over 29% of projects run using ‘traditional’ waterfall methods are a failure, and only 14% truly succeed. In contrast, for Agile, only 9% are failing and more like 42% are unequivocal successes. Makes you think.

Agile Business Forum in August…book now

For a more in-depth consideration of how agile is impacting on business models, please email claudia (at) digital-nation.com.au for the full length article. This topic will also be discussed in a half day forum with Tim, and other agency/client practitioners – Sydney on 13th August and Melbourne on 16th August.

Saito: You remind me of someone… a man I met in a half-remembered dream. He was possessed of some radical notions. (Inception, 2010)

Saito from the movie Inception

The post Agile Software Development for Managers – Point of View appeared first on Digital Nation.

The current challenge is finding good hunters according to the business owners I interviewed recently.

It’s about finding and getting new business. Or as one agency head put it: “The challenge is getting a foot in the door that’s not even open. We can’t find the right people to do that.“ It’s incredibly difficult to find people that can actually sell digital services to major corporates or government.

Recruitment agency S2M Co-founder & CEO David Jackson, agrees: “More than ever agencies are looking to hire pure hunters.”

There is still a role for account managers or farmers who are given a portfolio of clients to maintain, and to cross sell and upsell. Hunters or BDMs identify new business opportunities, cold call, organise visits to potential clients and establish relationships. The emphasis is on actively growing revenue, rather than relying on order takers waiting by the phone for the client to ring.

So where do you hunt for hunters?

David Jackson says it’s difficult to find them, but is looking for them in different places. “We are placing numerous hungers in agencies at the moment. Typically they are coming out of the publishers. Media sales people are used to chasing the dollar, and are generally creative and hungry.”

Technology makes the process easier to find sales/BDMs particularly using LinkedIn. I’ve just noticed jobs being listed on Gumtree which personally is a scatter gun and haphazard approach.

The best BDMs are not the big brash old sales school personalities of old. They avoid the bullshit speak. Generally they are softly spoken, intelligent and articulate who get on with the job at hand. David elaborates: “The best hunters are used to dealing at C level. They identify with a particular industry say financial services, and know everything about that sector. They can sell cross platform or bundle offers into that market. They are not the big brash old style sales people anymore.”

In my dealings with smaller agencies it’s often the CEO or senior manager responsible for new business development, but they are overloaded with operational responsibilities, and hence the need to hire specialists. An agency needs to get to a certain size of revenue or staffing before a BDM becomes viable.

Who is responsible for bringing in new business in your agency or digital services business?

The post Finding hunters is the biggest business issue for agencies appeared first on Digital Nation.

I run my businesses (Objective Asia in Singapore and Objective Digital in Sydney) with my wife and business partner Kylie.

What type of projects does your company work on – how long do they run?

We work mainly in finance, telco, travel and FMCG; helping companies understand their customers’ experiences using eye tracking and other psychological research techniques. The outcomes of our work include design recommendations that improve consumer experiences across business systems, websites, mobiles and shopping environments.

How did you get started in digital?

My work as an Organisational Psychologist in HR and Change Management was not as exciting as I had hoped, and the problems we were trying to solve were mainly caused by the IT systems that people were using. So I decided to move into a role where I could fix the problems at their root cause, the unusable systems.

What’s your current favourite book, website, blog or source of inspiration for your business?

I love reading Mashable for new technology inspiration and I write for, and read, UXMagazine.

What’s the ratio of project managers to developers/producers?

Most of our projects are managed by the consultants on the job, with Kylie making sure resources are allocated profitably.

How many staff do you have in total

15

Have you introduced in new roles/jobs title in your business – is the nature of your business changing?

Our industry is new! User Experience Consultants didn’t exist when I started as a usability researcher 13 years ago.

How do you keep hours and costs on or under budget? How do you maintain profitability on each and every project? Is it a result of project management processes, good budgeting, or initial scoping? 

Correct initial scoping is key of course. But once a project commences, Kylie allocates our UX consultants to projects, and allocates their budgeted hours against each project. Staff then enter their time into a system which allows everyone to see whether a project is on budget or going over time.

We also use a WIP document which is in the cloud, and updated in real-time, so that everyone can see how their project timelines are scheduled. Keeping projects on time and on budget is a key focus for our business.

What tools do you use to manage time and job tasks?

We currently use Harvest to manage time and job tasks, but we are currently looking at other tools which can give a more accurate measure of staff utilisation rates.

Any suggestions on dealing with difficult clients?

If there is an issue, deal with it immediately and sort it out. If the client is being difficult, stand up for what you believe in, they respect that. If they are really painful, resign them.

What’s your or the company’s biggest challenge currently?

Managing growth across SE Asia and within Australia.

What particular skill set do you look for in your new hires?

To me User Experience (UX) is not simply a design role. I look for people who have an interest in people and who have undertaken a lot of user research to understand how the people they are designing for think and behave. Only once we have deep insights into the person who will be using a digital platform can we design it in a usable way. UX design is the outcome of research.

How do you ensure that your team is performing well, and focused on the same goals? Do you have any special team activities that you do to maintain a good culture?

We have 6 monthly planning days where we present the 3 year vision for the company and discuss strategies to reach our goals. All team members have KPIs and job goals that are aligned to our business dream.

Every second Monday morning we have a brown bag breakfast where we spend a couple of hours educating each other or being educated by guests. In addition, we encourage staff to attend industry events and training.

In addition, we try to foster a great staff culture. We have a balcony overlooking Darling Harbour and this is the venue of many staff and client BBQs. We also like to get out of the office to do things together. (See photo of Xmas bushwalk and lunch).

The post Interview with UX specialist, James Breeze, CEO, Objective Digital appeared first on Digital Nation.

Lost a few battles, but not the war

There is no doubt that Microsoft is at a crucial tipping point in the success of the company. What is not clear yet is whether Windows 8 is the tip of the iceberg of a longer term strategy which will see them dominate enterprise and domestic markets.

It is well documented that Microsoft products and web technologies have on the most part been unsuccessful in challenging Apple, Google and Samsung’s dominance in recent years, with several failed operating systems and casualties including Bing, Windows Live and MSN. Despite this, Microsoft has had significant and growing success which may pave the way to future resurgence in domestic markets.

Microsoft set to dominate the living room

Where Apple, Google and Samsung have had less success, Microsoft is dominating. Take the Xbox for example; it’s a market leader as a gaming device and now a media/companion device giving Microsoft an important foothold in the battle for living room technology.

The Xbox gives the consumer a robust and high fidelity operating system for their TV, an area where competitors are lacking. Smart TVs from Apple, Google and Samsung have seen slow adoption rates and sales remain low. Samsung’s Smart TVs are a disappointingly clunky, low tech solution; Microsoft however has got it right.  Plug in your Xbox to your TV or monitor and the experience is superior, giving you access to games, entertainment and music content all through a powerful connected device. Microsoft has a strong foundation in the quest to take over living room technology.

There are other notable rumours emerging from industry sources. In a leaked presentation Microsoft describes the next generation of Xbox with an improved Kinect device. The Xbox 720 will be able to instantly stream any content you want and work with Windows 8 to provide a unique home entertainment experience. And don’t forget Microsoft’s second screen technology, SmartGlass. Microsoft is already delivering rich and engaging second screen experiences.

Converged Media –Devices, content and experiences

The next chapter for Microsoft sees the introduction of Windows 8, the new touch based operating system for Microsoft.

Where Windows 8 differentiates to competitor’s iOS and Android, is the ability for the user to share content and experiences between multiple devices. If you’ve got a smartphone (Nokia Lumia) and a tablet (Slate) running Windows 8, you can easily share content between devices. Then if we add the Xbox 720 and traditional laptop into the mix, the experience becomes something else entirely. Windows 8 and Xbox is the glue that enables a truly seamless, cross device experience for consumers.

So by solving the age-old fragmentation issue, through connecting, enabled devices, Microsoft presents itself as a potential juggernaut in the battle for control of the living room. The future will see users syncing mobile, tablet, Xbox and Smartglass with the Cloud delivering a truly powerful, integrated and slick home experience for the whole family. Ardent Digital is a Microsoft Gold Certified partner and is working on several Windows 8 projects for large brands in enterprise and domestic markets.

If you want to speak to us about Windows 8 or other mobile projects then please get in touch – Nick.blyth@ardentdigital.com or check out my professional profile and connect with me on LinkedIn. http://lnkd.in/e_ab9B

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