Kevin Benedict Ponders the Future: enterprise mobility

Showing posts with label enterprise mobility. Show all posts

Sensors and AI in the Kingdom of Robots

Fingerspitzengefühl: Is a German word used to describe an ability to maintain attention to detail in an ever-changing operational and tactical environment by maintaining real-time situational awareness. The term is synonymous with the English expression of "keeping one's finger on the pulse". The problem with traditional fingerspitzengefühl, in addition to pronouncing it - is it is hard to scale. Today, however, in a world of sensors, GPS and mobile devices, having real-time situational awareness is far easier than ever before. In fact, today the challenge is not how to do it (answer: sensors), but what to do with all the information.

There are many dimensions of data that are available for work outside the four walls, which is mobile, remote and dynamic. We all know about 3 dimensional (longitude, latitude and altitude), but there are many more. We contrive:

Time
Start and stop tasks times
Travel times
Traffic conditions
Available workforces and associated costs
Available equipment
Activities
Events
Business process steps
Expenses
Security steps
Transactions
Compliance tasks
Performances against KPIs (key performance indicators)
Actors (customers, partners, suppliers, contractors, employees, etc.)
Relationships
Contract/Agreements
Supplies, materials and equipment tracking
Etc.

All of these data points can be bundled together as Performance Impact Variables (PIVs). PIVs are the data points that can be used as inputs to algorithms that can be used by AI systems to optimize and manage the performance of the business in real-time.

All of this data can be used as overlays to simple GPS coordinates on a map. Each of these additional layers of information exponentially increases the complexity, decision-making options and possible combinations. This enormous volume of data quickly overwhelms humans. That is why non-humans (AI/software robots) can be used to such great effect to maintain productive situational awareness and strategic advantages in complex environments demanding real-time decision-making and action.

During the period between WWI and WWII, Western countries all developed new tanks and military aircraft to support their infantry. The Germans, however, went three steps farther by developing strategic advantages in:

Radios and frequencies for communicating between forces (tanks, infantry and aircraft) in real-time
Strategies for coordinated actions between the three groups
Mission oriented command structures – Commanders define the mission “intent”, but the details of how to accomplish them were left to frontline officers.

In today’s world, companies seeking strategic advantages in field services operations can learn from these three additions.

The modern equivalent of “radios and communication networks” is OILS (optimized information logistics systems) that sense, collect, securely and wirelessly transmit data, analyze and report on it, and support artificial intelligence (AI) and automation.

The modern equivalent of “strategies for coordinated action” is the ability to collect and analyze vast quantities of real-time data to automatically and dynamically manage and adjust (using AI and software robots) a whole series of activities and events such as: schedules, tasks, jobs, orders, transactions, etc.

The modern equivalent of “mission oriented command structures” is an algorithm. Once the algorithm is developed, it can operate without human intervention.

When massive amounts of real-time data are automatically collected and analyzed, they can feed algorithms and AI systems to optimize real-time activities and events. The speed at which data can be processed through OILS and AI systems today far exceeds human decision-making capabilities – so automation that works in digital-time is required. This is where AI excels. AI can analyze all the inbound data in nanoseconds and instantly adjust and optimize operations.

AI does not just impact field services. It impacts many business processes by supporting:

New ways of selling
New business models
New ways of managing
New business processes
New ways of collaborating
New ways of making decisions
New ways of engaging customers
New ways of working with products
New marketing and growth strategies

My mantra is, "Digital technologies without digital strategies are wasted." Having digital technologies without a digital strategy is like having tanks, mobile infantry and aircraft, but no coherent plan for combined action. In a recent report, 40 Months of Hyper-Digital Transformation, digital laggards were found not to receive as good of return on investments (ROIs) on their digital investments as digital leaders do. The difference I believe is in their digital strategies, or lack thereof.

In the book, Stray Voltage, War in the Information Age, author Wayne Michael Hall defines two more PIVs - cyberspace and cerebral. "Information superiority is firmly connected to making decisions that are superior to an adversary's and combines information technology and intellectual power to create conditions with which to make better decisions…human beings will need to improve their thinking capabilities to cope with the increasing complexities of the world...people will depend more on visualization to help understand complexity quickly. Visualization will fuse data and information and display the result in a multimedia format. Visualization will allow the integration of data, information and knowledge from all sources and will allow for the integration of numerous contributors." Visualization, although helpful to humans, is far less relevant once algorithm-consuming AI systems take over.

Sensors, already powerful, are being developed with more capabilities to sense more things every month. Each year when I attend GSMA’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, I am astonished to see what additional capabilities sensors have added. Here are some examples:

Sensors able to identify and classify vegetation - natural and artificial
Sensors able to identify and pinpoint distressed crops
Sensors that can identify soil moisture content
Sensors that can detect heat sources and leaks
Sensors that can detect movements and changes in defined objects
Sensors that can detect the chemical make-up of make-up

Each of these sensors and their real-time data collection capabilities adds to decision-making complexity, but they can also be the very PIVs that give you the competitive advantage you need to win.

Watch my latest video on digital technology trends:

Download the full report with charts and data sources here: https://www.cognizant.com/FoW/twa-hyper-digital-transformation-codex2478.pdf

Follow Kevin Benedict on Twitter @krbenedict or read his latest articles here:

************************************************************************

Kevin Benedict

Senior Analyst, Center for the Future of Work, Cognizant

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Subscribe to Kevin's YouTube Channel

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.

The End Game of Digital Transformation

Digital transformation requires participants to have a vision for and understanding of what they are trying to achieve and why. In fact, the lack of a clear digital strategy is the second biggest mistake companies make in digital transformation, right behind moving too slowly, according to the middle managers we surveyed. Digital strategies, however, should evolve out of a documented, enterprise-focused digital transformation “doctrine.”

The purpose of a digital transformation doctrine is to create a unified understanding of why digital transformation is needed. An organization’s doctrine should influence its strategy, its operating model and the tactics it uses to compete. A simple example of a doctrine could be:

The digital transformation of our marketplace is changing the behaviors of our customers and the nature of our competition. We must embrace and respond to these changes by creating a digitally agile business, and employing digital technologies and strategies. We will achieve transformation and information dominance by investing appropriately in an optimized information logistics system. We will restructure our organizations for business agility, speed and real-time decision-making. We will develop a culture that encourages collaboration, innovation and creativity.

The justification for the pain and stress of digital transformation is to compete at a higher level. Digitally-transformed enterprises have fully functioning “digital nervous systems” consisting of sensors, mobile devices, technology-enabled people, shared situational awareness, networked applications, automated data collection, optimized processes, advanced analytics and a centralized OILS. This system provides full visibility, in real-time, into system changes that require a response from humans and/or bots. This awareness enables leaders to make data-centric decisions and implement automated bots using AI to speed up responses to data triggers.

PG&E is a great example of a company with such a doctrine and an accompanying “digital nervous system.” PG&E supports 50 million customers with 1,500 distributed work crews managed from 67 different locations using separate software applications and databases. With this scale of customer service operations, PG&E’s pre-digital infrastructure was highly stretched and brittle. Each dispatcher’s visibility and authority was limited only to the local work crew’s schedules, which resulted in poor and inefficient resource allocation, slow responses to major events and high administrative costs. To solve these inefficiencies, PG&E redesigned its business strategy and IT infrastructure by implementing an OILS, including cybersecurity, mobile, telematics and IoT systems, and consolidating all of its dispatching and field services management into two centralized centers, which were standardized on a shared software solution for scheduling. The results: Management now has centralized control over workforce scheduling and can accurately measure work crew utilization. With these capabilities, management can move work crews between different regions for optimal efficiency; dispatch is now consolidated to two offices (from a previous 67); and the company is standardized on one solution that can be enhanced and upgraded in a uniform manner.

It's important that all participants understand not only what digital transformation is, but what it means for your business and what the endgame looks like.

Watch the 3-minute video:

Download the full report with charts and data sources here: https://www.cognizant.com/FoW/twa-hyper-digital-transformation-codex2478.pdf

Follow Kevin Benedict on Twitter @krbenedict, or read more of his articles on digital transformation strategies here:

************************************************************************

Kevin Benedict

Senior Analyst, Center for the Future of Work, Cognizant

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Subscribe to Kevin's YouTube Channel

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Join the Google+ Community Mobile Enterprise Strategies

New Report: 40 Months of Hyper-Digital Transformation

Forty months is not a lot of time to design, develop and deliver something monumental. Consider that it took 182 years to build the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, 20 years to build the Great Pyramid of Giza and 10 years to build the Panama Canal. Executives from digital-leading companies, however, tell us that in just over three years – the year 2020 – 17 different digital technologies will dramatically impact the way they work, and transform the work that gets done, so we don't have much time.

This means that within the next 40 months the exponential growth of digitization and machine learning will fundamentally change how businesses create value, satisfy customers and outperform competitors. This also means that in this same time period, companies must take actions that position them for the next level of success. If they don’t embrace digital, for many it will be game over.

To better understand the strategies and technologies that digital transformation winners require, Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work, in partnership with the renowned economist Nouriel Roubini, surveyed 2,000 executives, 500 managers, 150 MBA students and 50 futurists across 18 countries. What we found is that today’s and tomorrow’s winners will need to think differently, follow different strategies, deploy different technologies and make cybersecurity a top priority – all while realizing that time is slipping away.

Guiding a business through the turbulence and friction of digital transformation is perhaps the great challenge of our time. Just as John Ellis’s invention of high-temperature oils unleashed the power of railroads, industrialization and economic growth in the 19th century, data is the lubricant of today’s digital age. More to the point, today’s hyper-digital transformation will be driven by optimized information logistics systems (OILS) and IT infrastructures capable of facilitating real-time digital interactions.

Our research revealed several findings that we detail in the report:

Digital leaders think and act differently.
Digital leaders recognize that digital transformation is the key to their future relevance and success, and they act as though their lives depend on getting transformation right.
Recognition alone is not enough, though. Digital leaders also execute the right actions and technologies in the right sequences to successfully navigate resource constraints.
Digital technologies are the keys that unlock a golden door.

The 2,000-plus executives we surveyed have already generated $328.7 billion in total revenue through the strategic deployment of digital technologies in the last year. Respondents believe there’s much more to be had, though: We found businesses could unlock another $151.6 billion in value if they take full advantage of the digital opportunities at hand. Download and read the full report here https://www.cognizant.com/FoW/twa-hyper-digital-transformation-codex2478.pdf.

Follow Kevin Benedict on Twitter @krbenedict, or read more of his articles on digital transformation strategies here:

************************************************************************

Kevin Benedict

Senior Analyst, Center for the Future of Work, Cognizant Writer, Speaker and World Traveler

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Subscribe to Kevin'sYouTube Channel

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Join the Google+ Community Mobile Enterprise Strategies

Merging Humans with Enterprise AI and Machine Learning Systems

Artificial intelligence and machine learning systems are made up of code and algorithms, and as such, they work as fast as computers can process them. Often this means massive amounts of learning can be accomplished every second without stop 24x7x365. Code doesn't need to take weekends off, holidays, or sick time. Code doesn't get tired. It can recognize complex patterns, areas of potential improvement and problems in real-time (aka digital-time). Given these available computing capabilities and speeds, what are executives to do with AI and machine learning, when we live and operate in relatively slow human-time, and work within organizations that work at an even slower pace of organizational-time.

I believe the first step is to admit we have a problem - the problem is a difference in the speed that computers can operate and the speeds us humans can operate. The second is to understand what a solution might look like - how humans and computers can best integrate and operate together for business success, and the third is to have a strategy and plan.

Imagine a scenario where you arrive at your desk on a Monday morning and find hundreds of recommendations for business process improvements from your AI and machine learning systems. Each of the recommendations might take weeks to socialize across the organization and implement. Now, imagine that happens every day of the year. We humans would be completely overwhelmed! In this scenario, humans are the weak links in business process optimization.

How are we then to best utilize AI and machine learning in a manner that benefits humans, and human powered organizations? I propose the answer lies in developing a powerful AI and machine learning platform that understands our goals and aspirations, can filter findings, run and test simulations, and then present a few select prioritized recommendations to human decision-makers. Simply feeding leaders with unlimited numbers of recommendations may actually paralyze, rather than empower them. What are needed are systems that won’t overwhelm humans, but rather augment them.

In order for any of these AI and machine learning systems to actually work, the data that fuels these systems must first be available, accurate, normalized and timely - for many that is the essence of digital transformation. A digital transformation initiative often includes upgrading IT systems to become “optimized information logistics system” (OILS). Systems that ensure the right data is collected, available, analyzed and its meaning and context understood and utilized.

Once an organization has an OILS in place and the data available, then leaders must ensure their organizational structures and business processes are capable of responding at an operational tempo sufficient to capture the benefits and competitive advantages available from the insights derived from AI and machine learning. That is no small feat. It does no good, as we pointed out, to have recommendations that cannot be implemented.

Massive volumes of new data from sensors, mobile devices, embedded computers and online activities means there are enormous opportunities to learn and gain competitive advantages as a result of it, but only if our leaders, IT and business systems, and our organizations are capable of responding fast enough to capture the value. Understanding how to create OILS, how to utilize AI and machine learning to effectively augment our leaders, and then knowing how to create an organization able to respond fast enough to capture the competitive advantages in the data are the monumental tasks before us today.

Follow Kevin Benedict on Twitter @krbenedict, or read more of his articles on digital transformation strategies here:

************************************************************************

Kevin Benedict

Senior Analyst, Center for the Future of Work, Cognizant Writer, Speaker and World Traveler

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Subscribe to Kevin'sYouTube Channel

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Join the Google+ Community Mobile Enterprise Strategies

Profits that Kill in the Age of Digital Transformation

Presenting 40 Months of Hyper-Digital Transformation in Lisbon, PT

Digital transformation initiatives both increase revenue and decrease expenses according to our upcoming study titled Work AHEAD 2016 by Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work. For this study we surveyed over 2,000 executives across 18 countries. The expected net business impact over the next 3 years of rapid digital transformation, i.e. hyper-transformation, is an increase in revenue of 11.4% (Revenue = 10.3%, Costs = -1.3%) amongst the companies in our study. These numbers represent the difference between success and failure in many industries.

To get the predicted revenue impact, companies expect to increase their spending on digital technologies from 11.3% of their revenue today, to 16.6% of revenue by 2020, while decreasing their non-digital investments.

In addition, our study reveals 64% of the futurists in our study, experts paid to study digital technology trends and to develop future strategies, believe digital transformation will boost revenues by 2020, 76% believe it will strengthen their competitive positioning, and 88% believe it will accelerate their speed to market. If you accept these predictions, then your organization should quickly transform itself and jettison the heavy baggage that accumulates as a result of decades of institutionalized methodologies developed and codified in an analog era - an era operating at a far slower operational tempo. The good news is that ROIs (return on investments) from digital transformation initiatives are compelling. Nearly 30% of the surveyed firms are receiving an ROI greater than 100%.

These revenue numbers have investors interested and asking about the digital transformation plans of companies they invest in, or are considering investing in today. We have all read about the list of companies that have failed this year due in part to their slow and/or inadequate response to digital technologies and changing competitive marketplaces. As a result investors today want to understand the speed and scale of their portfolio’s digital transformation initiatives, as these initiatives can be predictors of future value.

For executives, transforming an enterprise is difficult at any time, but when an enterprise is highly profitable - digital transformation is even harder. Why? The temptation to follow the maxim, “Don’t fix what isn’t broken,” is just too compelling. The challenge enterprises are faced with today, however, is that digital technologies are changing the competitive landscape faster and in different ways than executives have ever seen before.

Recently, we presented a workshop on digital transformation strategies to a highly profitable automotive parts and systems manufacturer. The company is filled with smart people using efficient long standing manufacturing systems and processes. The company is innovative in R&D, and forward thinking in the adoption of digital technologies and strategies for their products and services.

The challenge we all faced in the room is how do we justify digital transformation investments, when today the old systems and ways of thinking pay out in record profits? How do we articulate that sensors, artificial intelligence, digital platforms and real-time data are taking on a whole new level of importance? In fact, executives believe big data and business analytics will have the biggest business impact of all technologies on businesses from years 2020-2025.

We were able to demonstrate, through an intensive brainstorming workshop, how a sensor enabled digital platform connected to their physical parts and equipment, and integrated with external databases could provide enormous customer and business value. We were able to show them how their current list of physical products and services, could be expanded by adding a whole new list of new digital products and services on top of their current offerings. The data they had access to in their physical products and solutions was unique and could offer significant value and competitive advantages if they made it available on a digital platform as a service. Our mission was accomplished.

Today an enterprise’s system for collecting, analyzing, reporting and sharing data is mission critical, especially given the increasing importance of artificial intelligence, robotic process automation and machine learning to companies’ future success. The end-to-end system for managing this data we call the “optimized information logistics systems” or by its acronym, OILS. Having effective OILS is mandatory in order to become a digitally transformed enterprise (DTE). Digitally transformed enterprises place a premium on data collecting, analysis, situational awareness and real-time action and reaction. Executives see the value in OILS, as 63% believe analytics will have a very strong impact on work by 2020, and 62% predict OILS will significantly enhance decision-making over the next 5 years.

DTEs see where their resources are located, where they are needed and how best to manage them at all times to successfully and efficiently accomplish their mission. They see how customers are using their products and how they are holding up. Real-time connectivity combined with OILS enables organizations to think, act and compete in real-time, a capability never before possible. It enables products in the field to be intimately tied to R&D and the manufacturing floor. It is a whole new world, which in spite of profits today, must be anticipated and invested in for tomorrow, or the profits of today might lead to the death of them tomorrow.

Authors: Tim Hillison, Senior Director, Cognizant Digital Works, and Kevin Benedict, Senior Analyst, Cognizant's Center for the Future of Work

*Source The Work Ahead, 2016, Cognizant Center for the Future of Work

Follow Kevin Benedict on Twitter @krbenedict, or read more of his articles on digital transformation strategies here:

************************************************************************

Kevin Benedict

Senior Analyst, Center for the Future of Work, Cognizant Writer, Speaker and World Traveler

Kevin Benedict Ponders the Future

Sensors and AI in the Kingdom of Robots

The End Game of Digital Transformation

New Report: 40 Months of Hyper-Digital Transformation

Merging Humans with Enterprise AI and Machine Learning Systems

Profits that Kill in the Age of Digital Transformation

Interviews with Kevin Benedict

Get new posts by email: