Sep
11
Diamond in the Rough
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, Education, eLearning, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Pearson, Publishing, Search, semantic web, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
“Well”, said my questionner, “all this stuff about workflow is just fine, but what we really need to know now is where this goes next. So lets just imagine that we integrate all the data into all the systems, and everyone on every screen has all they need to be more productive, make better and more cost-effective decisions and to be wholly compliant with all relevant regulation and best practice. What happens next?” There is, I have come to know, a certain class of manager (possibly deprived of breast feeding at too young an age), whose cruel sport is seeking to confound itinerant consultants with all this “next” guff. Hopefully, I had been thinking, workflow and the semantic web would see me out. But you have to answer the question, so I looked at the ceiling in what I hoped was an image of wisdom and muttered something about intelligent systems. And I ignored him when he challenged me to show him one.
But it was a bit worrying. I guess the answer is that far more of the tasks over which we slave will become subject to machine to machine communication and an increasing range of Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. I remember when AI was seen as the “always there, never delivers” technology (just like GIS in the 1980-1990s). Yet GIS in the broadest sense gave us spatial location and even SatNav. AI is yet to hit the point of large scale integration with what we do with content and data in solutions, systems and services. And I was worrying about how little I knew in this area when I bumped into Sir Isaac Newton’s dog, Diamond.
I bumped into him in a March 2012 paper published by Dr Glenda Eoyang, Executive Director of the Human Systems Dynamics Institute (www.hsdinstitute.org). She is an expert in adaptive systems, and having pointed out how comparatively easy it is to learn and assess learning of something like Sir Isaac’s equations, she then turned to his dog. Here was a learning problem of a different type, as your experiences of the dog altered your learning perspectives and your learning had to become “adaptive”:
“On the other hand, when you learn Newton’s dog, the expectation is that you develop the ability to 1) recognize Diamond; 2) interact with him; and 3) get better at recognizing and interacting with him over time. The assumption is that teachers, too, recognize and interact with Diamond, and that their performance continually improves through a process of life-long learning. The purpose of learning the dog is adaptation. The measure of success is adaptive capacity. The best pedagogy is adaptation, and adaptive action is also the best way to assess performance. Learning Newton’s dog is about engaging with an ever-changing environment in ways that are creative, courageous, sustainable, and sensitive. When the goal of education is to prepare the younger generation for a complex and emergent and unpredictable future, we must teach them Newton’s dog.”
Quite so. And here, clever questionner, is part of your answer. The next leap forward looks like it will be in education, as we begin to tackle personalised learning en masse. And that takes me back to Knewton Technologies (www.knewton.com), whose deal with Pearson last November will lead to some 10 million users of MyLab/Mastering (mostly US college students) having coursework which adapts to their pace and their needs. So they get a test, and the machine does them some diagnostics and sets them off on a new route (or rote)? No, the system is continuously adaptive, it tracks everything they read and write, and it continually adjusts and resets, not just for strengths and weaknesses, but for each individual’s unique learning style. No less a learner than Bill Gates has praised the two first year college maths courses launched last year at the Arizona State University, and Pearson and Founders Fund led the new investment round which raised $33 m in the fall of 2011 for Jose Ferreira’s brilliant start-up.
It is unlikely of course that Knewton will be the only answer. One man’s proprietory algorthym is another man’s challenge, as we have learnt many times in the last 22 years. But what interests me at the moment is that our first approaches to mass customization and personlization in depth should be in education. In education we know for sure that even if we try to teach a class of 30 from the front, a certain percentage will be bored because progress is too slow, and a larger group will be bored because they lost the thread. For a handful the teacher will hit the mark. So we continually, and rightly, stress that learners should learn for themselves and collaboratively with other learners, and the teachers’ role is to moderate, not drive, the process.
And yet, customization does not yet get a look in elsewhere. We try to build workflow as if every company was the same just because it has the same end objectives in terms of revenues or margins. Yet cultures and the ability to improve performance are idiosyncratic and often unique. But we want to sell a “productized” service, not a solution per client, and it may be that the technology of the classroom is in fact taking us towards supplying individual needs without re-assembling the coding. Maybe, indeed, adaptability becomes the new service offering, down the road that takes us ever closer to AI – penetrated services.
Thats All, Folks! There now follows a short intermission before I return in October.
Aug
23
Strip Billiards joins Ecosystem
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, semantic web, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
In truth, I thought it a dull week of post-Olympic depression, but for the professional grinch it had some brighter moments. I watched England losing a Test Match that they might have won but for the lack of something extra-ordinary. I hear that something extra-ordinary took place in a Las Vegas hotel room, leading to a potential new Olympics sport. But between the sports pages and the gossip columns it felt like a really “silly season” sort of week. Except that it wasn’t. At all. Two things fell to Earth which exemplify where and how quickly we are going in the information services and solutions marketplace. Two routine announcements, but read them as confirmations that the changes we have been tracking here are market-wide, deeply embedded and worth real investment.
The first that caught my eye was the purchase of Adeptra by Fair Isaacs (FICO). Now, the credit rating sector has never been at the leading edge of workflow delivery, though in other parts of the same wood companies like Experian are foremost players in data analytics, and the whole risk management sector is in the vanguard when it comes to service solutioning. So an outfit like FICO (www.fico.com) knows all about solutions, and its FICO Score service is currently said to be the US industry standard for consumer credit risk assessment. Adeptra (http://adeptra.com), a UK software house, with almost 20 years of experience in its market, has emerged as a leading power in customer connectivity in this sector. Cloud based, SaaS configured, and running in voice, SMS, mobile and email to resolve credit-based issues in real-time. In other words, this is technology used by banks to improve customer engagement, and if those banks are (and they mostly are) using FICO scoring systems, then a bigger solution is possible, more dots join up, the banks get to gratefully outsource a bit more functionality, and everyone gets to go home happy, except for players like Equifax who now have to think about what the competitive response may be.
And the reason this intrigues me so much is the timing. FICO have known Adeptra since 2002. In 2007 they became strategic partners as FICO Falcon Fraud Manager was integrated with Adeptra’s package. And of course, as the world has gone mobile and these two players move globally into younger, and thus more mobile-dominated markets, the importance of partnership grew. But acquisition in a $115m cash deal? Only a few years ago that would have had managers talking up the cultural and geographic differences instead of emphasizing the importance of full workflow integrated answers for customers. This is a real step forward in competitive positioning, and could precipitate an arms race in acquisitions in the credit and risk management sector. And I wonder what the FICO Score is on a Royal Prince in a gambling joint?
And my second choice? The Thomson Reuters Life Sciences Partner Ecosystem. Did I miss its real significance when it launched in April? Probably – the title is a long one and so many things are now called Ecosystems that the word has slightly lost its bearings: hence the ironic title of this piece. But I did not lose track of the news that GenoSpace had this week joined this club, which now boasts six members (Accelrys, Entagen, IBDS, INOVA and Symbiosys being the others. GenoSpace (“Own your own genome” www.genospace.com) was a last year start-up which has a passion for the ability of individuals to store and control access to their own genomic data. Others in this group are also users of Thomson Reuters’ Life Sciences data. Particularly interesting to me is IDBS, the lab notebook player, but they all have something in common: they can use Thomson Reuters data to help them build a service and cross-referencing component within their own services and solutions, so that the T-R data becomes an “Intel Inside” element which helps each service sell a more complete solution to each chosen party. This then is a real club, co-operating around the Thomson Reuters Cortellis platform. Here is how they describe it:
“If you are an innovative services and technology-based company with a vested interest in the life sciences, a partnership with Thomson Reuters could enhance your client offerings with comprehensive and timely scientific data and competitive intelligence.
Thomson Reuters supports access to the company’s life sciences information at the point of customer need through application-specific solutions developed by third party partners, creating a mutually beneficial solution for users. These solutions can potentially include data ranging from ontologies, to biological target information and information to support pharmaceutical business development activities.
For more information on how to join the Thomson Reuters Partner Ecosystem for Life Sciences, please email us at: Partnering.Ecosystem@thomsonreuters.com
Note — Thomson Reuters Life Sciences Partners are not resellers and are not authorized to resell Thomson Reuters solutions.”
I included the note at the end deliberately. This is about co-operation and forming communities of interest. Just as FICO must now own its communications pathways to compete, this unit of Thomson Reuters must form collaborative relationships with small or specialized players to intensify the seamlessness of delivered solutions. Both critical trends. And they even go forward in a news free summer break – news free unless you are a Prince, that is.
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