process everywhere

Below we find another video, this time from IBM, that paints a vision of the data enriched world in our not too distant future.  Most of the things we use and interact with as we go through our day will all be connected and talk to each other on the same network.  The items will work together to make our lives more simple and efficient.  For instance, our alarm clock may check our calendar for the day’s first meeting time and location.  It will then work backwards using public transport networks (traffic patterns and ferry schedules) to calculate when we should be woken up.

The video is very nicely done, but it does raise some questions about the effects that this kind of artificial intelligence or automated decision making will play in this new world.  Are we really building the smarter planet that IBM intends?

The video talks about the DIKW triangle.  At the bottom level is Data–expanding and hard to make sense of.  As you go up the triangle Information gets extracted from the data.  The information is then used to create Knowledge.  Finally, the acquisition of enough knowledge leads to Wisdom.  My concern is that as we make the systems around us smarter and allow them to obtain the ability to make decisions for our life or perform certain actions, are we doing it at the expense of our own abilities to navigate through life?

I guess this is by no means a new conflict.  After all, I haven’t remembered a phone number of a friend or contact since my 7th grade girlfriend.

The Economist recently published an excellent article painting a picture of the the emerging data explosion and of the challenges and opportunities that this explosion will present.  Apparently some are even calling it an “industrial revolution of data”!  The article explains the role that I aim to play in the revolution with the following paragraph:

Chief information officers (CIOs) have become somewhat more prominent in the executive suite, and a new kind of professional has emerged, the data scientist, who combines the skills of software programmer, statistician and storyteller/artist to extract the nuggets of gold hidden under mountains of data. Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, predicts that the job of statistician will become the “sexiest” around. Data, he explains, are widely available; what is scarce is the ability to extract wisdom from them.

Data, Data Everywhere, The Economist

You can’t fault Mr. Varian for adding some wishful thinking to his prediction.  I can say with 95% confidence that statisticians will not suddenly become sexy anytime soon.  Other than that, his assertions are true.

In the last post, I exposed the mounting challenge related to our abilities to draw valuable conclusions from the swell of data that will be available to us in the near future.  In order to benefit from this influx of information, companies will need to adopt a scientific approach to understand and create actions from this information.

Fortunately, the sort of scientific and numbers driven approach has been evolving for the past century.  It started with Fredrick Taylor studying the movements of workers in a factory and has evolved into process improvement philosophies like Total Quality Management, Six Sigma and Lean thinking.  Over that time period they have moved from assembly lines, to service business like delivery, restaurants, and medical practices, and now are starting to take shape in white collar environments including banks and insurance companies.

Applying these concepts to web companies and consumer product behavior are the next step in this evolution.  Because the disciplines are heavily focused to operations inside the company, many people assume they are not good for evaluating what is happening outside the walls of the organization.  In fact, this assertion couldn’t be further from the truth.

In lean thinking, everything starts with the customer.  Our business need is to provide the exact item required at the highest quality at the lowest cost in the shortest lead time.

Getting the Right Things Done, Pascal Dennis

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What follows is a brilliantly animated video that demonstrates the technological opportunities and challenges that lie in the very near future.  As computing power continues up the curve of Moore’s Law and chips get smaller, faster, and cheaper, technology will be embedded into more and more of the products we buy.

As the video suggests, the information captured on these items will not simply be isolated to the devices themselves, but rather they will be communicable to the environment around them using wireless technology.

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