Feb
16
Points of Interest on the Road to Innovation
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, semantic web, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Like rhubarb, innovation can be forced. And both are often best served mixed with other elements, from mash-up to crumble. But there, worried reader, this rather superficial comparison ends. The results of forcing innovation are often disastrous, would-be dotcom tycoons forget about market readiness, and that valuable old maxim “nothing succeeds on the Internet until it has failed on the Internet” is set aside. Think of the UK’s Independent newspaper. If management had not innovated around the “I” versioning they would have had nothing to sell this week. Ten years after launch the print paper has come to an end, leaving a website and the sale of the I to Johnston Press, a company which, ten years ago, turned over 600 million pounds from some of the most valuable regional newspaper franchises in Britain to create margins of 130 million pounds. Today its revenues stand where it’s margins did then. It reminds us that innovation in the face of change is often not a choice – more a way of survival.
Which makes it even more odd that the two most innovative cultures experienced in my working life – AI and GIS – have taken so very long to get to market. They have had to do name changes and relaunches as entrepreneurs despaired of bringing these technologies to life in user-appealing fashion. So I well recall the advice of an experienced property man when I said that I was doing some work for an emerging property database service. “Maps and data?”, he said, “people just want to buy and sell – and cheat – when it comes to property”. But I was in thrall to the galvanic energy and enthusiasm of Christopher Roper at the time, and believed differently. The company he sold to DMGT, Landmark Information Group, has gone from strength to strength, added great network acquisitions which bring together the needs of surveyors, conveyance solicitors, mortgage parties and eventually buyers and sellers into the same workflow. From providing a non-mandatory environmental check Landmark has become an essential part of buying and selling property. And all of this was sparked by an agreement with the UK’s Ordnance Survey mapping agency to allow re-use of historical survey data going back to the mid – nineteenth century.
But it was the other deal that Christopher Roper did at this time which has left me wondering all these years. He created a joint venture company between Ordnance Survey and Landmark called Point X. The object here was to gather Point of Interest data. The conventional wisdom then was that you would need this data to customized and innovate. Do you need to know the nearest pub? Or vet surgery? Or are your salesmen calling on newsagents? Or sweet shops? We would gather up the data and then offer it like toppings on ice cream. In the age of mash-up this seemed a very obvious strategy. Unsurprisingly to watchers of the glacial progress of change, it has taken a decade for this to come about. You can imagine my joy therefore when I saw the Landmark Solutions Point of Interest Web Portal launched last month. All of that delicious information combined with the Ordnance Survey Open Source mapping environment. If, as some think, web service innovation is a cookbook which begins “first take a map, and then add data” then a new age has begun.
But many things have happened to GIS in the meanwhile. In local and national government, in logistics and distribution, in planning, in agribusiness and in very many other walks of life we are totally GIS dependent. The icy grasp of systems providers like ESRI means that many of these are very idiosyncratic, so achieving compatibility with an installed base, backwards compatibility, is no easier than it was in the early days of Microsoft and Apple. While GIS clearly failed as a religion, it has succeeded as millions of real solutions. So what do you have to do to cope with that? Well, make a customisable solution for a start. Point X has over 4 million points of interest, but they come in 9 groups, with 52 data categories and some 620 different classifications. Go to the portal and you can mix and match, and then select what you need to do to align your custom creation to the GIS system you are using. And the business mode? This is, as it has to be, a Pay As You Go model! (http://www.landmark.co.uk/news-archive/landmark-solutions-launches-points-interest-demand-web-portal)
In a sense, this now seems obvious to the user-centric world in which we live. Yet service developers always think first about prescribing service values and limiting options, so when they let users do what they want to do it seems like a big deal. Here is Reed’s ICIS chemicals database announcing its new Data Express service a a week ago: “Data updates are highlighted automatically and price history updates are sorted in the same column, making it easy to benchmark prices, identify opportunities, and manage risks. This facilitates smoother decision-making, and increased competitiveness for ICIS customers.” This announcement effectively launches an API and an Excel plug-in! (www.icis.com/data express)
So we are in a familiar place in the industry on the road to innovation. We cannot believe what customers tell us about how they want to use information and we hoard information we cannot believe they want. What happened to making service values for the few and then re-iterating for the many? Or even watching how the customer works and makes decisions – and then helping?
Jan
24
Think Block Chain, not Bitcoin
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, data protection, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, privacy, Search, semantic web, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Here is a really great moment to celebrate. A readable UK government report with a real impact on markets (https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/492972/gs-16-1-distributed-ledger-technology.pdf). It tells us what Honduras and Estonia are doing that we are yet to fully consider. Yet it fingers a new area of creativity that some authorities liken to the dotcom boom – a new configuration that we relaunch B2B inventiveness in the network around commercial workflows in a way that will take us much further than conventional network technologies. So far it has been the instrument of the crypto currency businesses, but this is far more than that, and the U.K. Office of Science paper, prepared by a team reporting to the Government Science Advisor, Sir Mark “Open Access” Walport, deserves the very widest attention, especially in Shoreditch, Tech City and other parts. There is enough here to launch a whole raft of B2B start-ups.
So let’s start a bit closer to the beginning. When Bitcoin was launched in 2008 the thought was that if a shared, encrypted database could be installed and mirrored across the network, then transactions updated to each ledger and validated would form a useful way of circumventing the use of cash by creating a means for secure asset transfer. Data thus added in each instance of the transaction thus created a data “block”, and as transactions grew more numerous and blocks thus chained together more widespread it became even safer – intervention and alteration of data would have to take place on thousands of machines at the same instant, even if the encryption was circumvented. These Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) have seemed like the white hope of interference-free financial transactions, but despite the fame of Bitcoin have been very hard to move into popular focus.
But this too is a characteristic of the Internet age. Technologies arrive, get used on a narrow front, get half-forgotten, and then come sweeping back in to answer questions that were never even thought about when they were invented. This appears to be the fate of DLT. When the Hondurans wanted a new land title system that was not open to third part falsification and could be updated by parties to a land deal or ownership change, then this was obvious. When the Estonians sought a way of leveraging one of their areas of expertise – the use of PKI (public key) encryption technologies – the DLT provided the answers. Amongst the case studies in the report is one after my own heart – an angel investor service network called Funderbeam which uses DLT to allow investors to turn their investments into a trade able currency and move money from investment to investment, preserving investor liquidity while avoiding the lock-in normally experienced by start-up investors.
So DLT has real benefits where asset classes are being exchanged. But we have not been in the data game for the last 30 years without knowing that data itself is an asset. This week, during an eye examination and an annual routine Heart examination, I found myself wishing for DLT in healthcare. What if my records were automatically updated, and any of my health advisors, authorised by me, could see every alteration in drugs or treatment decided by other practitioners treating me? And if I sell my house or trade in my car, can the whole intermediary network please be informed at the same time, including the bank, the insurer, the new owners and the registrars in government who need to know these things?
In the early days of the Web we spoke earnestly about Disinter mediation. Then many of us spoke equally confidently about re-intermediation, as we saw how markets moved fresh digital agents into place in digital marketplaces. It may be harder for the middleman to reinvent himself in the brave new world of DLT technology, however, and taking jobs and increasing productivity will become the focus of inventiveness in this area. Before the last election the UK government made a half-hearted attempt to privatise its own Land Registry. That organisation enters records by hand as well as digitally and employs 5000 people in the business of admits ration and verification. Now imagine it Honduran-style: land transfers are entered by sellers and verified by buyers and their lenders, insurers and other concerned parties, and archived in a block chain where all transactions are archived and held. While we may need an office of Land Transfer Governance we may never again need the current structures. Anyone reading this report in the Shareholder Executive should sell government agencies fast.
All this sounds like redress for the problems of Big Government. But there are other aspects that could affect every business in the land. If we look at business relationships as an asset, then the report suggests that Smart Contracts are likely to become the way in which we action and police business deals:
“Smart contracts are being considered for a wide variety of uses, particularly for regulatory compliance, product traceability and service management, and also to defeat counterfeit products and fraud in the following sectors:
• Food
• Financial Services
• Energy
• Pharmaceuticals
• Health
• Aerospace
• Aviation
• Telecommunications
• IT and communications
• Transport
• Utilities
• Agriculture
• Oil and gas”
So if we are content to sit back and relax, thinking that the technology behind Bitcoin is a “sometime, maybe” phenomenon. This technology is as potentially disruptive as the Web was once perceived to be, it will spark a host of start-ups and within a year every one of us will be thinking about how it applies to what we do – and how we live. And this technology centres on the SmartPhone! Happy New Year!
« go back — keep looking »