This year’s CMA annual conference attracted record attendance.  Delegates packed the chandeliered confection that is the Great Hall of the archaically-named Worshipful Company of Plaisterers.  There was nothing archaic about the conference and there was no plastering over the cracks. 

CMA’s new Chairman Carolyn Kimber set the tone by looking forward to hearing how (not if) Ofcom would be taking on board the needs of the business community.  Carolyn had the benefit of recent assurances from Ofcom promising to amend their Annual Plan and correct the perception that the regulator assumed the business community ‘could look after itself’.    

Ofcom’s Chairman, Lord Currie, entered a robust defence and protested Ofcom’s innocence.   It was not an apology nor even an admission of accidental oversight of the business community’s needs.  It did however reflect Ofcom’s sensitivity to CMA’s criticism.  It remains to seen whether Ofcom has fully grasped the extent to which the business community, if encouraged, can inform regulatory policy and balance the views of suppliers. 

There was more good news on Next Generation issues.  BT and other Operators  have developed a better dialogue with CMA’s business community and this is an area where Ofcom has usefully held the ring.  Ofcom’s technology-neutral stance doesn’t allow for much in the way of top-down direction, so CMA’s appeal for more ‘Thought Leadership’ probably left the regulator slightly bemused.  The gaps between what many businesses see as Ofcom’s remit and the practical UK realities are widening as we look overseas and observe much faster progress toward better broadband, mobile roaming and multi-user mobile gateway services.    

In the margins of the conference a delegate remarked that the current campaign against road pricing should not be top priority for the Commission for Rural Communities’.   The government has, apparently, a policy of ‘rural-proofing’ new legislation.  Maybe it’s time to revisit the 1989 plan for UK fibre – a programme whose cost appalled the government of that time.  The cost was broadly equivalent to the funds voted by Operators for  3G licences just over a decade later.  We don’t have Universal Broadband Access – and this may well be illuminated soon by research that will go far deeper than counting up the number of BT exchanges that provide broadband service if you live close enough.   Why penalise motorists because the roads infrastructure is inadequate when a better network infrastructure will enable far more people to work from home?  Yes, this was a very Green conference. 

Like all good conferences the best bits were the least expected.   It was on Day 2 when we got closest to thinking about next generation management.  The next generation are today’s youth – a new breed of techno-savvy souls who arrive in the world of work to find themselves downgraded to use what they regard as legacy systems.   Tensions abound.  Managers are busy protecting their networks while this next generation expects greater freedom and customisation.   According to Camille Mendler  of Yankee Group the imperialists are locked in combat with those who want to democratise their work-styles.  ‘Generation Me’ expects so much more freedom to create and share their identities with their wider world.  Even the  notion of Work/Life balance was seen as out-moded and a product of archaic thinking.   

So the old familiar mouse is a piece of legacy kit compared to a Nintendo Wii remote – not something many of us would yet consider as a business tool but, hey, you read it here first on the CMA channel and there’ll be no plastering over these culture cracks.

______________________________________________________________

This article was first published in NetworkingPlus, February 2007.