Australia's state-owned ABC radio has a useful online style guide. It's a useful tool for down-under writers, journalists and editors – with plenty of notes on local use.

I also recommend the short version with the style guide's main points.

Australian Reseller News, Computer Reseller News, New Zealand Reseller News and The Channel serve readers working at the sharp end of the information technology industry.

While many of the stories they cover are similar to those in other technology media, their specialised audience means  journalists need to filter information through a channel-oriented lens.

In most cases this means asking “what does this mean for the channel” and sticking the answer at the top of the story.

People who sell or distribute technology read these titles, they are ahead of market trends. That's because companies need to speak to resellers and distributors before speaking to the public.

When these publications work well, there's a flinty realism to their approach. They tend to deal with the nuts and bolts of the business and not airy-fairy possibilities.

New Zealand's The Channel is mainly advertorial – that is companies pay the publisher for stories written about their offerings. And all three other titles run sign-posted advertising supplements – they also pad out local coverage with overseas stories of variable worth.

Otherwise the publications are news-oriented.

You need to show the publishers of these titles you are a bone-fide computer industry person to get a subscription to the print publications, but all four run free access web sites.

Australian Reseller News

Computer Reseller News (Australia)

New Zealand Reseller News

The Channel (New Zealand)

Writing for the Australian edition of Lifehacker and drawing on research conducted by Monash University, Angus Kidman says one in four “independent professionals” took a pay cut last year and almost half say they expect they’ll need to be more flexible about their rates.

Kidman's Contract Workers Are Seeing Pay Decline follows on from his What’s Happened To Your Salary In The Last Decade? which notes average Australian salaries climbed last year, which implies freelance and contract workers are falling behind full-time employees.

Despite the global financial meltdown and widespread lay-offs, Australia still faces serious skills shortages. The obvious answer is to drag in workers with the right qualifications and experience from overseas.

It’s not hard to attract skilled people to Australia; from many places overseas it can almost look like a Shangri-la. However, the bureaucratic hoops are daunting and, technology skills requirements are a fast-moving target so often, by the time applications are processed, employers demands have changed.

Today’s The Australian Financial Review reports the way the country grants overseas technology professionals entry to the country is set for an overhaul in IT projects force migration target change (the story is behind a pay wall). There’s a similar report at The Sydney Morning Herald : Migration rules set for revamp.

This is going to propel Australia’s economy. There are a number of big tech projects underway and a shortage of suitably skilled people to do the work. I’d like to see New Zealand take similar measures to make sure our nation had the skills it needs to compete on the world stage. Taking unemployed or under-employed professionals from the US, UK and other northern hemisphere countries that can’t or won’t make use of them makes a lot of sense.

By Bill Bennett

When movie or television directors want to let the audience know a character is an MBA, they grope for obvious clichés. Yet as a rule, Hollywood's idea of someone with a formal management qualification bears little resemblance to reality – this is especially true in Australia.

As far as central casting is concerned, business school graduates come mainly from a classic WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) background. It goes without saying they are usually male. They were also born wealthy. At the least they will have a middle-class background, but frequently they have more of a patrician pedigree.

There's often an assumption that some or all of their education took place in one of America's Ivy League institutions.

Nine times out of ten the fictional MBA will work for a huge multinational or a large American corporation – probably something in the Fortune 1000.

The person’s role is not always made crystal clear in movies, but the clues are there and the person almost always has an air of the all-powerful about them. Sometimes the characters appear to go straight from business school to the boardroom, though good dramatic tension often requires them to be merely a single step away from greatness at the time the movie starts.

MBA template

To be fair to Hollywood, there are MBA graduate who fit this template. But they are in the minority – even in America. While there may be a handful of Australian MBAs who can recognise a little of themselves in the above picture, in the real world things are quite different.

For a start, Australia’s MBA students show an amazing diversity. That’s partly because management education is a big export earner attracting many overseas students, mainly, but not exclusively from Asia. But management programmes are also popular with Australians from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds.

One of the more glaring gaps between fiction and reality is in the age of MBA students. It is way too sophisticated for Hollywood myth-makers, but if they stopped to think more about the assumptions behind their vision of MBAdom, most of their characters would have been in their early 20s when studying for their qualification.

We can extrapolate from this to assume the fictional MBA came hard on the heels of a first degree – probably with no meaningful intervening work experience. By default, this tends to mean the person would have studied full-time for their formal management qualification. If scriptwriters bothered to look closely at motivation, they’d surmise that their MBA students were driven by the need to get a great job – or, possibly, the lure of a huge salary.

Australian MBA students tend to be much older and rarely study full-time. Victoria O'Connor, who runs MBA Showcase, says while there are MBA students who are just starting out or who are approaching the end of their working lives, on average they will have about ten years’ work experience before embarking on an MBA.

O'Conner gets to meet a large number of prospective MBA students through the MBA Showcase: a travelling one-stop shop where prospective MBA students can meet with representatives from a range of institutions around the country in their home cities.

She says, "There is often quite a difference between the people studying full-time on main campuses and those at satellite campuses." According to O'Conner full-time students studying on campus are younger, but they only make up a small fraction of the total. She says, “About 10,000 people are studying for an MBA in Australia at the moment. The full time students only number a few hundred. Some 85 to 90 percent of the people attending the showcase are interested in studying by distance programmes.”

As APESMA’s (The Association of Professional Engineers, Managers and Scientists) director of management education, Andrew Macdonald is responsible for Australia's largest MBA programme which is run as a distance programme in conjunction with Deakin University. At the time of writing, the APESMA programme has around 2,000 active students. Macdonald says most of his students are aged between 32 and 42, with the mean age being 36.

Married with children

Significantly 94 percent of the APESMA students are in full-time employment, another two percent are working part-time. Macdonald says, "A high percentage is married with children – only 21 percent are not in a relationship. Most APESMA MBA students are already in some kind of management or supervisory role.

"We don’t have any data to back it up, but we feel that one reason our course is attractive is that it allows people to do the programme while they can get on with the rest of their lives. We’ve also found that the majority of people don't take our course because they want to change career, but because they want too develop their existing career – most are sponsored in some way by their employers and stay with the same organisation after they graduate."

Motivation is another area which is widely misunderstood. There is a lot of evidence that some students see an MBA as a stepping stone to wealth. For example, many American MBA guides talk about the return on investment; that is how long it takes a freshly minted MBA earning a higher salary to recover the high cost of their education. Again, while there are Australian MBA students chasing dollars, most local MBA students are driven by higher principles.

Dr Robert Rugimbana, deputy director of the graduate school at the University of Newcastle says that many of his students come into the MBA programme with a clear idea of what they expect to get out of it. He says, "Typically they come in to further their management expertise. They are looking for knowledge that they can apply to their work."

Typically they come in to further their management expertise. They are looking for knowledge that they can apply to their work.

MacDonald agrees. He says his students typically view the MBA as a way of developing their existing career rather than finding a new one. He says, "We know a reasonable percentage of them are given support from their employers."

Both Rugimbana and MacDonald say that their part-time MBA students generally go straight out and immediately apply what they learn.

Gender is one area where the scriptwriters are on less shaky ground. Women make up only 12 percent of APESMA MBA students – though the organisation's scientific and engineering bent means its numbers are naturally skewed towards men. However, change is in the air. The number of female APESMA MBAs is climbing – albeit slowly.

Rugimbana says more of Newcastle’s MBA students are women, "There's a much greater number than before. In the early 1980s you'd be lucky to see two or three in a class of 20. Today they make up around half the numbers."

This story originally appeared in The Australian Financial Review in September 2002

Employers are out of touch with reality according to research by Hudson, a recruitment company.

Those aren’t the words Hudson uses, but it is what the company means. In Talent Tightrope: Managing the Workplace through the Downturn, Hudson says; “Employers consistently think their employees’ sentiment is twice as good as it is in reality”.

"In every aspect of current workplace sentiment, whether job satisfaction, motivation, morale, perceived stress levels or job security employers are clearly unaware of their employees' frame of mind.”

Mark Steyn, CEO Hudson A/NZ.

In a press release announcing the report Steyn goes on to say; "For example, nearly half (44 percent) of the 2,394 employees surveyed indicated that worker morale has plummeted. In contrast, only 26 percent of the 247 employers interviewed acknowledge that workplace morale has dropped”.

There’s more in the same vein. You can download the press release from Hudson’s website.

Not surprisingly Hudson found employee stress, workloads and insecurity are all higher since the start of the recession.

Bill Bennett says: This should come as no surprise. I’ve seen managers use the recession as an opportunity to exploit workers without being aware the negative impact on moral hurts productivity far more than any gains made through extracting extra hours from them.

Managers and companies who behave badly now will struggle when the recovery arrives and downtrodden employees head for greener pastures.

As the report says one-third of employees are angry and resentful of the way they’ve been treated. It’s going to take more than team-building sessions and employee of the month badges to get those people back on side.

By Bill Bennett

From the Australian Financial Review 11 April 2001

Web hosting operations in Australia and other western countries face a nasty double whammy in coming months. Not only are the various Internet markets in these countries heading towards saturation, but at the same time, many of the national economies are facing a slowdown. Asia on the other hand is, in Internet terms, so massively underdeveloped that any economic hiccups are unlikely to hinder regional web hosting growth prospects.

According to Forrester Research, by 2004 some 99.7% of US small businesses and 83% of America’s medium-sized companies will have some kind of web presence. Australia lags behind the US – but not by much. Although there’s still a long way to go before the saturation point is reached, web hosting operations can see an end to the rapid growth in customers and sites that has characterised their industry until now.

As far as Australian hosts are concerned, there are three likely drivers for further growth. First, there’s the option to sell a broader range of products and services to existing customers. Although there is plenty of scope for offering value-added services, this strategy largely depends on the still unproven ASP business model.

A second option is to expand by acquisition. In global terms the web hosting market could certainly do with a round of industry consolidation. There are currently more than 1000 hosting operations selling to international markets and while the intense competition has delivered low prices and spurred innovation there’s doubt about the long-term viability of many players.

The third option is to expand existing hosting operations into new geographic markets. Given that Europe and North America already have mature web hosting operations, for most Australian companies this means looking north to the Asian market.

Leading the charge is WebCentral. The company is Australia’s leading hosting business with 700 servers and around 40% of the local hosting market.

There’s certainly a strong business case for selling to Asia. According to a report by eMarketer and Dataquest, the Asian Internet market is still in its rapid growth phase. In 2000 there were some 49 million users in the region, by 2004 this will swell to 174 million users – that’s a compound annual growth rate of 38%. During the same period, Asian users will go from being 21% of the global online community to around 27%. More importantly e-commerce revenues are forecast to climb from US$39.4 billion to more than US$338 billion.

This is all very promising, but behind these numbers are even more compelling statistics for would-be Asian hosting operations. By world standards Asia has very low levels of business-to-consumer eCommerce – an area of great interest to web hosting companies. During the four years to 2004 this is set to rise twelve-fold. And according to Ovuum, a European-based research company, only 7% of Asian companies use web-hosting services compared with 37% of European companies.

Australian hosting companies will find the Asian Internet landscape is vastly different from the local scene. For example, compared with Australia, most of Asia has considerably less access to fixed line telephone systems. This means that for many consumers their only practical route to the web is through the wireless telephone networks. And the online experience for wireless users is considerably different to that for users with personal computers, modems and fixed telephone lines.

Another problem for local web hosting companies planning to expand into the region is that, while there is not a strong indigenous hosting industry throughout the region there are pockets of strength. For example, India already has a well-developed hosting market.

What’s more, many of the world’s largest telecommunications and Internet players already have their eyes on the yet to blossom Asian market. For example, last year Japan’s Nippon Telegraph and Telephone announced its intention to dominate the Asian hosting market when it acquired the US-based Verio hosting operation.

In December, France Telecom subsidiary Global One opened a major regional hosting operation in Singapore. This January saw Exodus Communications purchase the GlobalCenter web hosting subsidiary from Global Crossing. The two companies formed a joint venture to supply web hosting services to Asia – a business which is expected to generate some US$4 to 5 billion in revenues over the next ten years.

Remember all the talk two or three years ago about how everyone would love broadband? At the time, the industry churned out marketing material gushing about a new technology capable of delivering a whole raft of new and exciting applications that would radically change the way small companies operated.

In many respects broadband has lived up to its promise, but things didn’t quite work out service providers planned.

On the one hand, they actually underestimated small businesses’ appetite for fast Internet. On the other hand, while broadband had changed the way companies operate, they’ve not been as quick to adopt new applications.

Pacific Internet managing director Dennis Muscat says that by July of this year 52 percent or slightly more than half of all Internet-connected companies in Australia had broadband access. Two years ago the number was around 20 percent.

These numbers come from research conducted for Pacific Internet by ACNielsen Consult and published in the company’s Broadband Barometer.

Muscat, who heads the local operation of a regional telecommunications service provider, says many small businesses have purchased residential broadband packages aimed primarily at consumers. This makes sense because many smaller companies operate directly from people’s homes.

Jason Juma-Ross, principal analyst with AMR Interactive says that for small businesses the practical reality of broadband Internet is not that it enables new applications such as video conferencing or voice over IP, but that it allows users to do more of the things they did with dial-up. He says that for many users the always-on nature of broadband is possibly more important than its speed.

Muscat echoes this. He says, “They’re doing much the same as before, but with more intensity.” That means sending and receiving more email, increasing the amount of web browsing for information and doing more with their own web sites. At the same time, companies with broadband links are far more likely to use Internet banking and pay their bills online.

For example, Muscat says people are now sending large complex documents via email that they might have previously couriered or sent via fax. “Broadband increases efficiency and reduces costs. At the end of the day these are what small businesses want from any technology.”

One area that has changed dramatically is remote working. Companies that operate at multiple locations or who employ out-of-town teleworking staff can now give their remote users full, real-time access to internal computer systems.

Muscat says this has had a huge impact on some industries. “In the past if, say, a travel company employee got an out of hours call from a customer who needed to change his itinerary, that employee would have to physically go to the office in order to change the booking. Now they can take the call at home and log on to the travel systems.”

For now, more glamorous broadband applications such as videoconferencing remain well outside the business mainstream. This is despite the increased reluctance for long-distance travel now that airports have additional security procedures.

Likewise, there’s been no rush to voice over IP technology, which allows businesses to cut telephone toll budgets by enabling calls over the Internet. And software companies that have repackaged their applications as pay per use online services are still not getting much traction in the small business sector.

One reason for the slow move to new applications is that companies don’t necessarily see them as relevant. For example, videoconferencing adds little value for many companies, who could just as well get by with ordinary telephone calls.

But there another factor that can be sheeted back to Muscat’s observation about Australian small business using broadband products and services designed for residential customers. These consumer offerings tend to be significantly cheaper, but they are also generally much slower than business services – in most overseas markets anything less than 1.5 Mbps isn’t regarded as true broadband and certainly not adequate for advanced applications involving video or voice.

Moreover, residential broadband doesn’t offer the same service guarantees as commercial products. In other words, it’s not generally as reliable as business-class broadband and that extra consistency is essential for more sophisticate applications.

So what broadband applications are small businesses using? Muscat says that for the moment tools that increase data integrity dominate the market. He says there’s a huge demand for managed firewalls, spam filters, content filtering and other security products and services. “They’re concerned about viruses and hackers and being flooded with spam”.

Muscat says that as they gain experience and confidence with the technology, companies will move beyond what he describes as online hygiene factors and seek a higher grade of data network. “Small businesses know they have to deal with these issues before they can move on to the highfaluting applications.”

First published in The Australian Financial Review 2004