Using Data and Deming in a Pandemic

Throughout history military leaders have wrestled with the “fog of war" - the desperation of not knowing critical information.  Information as basic as where are my forces and where are the forces of my opponents?  We face similar information needs today in our battle against the COVID-19 coronavirus.

“The ultimate purpose of data is to provide a basis for action or a recommendation for action,” wrote the revered quality improvement consultant W. Edwards Deming.  Today, in our battle against the COVID-19 virus, we are struggling to make informed decisions because of our own lack of data.  The absence of information both paralyzes decision-making and forces us to expend enormous amounts of time and energy defending against all kinds of scenarios that may not in fact be relevant.  We just don’t know.  Think about a scenario of being lost in a dark forest at night with all kinds of strange sounds and dangerous predators lurking about. How would you defend yourself? Which way would you turn? It would be difficult in the best of times, but the absence of data can make it even more excruciating!  We are struggling with this today.

Today the fog of war can largely be lifted with the combination of software systems, mobile phones, sensors and analytics.  With COVID-19, however, we have the necessary and important consideration of how to protect personal privacy.

Another relevant Deming adage, “The biggest problems are where people don’t realize they have one in the first place.” Not knowing the status of COVID-19 in our communities is a big problem.  In order to move forward and open the economy again we need to understand precisely our COVID-19 exposure and status.  We must quickly remove the blind spots by collecting as much data as possible, while at the same time protecting as much of our privacy as possible.

I look forward to quickly reaching a point where we replace conjecture with good data.  Removing the blind spots is our next best step for our physical, mental and financial health.

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist | Leadership Strategies at TCS

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Mobile and IoT Technologies are Inside the Curve of Human Time

We humans have a finite speed at which we can think, analyze and make decisions.  We can only focus on a small set of data before we are overwhelmed.  When important decisions must be made, our brains need time, significant time, to weigh all the variables, pros and cons and possible outcomes in order to arrive at a good decision.  In times of high stress where making fast decisions is required, many of us don’t perform at our peak.  In addition, weak humans that we are - need sleep.  We are not always available; we require daily downtime in order to function.

Humans operate in human time, a biological time influenced by the environment and universe that we live in.  Computers, though, are not subject to these human limitations and can act on algorithms and pre-determined decision trees 24/7 in milliseconds.

Human time challenges and limitations are not going away.  As IoT sensors and mobile devices proliferate, so also does the volume of real-time data and required analysis.  Humans, already at their limit, must somehow augment their capabilities to handle the massive increases in the volume and complexity of data.  Many believe, as do I, that the competitive marketplaces of today and tomorrow will be won by those with better and faster information logistics systems.  Systems that can collect larger quantities of data, analyze and execute relevant actions faster.

The new F-35 fighter jet in the USA’s arsenal has over 24 million lines of software code running it.  Why? It requires sensors, computers and sofware just to keep it in the air. Code is required to process all the data fast enough to augment the pilot’s skills.  In addition, the F-35 comes with a $500,000 custom helmet that provides a 360-degree view of the operational environment, and displays so much data pilots have reported suffering dizziness from information overload.  We have hit the wall of human capabilities, and we are only getting started.

The late military strategist and US Air force Colonel John Boyd, taught a key advantage in air combat was to get “inside” an opponent's decision curve. That means to understand the true situation faster, and then make better decisions quicker than an opponent.  He taught that humans need a simple formula for quick thinking.  His formula was OODA (observe, orient, decide and act). He taught a continuous cycle of observing a situation, orienting or understanding it, deciding what needs to happen and then acting quickly.  He taught that competitors executing OODA cycles faster than opponents had the advantage.  The OODA quick thinking process is proven, and has now made the leap from human time to computer time via artificial intelligence.

The leap from human time to computer time has relevance in business today, especially in the age of Mobile Me, where consumer’s expectations for mobile app performances demand instant responses.   Mobile apps and real-time consumer interactions are now in the realm of the F-35.  Consumers today demand more real-time information processing, decision-making and business process execution than are humanly possible without computer and software augmentation operating beyond the limitations of human time, and into the future of computer time.

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Watch my latest video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uF2ntnskHA&feature=youtu.be.

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Kevin Benedict

Writer, Speaker, Analyst and World Traveler

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Information, Analytics and Speed are the New Mandates

The reality of information is entirely contained in the speed of its dissemination. ~ Paul Virilio

Information has a shelf life.  Its value diminishes quickly with the passing of time.  In a world of moving customers, employees, vehicles, subcontractors, materials, suppliers, etc., knowing what is happening at a precise time is critical for decision-making, scheduling and planning.  If some information is 90 minutes old, others 45 minutes old, and more available in real-time - you are going to have a real challenge integrating that information and forming an accurate and clear picture of reality!

Optimal efficiency and accuracy, in the scenario above, can only be achieved when the speed of information collection and dissemination is coordinated and real-time.  This means having mobile data communications and sensor technologies in place and integrating it to present an accurate impression of reality in real-time.

For many industries the quality of their information logistics systems is the new competitive playing field.  In history many of the greatest battles were won or lost based on the accuracy and timeliness of the information used to decide how best to maneuver armies, navies and air forces.  Enterprises today are in a similar position.

Legacy IT systems that are incapable of supporting a real-time information collection, communication, processing, analyzing and disseminating environment will be the reason many companies will no longer remain competitive in 2015.

In the past long-term planning was the ticket to success.  As the tempo of business increased, short-term planning became more important.  Today, nothing short of real-term is good enough to compete in a hyper-competitive global market.

Today the efficient and real-time coordination of multiple moving parts is mandatory in many industries.  That means mobile communications and sensor technologies have become an absolute requirement on the front-end, and IT systems that can support real-time on the back-end.  What needs to change in your IT environment in 2015 to support real-term planning and real-time decision-making?

For more on this subject read: http://web.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Virilio/Virilio_ArtoftheMotor2.html.

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Kevin Benedict

Writer, Speaker, Senior Analyst

Digital Transformation, EBA, Center for the Future of Work Cognizant

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Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Browse the Mobile Solution Directory

Subscribe to Kevin'sYouTube Channel

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Digital Transformation Expert Interview: Author Paul Roehrig

I love Google+ Hangouts.  They enable me to catch up with busy, world traveling digital and mobile experts anywhere in the world and record interviews with them.  Today, I have the privilege of sharing an interview that I recorded last week with author Paul Roehrig who is also the Co-Director of the Center for the Future of Work here at Cognizant.  Paul's new and important book that will be published by Wiley in April is titled "Code Halos - How the Digital Lives of People, Things and Organizations are Changing the Rules of Business."  There is also an accompanying iPad app "Code Halos" available now for free here.

Viewers may have caught the interview I published with Paul's co-author on the book Ben Pring last week.  In this interview we cover a different set of strategy discussions.  Enjoy!

Video Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10RYDcvbJng&feature=share&list=UUGizQCw2Zbs3eTLwp7icoqw

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Kevin Benedict

Senior Analyst, Digital Transformation Cognizant

View my profile on LinkedIn

Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Browse the Mobile Solution Directory

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Join the Google+ Community Mobile Enterprise Strategies

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Digital Transformation Expert Interview: Author Ben Pring on Code Halos

I had the privilege of interviewing Ben Pring the co-author of the book Code Halos - How the Digital Lives of People, Things and Organizations are Changing the Rules of Business this week!  In addition to the book, there is also a free companion Code Halos iPad app available for download.  As well as writing books, Ben Pring is also the Co-Director of the Center for the Future of Work at Cognizant.  Wiley will be publishing the book nationwide in 2 weeks.  It is available now for pre-order. Enjoy!

Video Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2uhEPxOMEg&feature=share&list=UUGizQCw2Zbs3eTLwp7icoqw

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Kevin Benedict

Senior Analyst, Digital Transformation Cognizant

View my profile on LinkedIn

Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Browse the Mobile Solution Directory

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Join the Google+ Community Mobile Enterprise Strategies

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

SMAC Expert Series: Paul Roehrig and Ben Pring

How does big data impact companies today?  How are companies competing on the use of business intelligence?  What business transformations and business model changes are taking place due to these capabilities?  Watch this interview that I recorded with Cognizant's Co-Directors of the Center for The Future of Work, Paul Roehrig and Ben Pring as they share their latest research with us.  Enjoy!

Video Link: http://youtu.be/ctycYs18dyk

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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) Cognizant

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Read the whitepaper on mobile, social, analytics and cloud strategies Don't Get SMACked

Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

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Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

SMAC News Weekly - Week of November 11, 2012

Click Here to Read More...

I am a SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) analyst.  I research this subject daily and share the best excerpts and interesting numbers that I come across each week.

Each of us is impacted by SMAC.  We all use mobile devices and social networking solutions like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  We use search engines, maps and weather apps, all of which use analytics and are in the cloud.  SMAC is the combination of all of these trends coming together on mobile devices.  This convergence is impacting businesses in many different ways.  We will do our best to capture these by reporting on the SMAC trends, numbers and forecasts in this weekly newsletter.

Now for the news...

Pinfluencer, the leader in Discovery Marketing & Analytics for Pinterest, announced its deep integration with web analytics systems such as Adobe Omniture, Coremetrics and Google Analytics to help marketers discover which pins drive revenue and clicks, and measure true social ROI.  Read Original Content

A survey conducted by DBD Media of 50 e-commerce sites, found that 67 percent haven't integrated social media tracking. Read Original Content

A recent Yesmail report, based on a consumer shopping trends survey and an analysis of the digital marketing campaigns of 20 brands over a three-month period, found that half of consumers are influenced by social media when making online purchases and more than one in three consumers have purchased a product as a direct result of a social media promotion.  Read Original Content

Another Yesmail report result, 41% of mobile device owners have purchased products as a result of mobile email promotions, but one-third of those emails linked to web pages that were not mobile-optimized.  Read Original Content

Between 2011 and 2016, Gartner is predicting Big Data to grow to $43.7 billion in 2016.  If the market scope is limited to social media, social network analysis and content analysis, the market is growing 45 percent annually from 2011 to 2016. Read Original Content

  

NM Incite, a social media analytics and research joint venture between Nielsen and McKinsey, just announced that it has acquired New York-based social TV startup SocialGuide. Read Original Content

Cognizant just published a 2 minute video demonstrating how an average person uses social, mobile analytics and cloud in their daily life.  Very interesting!  Watch Video Here

Accenture Federal Services was awarded a $3 million, one-year contract to help the Office of Health Affairs enhance its biosurveillance capabilities via social media analytics. Read Original Content

SAP announced an aggressive mobile analytics strategy nearly a year ago, and at the vendor's TechEd conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday it underscored mobile progress by announcing yet another new app: SAP Business Planning and Consolidation on its Enterprise Performance Management Unwired. Read Original Content

At its annual IBM Information on Demand 2012 and Business Analytics Forum, IBM showcased its  IBM PureData System appliance, which provides an engineering system for analytics and transactions. Read Original Content

Temenos, the global provider of banking software, announced that nine deals were signed for its Insight Business Analytics solution in the past year, including new projects with Synergy Credit Union and Innovation Credit Union. Read Original Content

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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant

Read The Future of Work

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Enterprise Mobility a Mighty Shift

In an article in the New York Times Tuesday, October 23, 2012 titled In Mobile World, Tech Giants Struggle to Get Up to Speed, authors Claire Cain Miller and Somini Sengupta write about the massive impact that the "rise of mobile devices" has caused the high tech industry.  Many of the traditional powerhouses of technology including Google, Intel and Facebook are struggling to find their footing in this mobile tsunami.

Industries such as books, music, hotels, TV, PC manufacturing and electronics of all kinds are being forever changed or eliminated.  Forrester Research analyst Charles S. Golvin is quoted in the article as saying, "Companies are having to retool their thinking..."  We must ask ourselves, "What is it that our customers are doing through the mobile channel that is quite distinct from what we are delivering them through our traditional Web channel?"

Social is right there with mobile.  They are growing hand in hand and benefiting each other.  Today, 6 in 10 Facebook users are accessing it through the web.  In fact, eMarketer reports that people using mobile devices for surfing the web, using apps, playing games and listening to music more than doubled in the last two years to 82 minutes per day.

Mobility is causing a mighty shift in so many things.  Has your team thought about how to respond to this shift?  Is mobility and these mighty shifts on your 2013 strategy session agendas?  Are you considering this shift while developing your budgets for 2013?

The authors of this article also said mobility is able to change so much so quickly because the web already exists.  The web, and wireless connectivity to it, are what makes all these changes so quick and potent.

I teach workshops on mobile strategies and SMAC - social, mobile, analytics and cloud.  In the enterprise space today, it is hard to separate the components of SMAC.  They are really a convergence of all four parts.  Just think about using your smartphone to search for a restaurant.  You are using a mobile device, with search analytics, you may access Yelp, a search engine/social site for reviewing restaurants, and it is all in the cloud.

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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant

Read The Future of Work

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Location Based Services and Mobile Device Customization

Many SMEs (small to medium sized enterprises) that use smartphones such as iPhones would benefit from the ability to add business information, alerts, tags and advice to a specific location on a map. Large enterprises can achieve these features by investing in business analytics, GIS solutions, route optimization applications, mobile data collection solutions and integrate them all with CRMs, but these enterprise solutions are often cost prohibitive for SMEs. They need these features all on a simple mobile application that is either connected to a web service or independent on the device.

Let's consider a few scenarios:

• A taxi driver has found a very good place to pick-up riders. He/she wants to mark this location on a map and include other relevant information such as day of week, time of day and the reason this is a good location.
• A house painting contractor driving through a neighborhood notices that it has a large number of houses that may need painting in the near future. The contractor pulls over, marks a map on his iPhone and enters the details.
• A landscape company owner notices a new housing development is going in. He pulls over and marks his map and enters the details.
• A neighborhood watch member notices ongoing suspicious activities and marks the location on his/her iPhone map and relevant details.
• Citizens report potholes in the road to the appropriate government agencies. They mark the location on their maps and then call in the details or enter the data in a government sponsored website.
• A parent enters the location of their children's friends' homes, by marking them on a map so they can quickly find them and know where they are located.

Any information that is location based and would help a person plan their business or personal life better would be useful. It would be beneficial if these applications were easily customizable so that individual users could quickly and easily edit them for their specific needs.

Can you think of other features that would be useful?
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Author Kevin Benedict
Independent Mobility Consultant, Wireless Industry Analyst and Marketing Consultant
www.linkedin.com/in/kevinbenedict
twitter: @krbenedict
http://kevinbenedict.ulitzer.com/
http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/
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Mobile Software and Mobile Business Intelligence

Business analytics and business intelligence is one of the few hot areas in enterprise IT sales now days. In fact, SAP is shifting resources from other business groups to focus more on their Business Objects solutions. All companies, executives and managers seem to be crying for more information that they can use to make faster and better decisions. In tough economic times, information is even more critical. Take this trend and consider that over 40% of the workforce is now considered mobile and you have an emerging requirement for mobile business intelligence and analytics.

In this recent article on Mobile Business Intelligence that I authored, an example of how service companies and their field service technicians can use mobile business intelligence was detailed. The bottom line, managers and mobile employees need access to critical business intelligence and business analytics while they are out of the office with customers or on remote job locations. This information needs to be published and formatted to fit the mobile devices used by these workers so this data can be used on location where ever that may be.

Today business intelligence and business analytics applications are designed for desktops and servers connected to large databases. There is also a need for better business analytics and intelligence on the mobile device. Mobile handheld computers have become powerful hardware platforms for many data collection accessories including RFID readers, barcode scanners, GPS units, data collection applications, Bluetooth to anything applications and much more. This collected data can be considered business intelligence. Business analytics is the processing and reporting of this data and what it means to the business. This information, in a mobile format is needed just as much by mobile managers as sedentary managers.

Mobile business intelligence and business analytics is an important segment of mobile software applications that needs a lot more development and thought. Other areas of mobile applications that need additional development are detailed in these articles:

• http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/2009/10/mobile-application-integration-platform.html
• http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/2009/10/mobile-workflows-and-erps.html
• http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/2009/09/mobile-application-development.html
• http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/2009/09/advice-for-mobile-start-ups-and-mobile.html
• http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/2009/08/mobile-software-sdks-and-toolkits-for.html
• http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/2009/08/mobile-workflows-in-field-sap-and-other.html

If you would like to discuss any of these topics in more detail please contact me.

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Author Kevin Benedict
Independent Mobile Computing, EDI and B2B Consultant
www.linkedin.com/in/kevinbenedict
http://b2b-bpo.blogspot.com/
http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/
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