Dec

5

Outsourcing My Brain

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, data protection, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, privacy, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | 2 Comments

During this period of enforced convalescence I have had to come to grips with the idea that my brain only works effectively when supported by the memory in all the devices around me. And that this state of dependency is now global. Without our membership of a globally networked society we would become slow and inefficient: with it we become dependent. And it is this dependency which seems to me the first stop on a mental route march which we need to make. I am far from the first to try to examine what Internet of Things (IoT) or, as some will say, Internet of Everything (IoE) will mean for social, industrial or commercial aspects of society. But I do not yet hear much examination of this phenomena in terms of the information industry, let alone the businesses we insist on still calling “publishing” or the “media”.

Let’s start at a point of common agreement. We are in the middle of a new industrial revolution. For evidence, check the websites of IEEE or IET: the latter have just published a splendid “Ones to Watch” report (http://www.theiet.org/policy/media/campaigns/ones-to-watch.cfm?utm_source=redirect&utm_medium=any&utm_campaign=onestowatch#.VHt6PmB0imw.mailto).
They see the vanguard industries in this fundamental change in the nature of commerce and society – think what happened in the UK between 1780 and 1830 – as driven by space exploration, robotics. 3D printing (I would rather they had spoken of additive manufacturing), new energy networks, food manufacturing and cyber-security. I buy all of those, but would add drug manufacture driven by individual DNA analysis.

Underlying this social and industrial revolution is the revolution that makes it all possible: the global connectivity of network – attached computing power, and it’s ability to exploit intelligence and data generated in the network. Only this week Professor Steven Hawking has pointed out the dangers of AI outside of man’s control. My feelings run the other way: it amazes me that while we have spoken of machine intelligence for 30 years we have so little to show for it. Only in the past few years has the ability to harvest data more effectively, and the ability to cross- search it without restructuring it, produced real results in terms of the impact of the data analytics advances (“Big Data”) really struck home. While we will always be seduced by thrills and tricks (Google Glasses?), we can now see machine intelligence built into most common workflows and at a variety of levels.

Here is a list, posted by Vincent Granville at DataScienceCentral, of impact areas for data analysis in the next ten years:

(http://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/17-areas-to-benefit-from-big-data-analytics-in-next-10-years)

Just look at how many of these impact the information industry marketplace. As our world of work changes so the very survival of information market players will depend upon how easily we are able to track change and react to it. But what part of this struggle to survive can we lay at the door of IoT/IoE? And can we picture an IoT world which is less trivial than sports wearables or more useful than a car that turns on the house lights at home when you are still a mile away? Well, obviously we can, but the unacceptable passengers riding on the back of IoT must then be taken into account. Yes, it does mean that we shall move from the age of privacy into the age of transparency – and we are halfway there already. And, yes, it does mean that employment is going to be very different. We will lose millions of jobs, and we are surprisingly far down this track as well. The UK public sector will lose a further Million jobs in the next five years, we learnt this week. Some of those will be outsourced but governments do not give up governing lightly – and many of those jobs will become automated systems roles in the outsourcing process . And it may well mean that, at last, we have to properly rethink what Capitalism means. After all, a zero marginal production cost society will ask questions about how the profit mechanism works.

For a good review of many of these questions see Sue Halpern’s review article in New York Review of Books (vol. LXI, Number 18, 3December 2014). Cisco famously predicts that all of this adds up to a 14.4 trillion dollar boost to the global economy between now and 2022. The 10 million sensors that measured our world in 2007 will number 100 trillion by 2030. In Rotterdam docks all containers will be engineered for auto drive by 2018. Uber, a precursor of the automated driving world, was as valuable as Time Warner this very month. For better or worse, this world is with us now. This is not 1780 in the original British experience, but 1820 and the railway boom is just beginning. And for information companies of every type there is a corresponding possibility of mega growth, as long as we read change accurately. Wherein lies a problem that I want to address later.

Nov

6

Of Mice and Men and NEDs

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Search, semantic web, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

Of the eighteen Boards of Directors of ventures various that I find that that I have been involved with over the years, none gave me any confidence about answering the most simple question. “Are you really sure that you know exactly what is going on here?” My sample includes a listed London FTSE quoted company; Dutch, Benelux, US and UK incorporations; corporate cultures that went from start-up to a hundred years of history, experience as both an executive and non-executive board member. As a result, one residual conclusion that sticks with me is the thought that being a non-executive/external director (NED) in a re- regulating networked business world is as isolated and thankless a high risk position as I can imagine. My heart goes out this week to the could not have known/should have known non-executives on the board of Tesco. How could you sit there and not know that the operating margins were fraudulent, bellow the so knowledgeable commentators of the Press. Easily, I think privately. In the cocoon of corporate culture which is the Board who do you believe if not the CFO? And how do you check a suspicion without evidence which even forensic accountants find it hard to unearth?

In the event, I found that I asked the hardest questions I could devise, tried manfully to test the evidence, used my powers of judgement of events and personality as widely as possible and seem fortunately never to have been lynched by the investors and staff who I was pledged to protect. And then, back in May this year, it slowly dawned on me that our world was changing in ways that might make all of this much easier. In a totally different context I found myself looking at the work of a UK company called Aging Analytics. It was a software-based consultancy in the health sector which found itself collaborating with the Center for Biogerontology and Regenerative Medicine to answer a question posed by a Hong Kong-based investor in regenerative medicine. This company, DKV (Deep knowledge Ventures) asked its consultant how it could reduce the risks in investment decision-making (and as I know well, most risk investors are highly risk averse). The answer was a programme called VITAL, and DKV were so pleased with it (or so PR cute) that they appointed it to their board as a non-executive director. (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/deep-knowledge-ventures-appoints-intelligent-investment-analysis-software-vital-as-board-member-2014-05-13.) At the time the story made headlines and then got lost, but it stuck with me as an example of how Artificial Intelligence will be used to buttress our insecurities.

VITAL has access to all of the data derived from the investigations and due diligence that DKV conducts. At the same time it has the open web and closed subscription services used by DKV to consider. And it is constructed as an algorithm to bring weighted judgement to categorisation like “most likely to succeed” or “closest to corporate investment criteria”. In some ways it is hard to imagine why such procedures do not take place in every PE or VC context. At the great NOAH investment show next week (www.noah-conference.com) I expect to see some hundreds of information and eCommerce investments unvisited and unblessed by such due diligence. And emotionally I understand why people want to rely on human experience (nous, hunch, gut, empathy), since so much of what makes these investments work derives from the people running the company, and not the algorithmic likelihood of success. And yet…

Transfer this thinking over into the true role of the non-executive director. Would risk reduction take place if data access internally for a programmatic Director was matched by access to market comparatives and trends, expected performance profiling and weighted risk comparison? For a decade now we in the information marketplace have been trying to understand workflow and support its automation. From accomplishing this in relatively straightforward areas – were the first in tax and accounting? – we have gone on to create complex systems for handling IP, financing the purchase of aircraft, or managing a continental marketplace in heavy industrial plant, to name only a few that I have encountered In recent years. Readers here will know that I think the PR market is ripe for more mechanisation. Yet how will the poor non-exec ever know that these systems are still effective, or need replacement, or are wasting resources? It will be hard enough of executive directors, with their minds diverted by growth forecasts, margins and capex control, to form a view. The view of the executive director will always be warped by performance criteria, which is why the non-exec is vital. But how can he perform if he does not have help in processing what can be known against the key issues of risk, governance, and, as the world’s bankers now know, compliance.

And then there is something else. Once we start installing intelligent systems which monitor risk and control compliance, the friendly neighbourhood regulator will be round. Asking for access. Online. Just for his own performance monitoring, you understand. So the role of the independent director becomes that of the artificial intelligence whistle blower. Of course, businesses will resist and complain, just as the truck drivers did when we forced them to install tachographs and other measuring devices in their cabs 30 years ago. Now that measurement is a fact of life. So it will be with risk monitoring. In time governments and regulators will mandate and specify some of the qualities they need in the output. And non-executive directors will once again grow confident in the knowledge that, while they still do not know everything, they know enough to protect staff and investors to a level that will make 2014 seem like the Wild West in retrospect.

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