Smart Gardens Take the Cool Award

Last week was an interesting week in many ways. Intel and Juniper announced that Singapore was leading the way in Smart City adoption, beating 19 other advanced adopters. One of the more interesting statistics was around how much time lost to congestion can be saved. Average figures suggested that over 80% of the time lost to congestion can be freed up by using Smart City technology to manage traffic flows better. Whilst this is interesting to motorists in the UK as town planned continue to persecute them with more and more "traffic calming" measures such as speed bumps, lights, constrictions in road width etc. it is also good news for those interested in urban health. Less congestion equals less emissions as well as a lower carbon footprint.

Moving on from this, India was identified as the leading Asian country for cashless money adoption, driven by widespread electronic purse adoption on phones in a country where many people don't have bank accounts.

Meanwhile in London, Cloud Expo returned to Excel with its partner exhibitions. This was definitely more interesting than last year (which had been a disappointment following the great show 2 years ago). It was noticeable that a wider set of companies are now offering global services with a first appearance (that I am aware of) from China telecom. there were more companies looking at clod orchestration and Oracle was making its pitch for differentiation from the mainstream service vendors such a Azure (Microsoft), AWS (Amazon) and GCS (Google) by featuring its cloud DNS services and Systems Management as a Service. The latter being apparently multi-platform for hetergeneous technologies and offering an automated and intelligent Machine Learning capability to features normally associated with companies such as Splunk.

The coolest show stealer however was on the diminutive stand for Gartenzwerg. Gartenzwerg offers an indoor automated gardening kit which uses smart technology to control lights, watering, temperature and pH. This apparently enables you to grow things all the year round and at 3 times the normal rate of growth. So you can have all the herbs, chillies etc. that you want. Anyway, in the stark and quite sterile ambience of a trade show, the luscious and colourful display was a verdant knock out.

Is HR Ready for the New Digital World?

One of the features of the future is that we are really bad at predicting it, So much so that we react late and often have problems catching up with the present. This translates into the essential behaviour of a Digital Enterprise of adaptivity. Since a Digital as Usual business needs to constantly innovate to stay ahead of the competition and innovation itself is fraught with missteps and corrections, resulting in the need for agility, design thinking and the need to know when to "pivot in the market".

At the same time Millennials apparently want to design work life around themselves, desiring to work flexibly, perhaps on several different jobs at once, whilst industry analysts who should know better are forecasting the end of jobs as AI robots automate everyone out of a job.

Anyone who has ever worked with a robot, knows that they need a lot of input to become effective and their flexibility is limited. AI bots are just as bad. They need a lot of teaching, can be fooled and have problems adapting quickly.

As I have argued in previous posts, AI and Machine learning fills a gap in process automation to help people become more productive and focus on higher quality work. so the nature of jobs may change, and some new types of jobs may be introduced, but in the end there will still be jobs.

So it was interesting to see this opinion confirmed by a recent survey by Willis Towers Watson which reinforced this opinion. What was most telling is the opinion that less than 5% of businesses believe that their HR functions are ready for this challenge. The have not anticipated the future and are having problems catching up with the present. At the same time, these businesses believe that they will be shifting more and more to contingent working with flexible contractors performing an increasingly important role in their work-forces. So perhaps the Millennial Dream will come to pass, but probably not in the way that we anticipate now.