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.
It took Magellan’s crew three years sailing ships to circumnavigate the earth. Today, at hypersonic speeds of 7,680 MPH, it takes just over three hours to circumnavigate the earth. Data on the Internet, however, travels at 670 million MPH, which means it only takes milliseconds to circumnavigate the earth. In this age of digital businesses and digital interactions, companies must digitally transform to work effectively in a world where mass information moves at these unimaginable speeds.
It's not just IT systems that are impacted by the volume and speed of information. The creators of business processes that were designed and developed in an analog area, simply never envisioned a business environment that would require these operational tempos. Analog business processes were designed to have humans involved. These dependencies were designed to slow down the process to ensure accuracy, compliance and accountability. Today, however, operating at the slow speeds of an analog, human dependent business process, will doom your company. Analog business processes must be quickly automated via robotic process automation using artificial intelligence and machine learning to effectively interact with impatient digital customers and B2B partners.
Fingerspitzengefühl: A German word used to describe the 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 fingerspitzengefühl traditionally, in addition to pronouncing it, has been it is hard for an individual to scale up. Today that is changing. In a world of sensors, AI 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, but what to do with the massive volume of data that can be provided.
W. Edward Deming taught that quality is achieved by measuring as much as possible and reducing variations, and reducing variation is achieved by improving the system, not just pieces. Japan widely adopted Deming's philosophies in the 1950s and became the 2nd biggest economy in the world. Quality improvement didn't decrease jobs in Japan, it increased jobs.
AI now has the ability to expand and codify Deming's philosophies - to take them to the next level. AI can improve and standardize decision making based on logic, rather than the fear of missing objectives, bonuses or losing one's job. It can continuously monitor for quality against specifications by analyzing streams of real-time data coming from embedded sensors connected to the IIoT, IoT and IoA (internet of agriculture). This means companies that are aggressive early adopters of these digital technologies will have more knowledge, higher quality and significant competitive advantages, which means more demand for their products, sales, customer service, manufacturing, distribution, etc. It also means aggressive adopters will likely generate more jobs.
Most of us understand that artificial intelligence (AI) offers opportunities for productivity improvements in the form of speed, automation, standardized actions and responses, plus the opportunity for continuous improvements via machine learning. These opportunities are enabled by data inputs that are analyzed and processed through AI algorithms that execute a desired decision and action. For all of the great capabilities and benefits that AI can provide, there is also a potential dark side. AI solutions can easily codify our prejudices, bias, gender stereotypes and promote injustices intentionally or unintentionally. This threat, as real and serious as it is, can also be seen as an opportunity to evaluate who we are, what we want the future to look like, and then codify a better tomorrow.
These days it's not hard to identify the challenges organizations are facing during today's rapid business and digital transformation. What's more difficult is knowing how to succeed. The following recommendations are the result of our analysis after interviewing 37 executives and over 80 high tech professionals involved in digital technologies.
Develop and monitor your own digital mindset and that of your organization's: Understand the need to continuously upgrade and update your own thinking, as well as your organization’s. Accept that digital technologies and a connected world are here to stay, and that the path to business success resides in them. Understand digital technologies and their capabilities, and rethink every aspect of your business, and business strategy, with a digital mindset.
Recognize the role culture plays in being successful in three key areas: your leadership, institutional and customer culture. Purposely develop a digital culture that accepts and embraces the rapid pace of change that comes with the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
What makes an Industrial Internet of Things platform different from any other IoT platform? How is real-time data treated differently from data that can be archived and analyzed later? What role does AI play in IIoT? All these questions and more are covered in this interview with OSIsoft's Sam Lakkundi. Enjoy!
Read more articles and watch more interviews at C4DIGI.com.
***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.
We humans have a finite speed at which we think, analyze and make decisions that is largely determined by biology, chemistry and physics. These limitations were not a problem when business was conducted largely by face-to-face interactions with other humans. Today, however, in the digital age, businesses must operate in “digital” and ultimately in “future” time. Here’s a closer look at these different time continuums:
Human time: Time governed by our biological and mental limitations as humans. We can only focus on a small set of data before our minds 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 when making fast decisions is required, many of us don’t perform at our peak. In addition, weak humans that we are, we need sleep. We are not always available; we require daily downtime in order to function.
Throughout history military leaders have suffered through the "fog of war," where they desperately sought answers to six key questions:
• Where are my enemies?
• Where are my friends?
• Where are my forces?
• Where are my materials and supplies?
• What capabilities are available now and at what location?
• What are the environmental conditions?
These “unknowns” impacted the strategies and tactics military leaders employed. Their time and energy as leaders were heavily focused on defending themselves against these unknowns.
The concept of speed as an advantage is not new. Over the course of 700 years, the Romans built and maintained a system of roads extending over 55,000 miles to enable speedy communications and the quick movement of troops across the vast expanse of the empire.
What’s different today is that digital technologies have warped our perception of time. As an example, a person might say they live five minutes from town, but that can have widely different meanings based on whether they were referring to walking or driving a car. Digital technologies compress our perception of time and space while expanding our expectations of what can be accomplished in a given time. We expect to complete the equivalent of one hour of shopping in a supermarket in one minute online. These changes significantly impact the way businesses must operate in a digital era to compete and remain relevant.
The human work of solving problems, facing challenges and
overcoming obstacles tends to share a common goal: creating stable, secure and
predictable environments. The tendency for most humans is that once we solve a
challenge, we want to be done with it. That propensity, however, does not
fit with today’s reality of perpetual change.
In the digital business world, organizations have no choice
but to operate in an unclear, uncertain and continuously shifting environment
that requires a new mindset and approach to formulating business
strategies. Digital winners recognize that change is part of the
game, and that they need to develop ways to exploit
continuous ambiguity. In fact, in our surveys of
high-tech professionals, when we asked how long they thought digital
transformation initiatives would last, about one-third of the surveyed technology
professionals answered “forever” – and as we all know, forever is a long, long
time.
Professor Paul Virilio, a philosopher of speed, urbanist and cultural theorist, wrote at length about the impact of speed on society. He wrote that speed compresses both time and distance. Where once it took a letter 6 months to get to the other side of the world, an email can now arrive in seconds. Today's near real-time communications has changed how nations are governed, markets operate and commerce is conducted. The distance and time involved in communications has been compressed into seconds.
Commanders of Roman armies could once estimate the day and time of battle based upon their soldiers ability to march 20 miles per day on purpose built stone roads. Today, however, a ballistic missile can be launched and reach the other side of the earth in minutes. As a result, nations and their military commanders must now prepare to make critical decisions in mere seconds rather than taking days, weeks or months to deliberate. That's a big deal. In the past, an army could retreat and give up distance for time. In the example of the roman army, an opponent could retreat and separate themselves by 100 miles to give them the security of 5 days of time. Today 100 miles means only a matter of seconds. The distance and time of military conflicts today has been compressed to milliseconds.
Any significant business process that can be documented and best practices identified - will be. Any defined process that can be standardized - will be. Standardized processes that can be codified and automated (through robotic software automation), will be - if the volume justifies it. If the process is repeatable across many companies it will be offered as a shared service on a platform in a cloud.
If you agree with these technology maxims, then you are likely to agree that most existing business processes offer little competitive advantages in the long run, and the advantages of new innovations are fleeting so must be captured early. They will eventually become part of a shared services platform followed and used by your competitors. For example, 20 and 40 foot shipping containers offered a competitive advantage for shipping companies and ports that were early adopters, but only for a very short period of time. After a quick few years the entire world standardized on them and the competitive advantage disappeared.
How can an organization with decades worth of accumulated ERP customizations and configurations, IT systems and customized software applications digitally transform fast enough to keep up with the rapidly changing behaviors of digital customers? That is a hard question most organizations are wrestling with today. Often complex custom IT environments served a purpose in a past era, but today where IT speed and agility are required, they serve as anchors restraining an organization from moving forward and digitally transforming fast enough to compete.
Like a CEO that closes down or sells a profitable business unit because it no longer fits with where the organization is going, CTOs and CIOs must rapidly shut down or replace IT systems and processes that no longer support the reality of today, or the vision of the future based on the best information available today - not yesterday. Keeping an outdated IT system or business process for the purpose of achieving a positive return on the original investment is a strategy based on pride, not logic.
I had the honor of interviewing and disrupting the vacation of Hitachi's CTO for Industrial IoT, Rob Tiffany today. In this interview we talk all about IoT platforms, big data analytics, architectures, digital twins and solution stacks for industrial IoT. I learned a lot and hope you will too.
***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.
I have had the opportunity to work for and around a good many start-ups during the course of my career. Often the start-up founders would simply define a problem, develop a solution and launch a company. The marketing department would then do their very best to identify the individuals in each target company that experienced the problem and had a budget to fix it. This was always a challenging task, but it is even harder today.
Today, start-ups must not only identify a problem that needs solved, but they must compete against "digital transformation" initiatives in both the business and IT organizations that are trying to reduce complexity through the elimination of applications, customized software solutions, IT systems, multiple instances of ERPs and vendors.
The goal of many organizations today is to simplify the IT environment, and to make business processes much faster and agile. I see many companies seeking to standardize on a handful of platforms like Salesforce.com, SAP, Adobe, Ariba, SuccessFactor, etc. Too many systems in an IT inventory, means too much complexity and the increased risk that data will be compromised, and that systems will be too expensive to maintain, secure and upgrade. In this age of fast changing digital consumer behaviors, flexibility and simplicity equal organizational speed to keep up with their markets.
What is the answer for start-ups? Start-up solutions must appeal to the digital transformation goals of their target customers. It means their solution must be cloud based and automatically upgraded to stay aligned with customer's core platforms and systems. It means offering artificial intelligence enabled robotic process automation, chatbots and machine learning that can improve predictability, simplify complexity and eliminate troublesome areas of service and performance. It must not result in any additional layers of complexity, rather new solutions need to solve big problems, while at the same time reducing complexity, and increasing agility and the operational tempo of the business.
***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.
I have read several articles recently about projects designed to
teach digital systems to think more like humans.For example one article was about teaching
chatbot systems to communicate empathy to humans.It seems ironic that we are developing
digital systems to think more like humans, while at the same time much of my
work is focused on teaching humans how to think more like and about digital
systems and their capabilities.Let me
explain.
Competitive battles in most industries today are increasingly centered
on digital technologies and digital strategies, and as a result, it benefits
leaders to have a deep understanding of how digital systems work, and how the
impact of new digital innovations will change the behaviors of customers,
competitors and partners.
A few of the areas that I think leaders should really understand
are:
Simple
programming concepts and computer logic
Small World, social
networks and swarming theories
Industry and technology
data exchange standards
Platforms, Cloud
computing, Containers and System thinking
Internet and
network architecture and design
Big Data and
real-time analytics
GPS, GIS and
Mapping
Mobile and
wireless technologies
Sensors, embedded
wireless devices and IoT
Data and device security
and authentication
Databases and
data lifecycle management
Online catalogs,
shopping carts and digital payments
Digital
marketing, personalization and contextual relevance
Digital content
and delivery: websites, blogs, videos, podcasts, social media (e.g. Twitter,
Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.)
Robotics,
automation, AI and machine learning
Virtual and
augmented reality
There are many more items that
could be added to this short list, but I hope you get the idea.If we can agree that digital technologies are
fundamental to our future success, then we must understand them, or at least
their capabilities.
***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.
The winning trinity in competitive decision-making includes
people, ideas and things according to the renowned military strategist John
Boyd. Although competitive decision-making is not yet an Olympic sport, it affects
us all.Leaders (people) must become
trained experts at using digital technologies to make fast decisions.Leaders must use the right strategies and
methodologies (ideas) to make wise decisions fast, and they must collect the
needed data and analyze it fast enough using the best solutions (things).If any component of this trinity is weak, it
will be hard to compete.
In a recent survey of high tech VP level and above
executives that I conducted, few companies have a formal training program in
place to help develop their leaders to be skilled at digital transformation and
competitive decision-making.Most
enterprises are just rolling the dice on the skill levels of their leadership.Given the emerging challenges that digital
transformation introduces to a complex business, I would strongly advise
companies to invest in formal digital leadership development.
Some of the key goals of digital transformation are to speed
up and improve interactions with digital customers, and to be able to react
faster to new information.As digital
technologies (things) provide more real-time data, and real-time data analysis,
new strategies (ideas) for making real-time decisions must be implemented by
leaders (people) or their proxies.In
the future, more and more proxies involved in real-time decision-making will be
in the form of robotic process automation systems using artificial intelligence
and machine learning.
Any business process where there is a documented best
practice for how best to respond to various data inputs can be automated.As data inputs become more real-time, human leadership
decision-making becomes the source of latency in the system.I predict that decision-making will increasingly
be a source of competition, and that decisions will soon be divided into those
where there is a defined best option already which allows for rapid automation,
and those that have ill-defined options and require humans' capacity for
creativity to solve.
***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.
The renowned military strategist John Boyd taught that
people and institutions collect favorite philosophies, strategies, theories and
ideologies over a period of time, and then try to align the future to fit
them.The problem with this is the future
is rarely like the past, and trying to fit new data into old paradigms often
forces us to perform irrational mental gymnastics, which leaves us farther from
the truth.
Our resistance to change and unwillingness to question our
beliefs in the face of mounting evidence, leads us to analytical and execution
failure. A more productive habit would be to continuously review our mental
constructs to find out how to modify our interpretations to align with new
evidence.This action, however, goes
against our human nature that seeks stability and resists change.We see the consequences of these challenges
weekly as we read about companies (especially retail) failing as a result of
their resistance. In the future, developments in artificial intelligence and machine
learning will have the potential to help us overcome many of our own mental
weaknesses that cause us problems in our pursuit of truth.
In the digital era, our ability to change our thinking
becomes even more critical as it must happen at a faster rate.I remember when updates to an enterprise’s
mobile apps required all users to bring their mobile devices into the office to
get them loaded and tested.This was a
slow, tedious and expensive process.Today, as we all know, this can be done worldwide instantly and for very
little money through cloud based app stores.Digital transformation equals speed and accelerated change.
In a world of integrated digital platforms and systems, new digital innovations can impact markets instantly and competitors must be able to react.
The bottom line - one of the biggest factors determining the
digital transformation winners of tomorrow will be the brains of leaders –
their mental constructs.Can executives
and boards look at new evidence and innovations without biases, resistance to
change and prejudices, and grasp how economies, industries, markets and
competition will be impacted?Can they
learn about new digital innovations, understand the breadth of the impact, and
develop new business strategies based on the new realities? Can they overcome
themselves?
It is quite the irony that digital winners will be not
simply those with the best digital technologies, but those that can best
overcome their own human brains.
****
I invite you to watch my latest video on digital technology trends.
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict, connect with me on LinkedIn or read more of my articles on digital transformation strategies here:
***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.
