 Well, thank you very much for inviting me to come and talk with you this just about afternoon, isn't it? I'm very pleased to have the chance to do that and look forward to a good discussion after my remarks. I mean even interrupt me if you want, that's absolutely fine for me too. So that was a kind introduction. I've forgotten actually about the riot networks thing. I hadn't really forgotten about it but it was a fascinating time. I was back in California in the days before the expression.com was coined and it was actually quite formative for me because I got into that through a venture capital company, a friend of mine in venture capital who wanted to put some money into a company that allowed musicians to play together on the internet, which is in the mid 90s. I think the qualifications were I didn't have a ponytail and I did own a suit. And I could add up a bit. So that sort of seemed to get me the job. But it was actually really interesting and very useful because I learnt an awful lot about raising money on the market. It went through three rounds of raising finance. I learnt a lot about the differences actually between raising money in the UK and in the US and the attitude of people in the UK and the US and it wasn't at all what I was led to believe. I found the UK much more flexible, people much more understanding them and I found a lot of the US telecom companies very inflexible. So it was quite good and it was quite good then to go through that whole dot com boom with that background. That's it where it is so it's quite telling. But that's not what I'm going to talk to you about today. Just a couple of other points about my background as it will shape my views a little bit. I've been the chair of a policy action committee as we now call it for our global organisation. So the trade associations in the tech sector around the world get together and form a global group called WITSA. And there are about 80 associations from as I say from South Africa to Taiwan to these days South America particularly a lot of activity there. And so I've had the chance over the years to meet and talk to my friends and make good friends all around the world who do similar jobs to mine and so talk to them about what's your country doing about a digital agenda or what's your country doing about some aspect of the role of ICT. So it's been good to compare notes and I'll draw on a couple of those things in my remarks too if that's OK. I'm also the member of the council the governing body at the University of Warwick and my pain for my accounting sins by being the chair of the audit committee which my finance director was very amused at the idea that I should chair the audit committee. But being involved with the university for a number of years has also given me quite a good understanding of the whole sort of academic research and how academic research and then how that sort of research and the R&D supply chain works as well. And I think that's important for the digital agenda with FV7 and Horizon 2020, the big commission funding scheme as it were. So those are also as it were shaped my views. So what I thought I'd do in the 25 minutes or so we'll see how the time goes. I'd actually rather than address specifically that exam question, I might set myself a different exam question that's slightly broader perhaps and then come on to that topic in the context of it. And the way I look at this is ICT, are they power tools for modern times? And if they are, what are the implications of those power tools? But I thought I'd just start by recapping, I know we all as it were know these, but I thought I'd just recap on some of the contextual situational things that affect how we use ICT in society and in the economy and just pick out some of the things that are going on today. Because I do think you have to set your digital strategy or whatever it is within the context of the economic and social challenges that you have. And so it's important to just keep up with those. And today, I mean the first thing obviously you can't ignore is what the Australians would call the global financial crisis or GFC for short. I was reading that the Eurozone unemployment figures are now at an all time high of 10.8%. I learnt at the digital agenda conference in Copenhagen that there are maybe another 12% who are freelance and a few more who are self-employed on top of that. And often you know, I mean it's obviously not completely the case, but some freelancers are there for forced reasons. So you might think well 10.8% unemployed maybe take half the freelance, what would that say, 16%? So those are serious numbers and you will also know that in Spain I think it is over half of the 18 to 24 year olds are now unemployed. And we've seen that with our Spanish Association for instance of half their headcounts and good friends of mine from down there now out of a job. So we all know people who are personally affected by this don't we? So we've got this economic crisis and particularly the jobs crisis and particularly jobs for young people. And I think that's got to think well if there's a problem I can solve with the digital agenda that probably ought to be aiming near the top. Then there's the broad debate about well how do you deal with this? Is it austerity or is it some other measures? We've seen just in the last day also the Dutch government come a bit adrift with the austerity line. I was hearing in the last couple of days that though the view of the markets is that Francois Hollande becomes elected. He's got four days to prove himself. This is what I'm hearing. I don't know where this is coming from but this is the sort of gossip is that the markets will be given him four days to prove that he's not an out and out left wing villain. What will happen then? I don't know. Downgrading of their status yet so that's what we hear. Then I think and all of these are things that I think ICT and related technology have something to say to which is why I raised them. Then I think there's the question about well even this economic model possibly is rather broken. The economic model of continuous growth is rather broken. I don't know how many of you have read Nick Stern's book on sustainability. I think a blueprint for a safer planet. He based that book on the work he did for Gordon Brown looking at the policy solutions to climate change. If you haven't read the book it's a fantastic book, not just because it deals so thoroughly with the issue of climate change but I think it's a tour de force in how you apply public policy to a major global problem and it really is a fantastic book. He and many others argue that we need a more sustainable economic model both in terms of carbon footprint but resource consumption too. Something I will say about that. Then we got what some referred to as the democratic deficit. I was in Athens on Friday on a panel with the Greek Prime Minister and the industry commissioner. The Prime Minister's advisor opened with his statement of the Greek problems were two basically. We've got to stop spending so much money and we've got to get our enterprises going again. When I was talking to my friends after this event or during the course of the event, they were saying that there's just no trust in politicians there. What they expect to see in these next elections is a really fragmented political landscape because the whole trust in politicians is really just broken down. Of course we've seen it all over Europe, haven't we? I noted that politics 2.0 is one of your seven key items on your agenda and I guess that's what you mean to make sense by that. I don't think it's too far fetched to draw parallels between what's happening in some parts of Europe and what's happening in the Arab world. It's also interesting to see how this is seen from the outside. Back in November time I was asked to participate in a conference in Mexico with this global group that I mentioned. They asked me if I would speak on a panel on the use of social media and particularly how it affected people's ability to engage and mobilize. I said what we're going to want on this panel is we're going to have some people from Egypt talking about what happened in Cairo and then something else and we want you to talk about what happened in the London riots. So they were grouping these things on a minute. But when looked at from the outside you can see how people just see the way that the technology is being used to stimulate sort of mass action very much more quickly. The guys from Egypt, by the way, put together this short video of what happened in the Egyptian problems from a technology perspective and it was really quiet. There was one image really stuck in my mind. There were two guys sitting on the floor by a garage door with their AK-47s in their hand and there was a sign above them saying, give us back our Facebook. So it was really quite talented. I just wanted to, so carrying on just briefly on background for a moment, I also wanted to touch upon the shift in the way that we're living in societies and in particular the move into cities. We know that we passed the 50% of the world's population in cities a few years ago and the predictions are that maybe by 2030, two thirds of the world will live in cities. And then when you combine that with the fact that more and more things are connected together and producing more and more data, whether it's smart meters or simply your travel passage, they're all spewing out lots of data, you can see the drive towards this smart cities, big data. And what was quite interesting in that regard is that I was speaking to the newly appointed, my newly appointed equivalent on the phone I hear since we had it in Canberra and she said, oh I've just done a poll of my members so these are all the tech companies who have operated in the Australian market and I've been asking them what their priorities are. That's interesting, Susan, what came out top, she said, oh big data. And that actually did quite surprise me, I know it's an issue on the agenda but to have it as the number one issue in Australia, I thought well either that's a very good marketing pitch by RBM, could be, they are very good, or they really are seeing that. So I mentioned a few things, all of which to some extent we know the sort of global economic crisis, the debate about is it stimulus, is it austerity. I've touched on these challenges about the economic models broken in any event and we need a more sustainable economic model that deals with resource consumption and what you might call carbon efficiency as well. I've talked about the democratic challenges and then something about the move into cities. The reason I mentioned that pick all of those in a way is because I think ICT has something to say about all of those and when one is thinking about how to construct a programme, let's not call it a digital agenda for a moment, but if you're thinking about how to construct a programme that focuses ICT in the problems in a particular geography, I think those are some of the candidates that you ought to consider as target problems to fix or issues to deal with. And so let me, if I can, then cut the cake a slightly different way to try and answer some of the, well how would you do that then? Because as you said Joyce, I think when I talked to governments almost everywhere around the world, the Mexican government, I was really quite surprised how advanced they were. Everybody wants, they want to know how. The general sense I get is look we get, we get, we get, we know, we know technology has a role, so yes, yes, we get that, but we want to know how. We want to know what do we do first, what's worked elsewhere around the world and where we will get the best return right now and what are the practical steps we want to take. And we've got to, those of us in the industry have got to stop sort of going on about we have the tools to solve your problems because we've got to say and this is how they are and here's the practical steps and this is what we're going to do to engage with you to fix those problems. We've got to go beyond the selling I think and start delivering. So let me touch on the things we might do in four areas. First of all, public service and there's a subset of that about open data. Something that's related to that social needs. Then the third topic would be resource and carbon efficiency and then the last but not least at all would be growth and jobs and that would pick up the digital single market in that. Now, so public service reform and I guess one of the things that makes government really interested cynically I'm afraid to say in digital inclusion is because they, I was actually at a meeting in number 10 where the Treasury guys admitted that they got it, they got the digital inclusion point because they realised they couldn't go digital if half the population wasn't online. Took them a while to get it but that's why we need digital inclusion. Get on the phone to Martha Lane Fox, get it to set up, I've been slightly cynical now but that's what got the Treasury behind it, the needs must because we can implement and fair enough if that's what it takes. But digital inclusion is important if you're going to be able to use, and you know the expression in the UK at the moment at the top is digital by default. That's the sort of, and I think that's good to have that mentality is very good. So I've worked extensively in this area over the last few years. It was a big thing in the UK for the industry to work with government. I mean nowadays maybe 50% of the UK market would include the banks are probably nearly all of it but it's 50% of the tech market in the UK is in the public sector in one form or another. So making that sector more efficient and taking the friction out of how the public services used ICT was very important. Interesting comparing with my Greek counterparts they said well we can't do that in Greece so why can you not do that in Greece? Well they said we just don't keep our politicians for long enough and when the politicians go it's a bit like the American system the top layer of the officials go as well. So they've got no motivation, no follow through and no commitment to use ICT. So it did as many things do makes me think we're quite fortunate in some of the countries in northern Europe compared to some of the ones that have more difficulty. So public service reform I think amongst this audience we'll sort of get the fact that efficient and modern public services are if you play it right they cost less and they deliver better results so why would you not go for it? But I think something that I'd only twigged recently was and this was a result of the commission inviting me to go and speak to the conference in Poznan in Poland at the back end of last year on open data. Now open data is a big deal in the UK for transparency reasons but also for market stimulation reasons. But in a lot of Europe it's seen and I think this is particularly relevant to say in Greece it's seen as a way to hold government to account more easily because of the transparency and open government that it brings. So it seemed to me that open data had to get a big tick in any digital game plan because not only was it a big market and I heard estimates in Copenhagen that the market might be as big I don't know what timescale I'm afraid but 60 billion euros I think that might have been a McKinsey report and you do see already companies springing up using open data and you already know the issues around open data is that governments have to publish it in a usable form, they can't just put the PDF of the data up as it were they've got to put it in a form that can be used by people but my eyes were opened to open data as it were and I think that's got to be an important part of any digital game plan and I think particular enthusiasm among those governments where there hasn't been so much transparency and there hasn't been so much accountability and democratic control I think there there's a real appetite driven by a sort of open government approach and I was quite taken by that I also think on this public service open data there's a big opportunity for the smaller companies and again you will know I'm sure that the UK is at a massive push on trying to put more business out to SMEs when pushed to give targets obviously they get a bit coy about this but they'd like a quarter of all government business by value to go to SMEs I'm not going to commit to it because then they'd have to measure it and then people would say you haven't made the target but I think they've taken some quite impressive steps towards trying to promote the deployment of SMEs and there are some actually some quite neat tricks I've seen around the world of governments that have done that well and if you know if it's an area that interests you I think the best one I've ever seen is the state of Victoria in Australia and do you know the trick there was or the thing that made it happen was the same guy was responsible for the government as a customer end with SMEs so he had the job of getting SMEs into government and he also had that sort of industrial policy responsibility of trying to make the SME community more successful and so because he had both hats as it were he made it work and he took millions of dollars millions of Australian dollars out of the cost of government doing business with SMEs and SMEs doing business with government with some quite simple things like saying your bid document has got to be no more than six pages and here's a pro-former for it you know just things like that and the SMEs wow that's fantastic it's going to save us a fortune in bid copies so those little tricks so I do think public service used well and play within the rules can still stimulate the SME the SMEs and local SMEs so I think that's a good one so that's public service and open data let's move on to a couple of things on social needs now I've always been being associated with Warwick University you might expect this but I've become a fan over the last few years in this whole concept of happiness economics now people rather dismiss it as a bit of a fad you know where did that come from but actually if you look behind the words happiness economics it's actually a device to ensure that your public policy is pointing in the direction of what your society really wants what is it that people want to be happy you know you can debate what happy means but people soon understand what that means it does mean security it does mean good healthcare it does mean good education it means those things so if you follow public policy from that point of view and social needs are defined in happiness you can then start to say okay well how do we apply tech to some of those and some of the good examples I've seen forgive me if this is another UK story Prime Minister launched with my old association a few months ago something called 3 million lives and it was based on a trial that the industry had run with the health services using ICT and related technologies to care for people to help in the care for people with long-term chronic conditions of whom there are huge numbers and so it not only improved the quality of the care but it reduced the cost of delivering that care you can look at other examples I mean you will know many in education I was very impressed by the way there's an Austrian group of schools who are leaders in the use of education in schools they've gone one step beyond anything I've seen and so you can see how it can help with education with health and also with this assisted living as the demographic change and we have more older people in our society you can see technology in all of those and I absolutely believe that if you're going to have a digital game plan anywhere it's got to deal with those social challenges and if it doesn't you won't get the impact in your society and it will be seen as some sort of nerdy thing for SMEs or techies or something that to me is really important to address those so my third area is this external stuff climate change, resource efficiency carbon efficiency and there I think the story falls into two parts there's the part of what can ICT do to reduce the carbon footprint of what we might call the bad guys the big emitters and some work that the European Association did some years ago produced a report called high-tech low-carbon and they looked at what you could do with the smart use of ICT to reduce the carbon footprint into transport, energy production and distribution and into buildings of buildings and the commission was so taken with that back then that they actually set up their own programme to look at bringing together the ICT industry and that goes on today and in fact next week there is and I mentioned this idea of smart cities there is a big two-bed conference in Brussels I think with four commissioners involved on the whole issue of ICT sustainability and smart cities and they're really taking this very seriously but from the other side there are two parts to this is ICT as it reduces the carbon footprint of the bad guys but then there's also what's the ICT industry doing itself to reduce the same carbon footprint and that has always been an issue but it's become more of an issue of late again I think because the industry has been saying for so long we could have these other people it's been selling its sort of messages and officials tend to get a bit tired of that sort of story and say well okay what do you do to put your own house in order and one of the things in particular that the officials have been concerned about is how do you measure carbon footprint in the industry and so they commissioned three pieces of work three parallel pieces of work in different institutes and agencies the ITU was one the Etsy was another in the telecommunications institute in Mies were another to look at how would you measure the carbon footprint of the industry and the commission took this quite seriously they're putting money into some pilots to work with companies who are then going to try these methodologies and I think we'll hear more about that at this event next week so that's two sides of the carbon footprint story and in parallel to that is the whole resource efficiency so how do you use fewer natural resources in the production and use of your product and the commission produced the roadmap back in September and our industry the RCT industry is now looking very hard at how we can work with that roadmap how we can deliver our own best practice and guidance and indeed how we can improve our own resource efficiency because you know the industry is dependent on many rare earths and metals that are in seriously short supply so I think there's a good story to tell on resource and carbon efficiency so let's move to this the last point probably where you asked me to start and I've described this as sort of jobs and growth through and in our industry so let's take again let's take this in two parts through and in our industry one of the things I think has been missing in the debate about economic growth is the role of ICT improving the productivity of companies in the economy and improving the if you think about it improving your productivity is pretty much the only way that an economy can become more competitive unless you're going to reduce everybody's wages which of course one or two are tried with a bit of a backlash so if you're going to become a western economy is going to become more competitive in the world it's got to become more productive probably the best way to become more productive is to use ICT if you analyse different sectors you'll see that some sectors have been very good at becoming more productive and others have been less good and there's certainly there's some work that's been done in the UK that shows the big productivity gain leading to big competitiveness improvements could come if the worst sectors simply got as good as the best now that's not something just for governments by the way I think that's where organisations like the employers organisations the BDI in Germany or the CBI I don't know what it is in the IPEC well you need organisations organisations like that who are working with the tech sector to say let's pick off some sectors where we could work together to maybe get a productivity roadmap and I think that ought to be part of any digital game plan too because that improves productivity competitiveness and ultimately then allows people to create new jobs and employ people it seems to me that the only sustainable sort of jobs is where you are genuinely internationally competitiveness and then of course there's the other side of that coin that if you then have and there's a piece of economist research by the way that shows that the countries that the best in exploiting technology for productivity improvements and others but also for public sector the geographies and countries that do best are the ones that have a strong tech sector in their own right that there is a relationship between them and of course it sort of makes sense doesn't it because if you are as an economy relying on simply deploying as Nelly Cruz says you are just using your credit card to buy US technology then you're not going to have those inates you're not going to build up those inates skills to know how to use the technology to the best effect so I think it's a strong argument for governments you need a strong tech sector in your economy because otherwise you won't make the best use of it and it can be a great source of jobs in its own right so do give tender loving care to your tech sector it will pay you it will pay you get the returns from doing that so to the sort of as it were the exam question a digital single market does that matter well I thought it was quite interesting in Copenhagen which was the Danish governments they have a presidential each presidency decides on what conferences it wants and nearly everyone has a digital agenda conference because it's a bit cooler than the others so of course they had one and they asked me if I'd access an awful job it really was they said would you follow one of the two tracks through the whole conference and then summarize at the end alright but it doesn't make you concentrate a bit harder and actually what I concluded at the end of that was in fact there were two conferences in one there was one that was genuinely on what you might call the digital single market and the other was on quite a lot of the stuff I've just been talking about today because it all gets rather muddled up so I think the digital single market it's certainly necessary but it's not sufficient it's important but it's not the whole answer and I don't know if I'm honest that I believe the 4% GDP growth that would come from a digital single market I don't know how good the science is that underpins that but that's not to say that I don't that I have any doubts about the core elements so I think the core elements of a digital single market are you clearly need that high speed broadband and you clearly need wireless to be an important part of that the demands on the wireless network these days are just growing a pace aren't they so you certainly need that enabling infrastructure you certainly need digital skills and we'll perhaps come back to that in a moment and when you think of trying to think of sort of practical examples of markets that would not thrive as well or won't thrive as well because there isn't a European digital single market the best example I can think of is this nascent European cloud computing industry and you can quite see and I've talked to people who are in this business that you can get a cloud computing business going say in Denmark but it's a bit difficult if you then want to operate in Germany it's a bit more difficult if you also want to operate in France I'm talking to one guy I said just the data protection regimes in those countries and understanding them is enough to put them off and they come up with this number that to expand into the state for this particular company was going to cost them a million dollars just that sort of investment but to expand into any European country was going to cost them at least as much so which would they do was the market opportunities are bigger in the US than to expand piecemeal around around Europe will we ever solve that? I don't know I think it's a long game isn't it really it's a long game it's a laudable ambition but it does seem to me that there are probably other things that we could concentrate on that would give us a faster return than trying to solve whole all of these things that I emphasise though I do think we should pick things off and try and solve them when we can and I think the data protection review at the moment is one of those because if we can have more harmonised data protection and we can have lower administrative burdens it will knock one of the things off that would make this guy say maybe it's only 800,000 now and not a million and I think if you could start chipping away that's the way I would see the digital single market I can't remember and there's a woman who worked for WET I could probably give you the reference afterwards but she just produced a very good report Lisbon Council just produced a very good report on the real challenges of the digital single market and I think it's probably one of the best I've seen and she was in Copenhagen talking about it as well so if you really want another think tank for you do you allow yourself to look at the competition I think that's a good piece absolutely all a good piece of work so let me recap on those sort of wanderings I laid out some of the social and economic challenges and I argued that if you're going to have a digital game plan of some sort you've got to think which of those are the biggest challenges that we want to solve where we think ICT and related technologies can be brought to bear and I really do think everybody has to think about that and as I've talked to people around the world I've seen them do that I mentioned before we started to you that I've seen the Malaysians have a fantastic in these controlled economies you can be a bit more autocratic about it but they've got a fantastic plan some of the states in Mexico have got fantastic plans some of the Australian states have got great plans you know you can almost everybody around the world has got some sort of digital game plan and I think if you're going to construct one you have to look at where you're going to get the maximum return and where do you want to encourage ICT to focus to solve the problems and create the opportunities that you've got and you should certainly look at all the work that's been done in the commission but I think you do your own thinking once you play into that and then I want to leave you I want to leave you with one thought apart from or one additional thought not one thought it'd be nice if you remembered some of the other stuff but one additional thought which is something about something about we've got to be careful to have a little bit more humility as an industry and to myself and others who represent the industry I was reading in the a magazine, a Belgian magazine recently, a sort of the headline was Technology One God Zero and what they were reporting on was the Pope's speech on Easter Sunday where he was saying people are devoting too much time to technology and not enough to spiritual and human needs and I thought my goodness technology makes it into the Pope's speech we should pay attention to those sorts of things and you do know that as we go along on this sort of crusade of tech and fix everything I do think we've got to be careful that we're not the missionaries of old bringing our bugs with us as the missionaries did when they went to Tasmania or whatever so I do think we have to be a bit sensitive to when we apply these power tools into solving these problems there are some things there are going to be some side effects and we need to pay attention to what those side effects are and not just blindly ignore them as I think sometimes as an industry we have done so maybe the way you draw all that together is maybe it's time for a think tank like yours all to actually produce a new digital commission where you genuinely look at what are the opportunities that can be solved through ICT that affect you however you want to define you and maybe look at also then what might be the side effects that you cause and how might you mitigate any damage that you might cause as a result of such a digital game model so I hope I've given you something of a canter through the world as I see it from ICT perspective and I hope I've answered some of the questions and I'm very happy to answer any other questions that you might have in whatever time