Kevin Benedict is a TCS futurist and lecturer focused on the signals and foresight that emerge as society, geopolitics, economies, science, technology, environment, and philosophy converge.
Have any of you spent time considering how digital transformation, artificial intelligence, IoT, mobility and virtual and augmented reality are impacted by computer memory? Me neither until this week at GSMA's Mobile World Congress 2017 in Barcelona. I had the privilege of interviewing Micron Technologies' Gino Skulick, II and getting educated on it. Very cool information!!!
***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.
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)
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:
***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.
We asked 50 futurists, professionals employed to review trends and develop strategy, to identify and rank the top five ways they believe digital transformation will drive value generation between now and 2020. Here are their top five answers:
Accelerates speed to market
Strengthens competitive positioning
Boosts revenue growth
Raises employee productivity
Expands ability to acquire, engage and retain customers
These top five value generators offer significant business advantages; but if your organization can achieve them faster than your competitors, there is a bonus advantage. We call it the Ax2 phenomenon (advantages have advantages). Not only do digital leaders realize competitive advantages before others, but they also have the advantage of insights from new data, which leads to new actions and new insights not yet understood or possible for laggards.
Research In Motion (RIM), the progenitor of the Blackberry, responded slowly to Apple’s launch of the iPhone. Years passed before RIM responded with its first smartphone. During this time, Apple worked at “digital speed” to improve its iPhones and the iOS operating system, and hundreds of thousands of software applications were developed for it. Each of these versions provided additional insights into consumers and their behaviors. The Ax2 phenomenon enabled Apple to rapidly widen the gap between leader and laggard, a competitive advantage that proved impossible for RIM to overcome.
Executives must closely watch the innovation efforts of competitors, and recognize that it is not only the new products and services that are being introduced that can be differentiating but also the data they glean from new innovations that can spawn additional advantages.
Information dominance is the strategic imperative of the 21st century. The good news for executives is that investing in digital technologies to gain information dominance makes sense as the return on investment for digital technologies averages nearly 50% among survey participants, but jumps to an astounding 230% for the top 25%.
Achieving information dominance involves understanding the data required to achieve competitive advantage, and then collecting and analyzing it to glean business meaning faster than the competition. Information dominance, however, is meaningless unless it results in actionable insights, which lead to appropriate actions, at the right time and place. It’s not the ability to collect and analyze data faster; it is the ability to understand and act on it faster. Businesses that can “understand and act with speed” will dominate those that are slower.
In today’s age of hyper-digital transformation, enterprises must digitally transform and implement OILS (optimized information logistics systems) that can respond and change with self-sustaining business agility. These abilities take more than digital technologies; they require a new way of thinking, which is revealed in our data on digital leaders:
Digital leaders recognize and respond to underlying market forces, and are budgeting and planning to implement specific business strategies and digital technologies in specific sequences to maximize ROI and competitive advantage.
Digital leaders recognize the impact of digital technologies on the expectations of consumers and markets. These expectations are speeding the tempo of operations beyond human time to digital time. The demands for digital time require humans to upgrade IT environments and augment their capabilities with AI and robotic process automation (bots) to enable mass volumes of transactions to be processed in milliseconds in order to support real-time and mobile environments.
Digital leaders develop a digital doctrine and strategy to unify and guide all business and technology strategies, tactics and investments and provide a shared frame of reference across their organization.
Digital leaders are exploiting the Ax2 phenomenon. The Ax2 phenomenon enables enterprises to gain new and unique business insights earlier than their competitors, leading to competitive advantages that result from the collection and analysis of data not yet available to digital laggards.
Digital leaders identify the digital technologies they expect to have a significant impact on their businesses across the three digital transformation ages spanning 2016 to 2025. These technologies are not all created equal in their business impact, and some are still not ready for prime time, but are maturing fast. As a result, it is critical to carefully time the adoption and implementation of digital technologies in accordance with the age in which they will deliver maximum ROI and competitive advantage.
First and foremost, digital leaders understand the reality and degree of impact that digital technologies are having on their customers, and their ability to compete. They recognize the pace of change and are aligning their strategies and budgets in ways that will provide them with competitive advantage now and in the future.
Watch my latest video on digital technology trends:
***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.
Presidents are powerful people facing and dealing with complex nation, market and economy sized problems. Making good decisions and managing these deeply complex systems and organizations requires massive amounts of data, analysis, experience and understanding. They must process and analyze millions of data inputs, and have a clear understanding of what the data in aggregate means, and then have an understanding of how they can influence the outcomes by pulling the right levers of power and influence to achieve their goals.
The responsibility of dealing with these massive levels of complexity seems almost inhumane. In fact, so inhumane, perhaps it would be better to not have a human, but a bot as President. Bots are designed and programmed to react in a prescribed way to data inputs. Data is fed into the artificial intelligence (AI) system within the bot, and the bot responds and takes actions as programmed. Add machine and deep learning, and the bot can learn and make decisions faster and better every nanosecond. The more data that it can access and analyze, the more accurately it can predict how pulling the levers of power and influence can change outcomes to achieve a given goal.
With a bot, the voters would vote on their preferred outcome and goals, and the associated algorithm, rather than on a personality, promise or televised debate result. If you want more jobs, a better economy, more security and peace, then vote on the particular algorithm that would give you the predictable outcome of your choice. The algorithm in the bot would take the millions of data inputs and use them to pull the levers of power and influence that deliver you, the voters’, mandate.
A bot’s administration and cabinet would be a celebration of nerds and data scientists (perhaps redundant) - responsible for finding all the possible data inputs needed to be analyzed to make the best decisions, improving deep learning systems to find patterns and hidden meaning, and identifying the appropriate levers of power and influence that could be integrated with the bot to deliver the voters’ mandate.
With a bot in office, public debates could focus on what our dreams and aspirations are for our society. Many of which are widely shared. A prosperous world that honors and supports our elders, invests in the best education, health, safety, peace, respect and renewable energies for all of us. Who doesn’t want that? We could dedicate our time to debating how best to collect the right data, improve the accuracy of data, ensure the right data is being analyzed, understanding what the data means, and then accurately identifying emerging levers of power and influence.
With a bot as President, Sunday morning news programs could spend their time debating algorithms and comparing the outcomes based on game theory and actual data results on sexy business analytic dashboards.
If you are up for a data-driven decision-making world, then Bots for President 2020!
Watch my latest 3-minute video on digital technology trends:
***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 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.
***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.
