Google Waters its Innovation Garden with a Gmail Upgrade as Digital Dances

So this week Google has been revealing the redesign of Gmail just as it is about to launch it. The new features are designed to make the user experience more productive and Gmail more attractive, as its current minimalistic interface can be a little infuriating when it is difficult to perform some of the tasks that, say, Outlook lets you do. Gradually though, it appears that Google Apps are moving to the point where Google is more of a heavy weight contender able to compete with Microsoft in established enterprises where Microsoft has a strangle hold.

This is important, because the move to cloud is an inflection point at which there is a genuine opportunity to present Google as a real alternative to Microsoft and also because Amazon does not yet offer much in the way of personal productivity alternatives. Google already has an advantage with small and start up businesses which wish to avoid the overhead of Microsofts fees. Additionally, most consumers (outside of China) use Gmail and are familiar with Google's other personal productivity offerings. This is Google's new unfair advantage, the hearts and minds of all school and university leavers, including the new techies. Coupled with the way that Chrome book has outmanouvered Apple and Wintel based offerings in schools, this means that Microsft risks being made irrelevant, since it has repeatedly lost in the War for domination of smartphone and pad devices.

So what does this mean to the big 3 in cloud:

• Microsoft continues to surround big accounts with Azure and Office, whilst it builds its AI and Big Data capabilities, but appears to have lost consumers (its original strength) and the hand held market, whilst PCs become increasingly niche;
• Amazon still dominates in platform services and has a well established service for helping innovators launch in digital market places and still has the best IoT platform and well established AI/Big Data capabilities, whilst its consumer credentials come from shopping and Alexa and Amazon;
• Google has taken new consumers and techies hearts and minds with its personal productivity apps, maps and its own reasonably successful persoan assistant. Google has also managed to take a dominant position in the consumer device market with ChromOS and Android. Whilst for enterprises it tries to be more price efficient abd flexible than the other 2, is playing fast catch up on platform capabilities and aslo has good Big Data and AI capabilities. Google also makes a great play of its custom chip technology as well as broadcasting its credentials as an innovation garden.

All 3 can talk a good game around security, global and local presence, and distributed databases. Whilst Apple is looking very niche, its cloud storage and music business is still strong and it is revamping its personal assistant to ensure that it competes with Amazon in the home automation market.

 

Oracle and IBM continue to try and surround their existing corporate customer bases with specialised offerings, whilst Oracle is also trying to provide agnostic join all your environments together services, essential for hybrid infrastructure.

 

Meanwhile GDPR has taken its first blood as WhatsApp has decided to raise the minimum age for subscribers from 13 to 16, to ensure compliance. This has established a precedent, going beyond parental permission or controls, so it will be interesting to see how other platform services will respond.  It certainly means that regulation is starting to become a governor to libertine innovation, as Uber has found out in several jurisdictions.

On another tack, Bill Haris posted a swinging blog on Bitcoin calling it a "pump and dump scheme". Whilst I don't agree with every aspect of his commentary and analysis, as Bitcoin is now really being used for something it was not designed to do and his comment on value applies equally to money as to any cryptocurrency (money does not have any intrinsic value, we just chose to give it some) he does cite some interesting facts:

• E&Y estimates 10% of ICO money has been stollen, 
• Insecurity of crypto coin exchanges,
• Cost and Energy demands of "mining" coins,
• High Failure rates of new cryptocurrencies (almost half of cryptocurrencies launches in 2017 failed),
• the high level of criminality and non tax compliance associated with cryptocurrency trading,
• Scalability issues.

So the Digital Worl continues to follow the two steps forward, one sideways and one backwards dance of progress. 

Is AI a threat to the Rockstar Developer?

This week IoT TECHEXPO was the main event at Olympia in London, combined with BLOCKCHAIN EXPO and AI EXPO. This was an impressively large event, though still not quite at the critical mass of some of the Security Exhibitions held recently at the same location. Though it shows that converged application of the 3 different technologies is gaining traction.

It was impressive how many vendors were launching new services based on blockchain. An aweful lot of them were based around assuring identity and provenance of assets, people and devices. So there were universal "passport" service, property dealing services, fine art trading, new travel disintermediation services and so on. In addition to several crypto currencies that I had not heard of before, there were a lot of wallet and token services.

In fact at one point I got the impression that the suppliers there were providing the means for circumventing national authorities with their own private currencies and virtual passports. For if you imagine a consortium of multinational businesses using tokens to trade with some end of year settlement in real money, this could totally confuse any picture of their tax obligations based on monetary trading transactions.

Putting this aside, the most interesting talk was probably the one on using AI for programming by Kiki de Bruijn of Diffblue which was heavily oversubscribed. She described the challenges of trying to generate code without human input and advocated the use of AI and Machine Learning based tools as productivity and quality aids instead, as it is difficult to replace the creative aspect of development as well as deal with all the potential complexities of developing well integrated code to meet all eventualities,

Lessons on Innovation

Apparently Singapore has been ranked the 6th most innovative county in the world. Recently 8 innovation leaders in Singapore were asked to share their thoughts and secrets on what works.

One of the strong themes which came out was how much the culture, perceptions and mindset of business leaders affects the ability of a business to innovate.

They used a number of approaches to over come this, e.g. by trying to adopt a learning culture, by evisioning the "bank of the future" or focusing on key objectives and KPIs the business wants to achieve and working out strategies to "move the dial". One company tries to find a unifying principle by exploring key leaders aspirations, fears and "journey" to find something that they all agree to be the guiding principle for their strategy.

The other key theme which came across was how much they relied on experimentation, prototyping and piloting to help align people and test hypotheses, proving what works and learning from failures.

This is a great vindication of the approach set out in the Way of DAU or Digital as Usual,

Update on the World of Agile

CollabNet has just published its 12 Annual Report on "The State of Agile". This makes interesting reading, although some filtering may be necessary as responses are dominated by North American participants in its survey. So for example SAFe tends to the prevalent approach taken to scaling Agile, which is more popular in the US than Europe.

To me, the most interesting bits are the high percentages of survey respondents reporting significant Business Value Oriented Benefits. Over 60% of respondents claimed:

• Better responsiveness to Changing Priorities;
• Improved Project Visibility;
• Enhanced Business/IT Alignment;
• Increased Speed to Delivery;
• Higher Productivity;
• Raised Team Morale.

The percentages far exceed the reasons for pursuing Agile. The other interesting metric is that only a fifth of respondents reported lower costs, which is in line with Agile philosophy, but still good to see confirmed.

The other key takeaway is that an increasingly high number of businesses have adopted both agile and DevOps as their mainstream approach.

The Business of IT

I have re-released a book I wrote several years ago, on amazon "The Business of IT". It's a simple primer for the first time IT executive. Its premise is that you need to treat IT as a business within a business and manage for value. It covers most of the main concepts that a new time leader needs to be aware of and points out to many areas of established industry practice.

Moscow Goes IoT whilst Businesses Struggle with Digital Culture

The City of Moscow recently announced that it had started to manage the operations of its whole fleet of 22,000 vehicles using a mixture of IoT and Machine Learning to optimise deployments for both effect and efficiency. This covers everthing from refuse trucks to snow plows. Efficincy savings of something live 9M roubles per month are now being claimed or roughtly £150,000. At the same time it meant that Moscos coped admirably with the recent extreme snow conditions, keeping the city moving with knock on gains to the lives and economic benefits of the local community. This is a good case study for Smart Cities.

At the same time, the digital work is throwing up whole new social and quasi religous groups such as the Kult of Kek and Witchblr. These groups have their own approaches to changing a frustrating world, but represent powerful pressure groups whose influence on things like social choice and consumer behaviour is leveraged well beyond their actual membership. They are however, non conformist and totally confusing to the pre-millenial generation, fusing a whole set of religious, game and folk themes with strong political messages and a dash of geek humour.

Little wonder then that a recent survey (by Virtusa and Forrester) show that 85% of businesses have digital plans, but many don't really know what to do next. They have not really grasped the principles or developped the capabilities to pursue their agenda. So they are not yet prepared for the fact that Digital makes access and on boarding of customers easier, but businesses can no longer rely on 75% of business being from repeat customers, unless as I pointed out in The Way of DAU they adapt to relentless renewal and re-invention and manage their ethical stance to keep their brand shiny and clean.

Time to Get Ethical About Human Computer Interfaces - Mind Reading

MIT is experimenting with a device which can read the words which you sub vocalise. The device is fixed to the user's face and uses electrodes to read electronic signals associated with "speaking inside your head" and AI to interpret them.

So far so good, this might have a number of practical applications and in an office environment would be better than speaking out loud to an intelligent agent such as Alexa, which would be intrusive and potentially annoying to other office occupants.

It also might have useful applications for communicating with people with speech disabilities. It might for example have sped up Steven Hawkin's communications via speech chips. The potential may exist for communicating with people with Locked in Syndrome etc.

However there is the potential for use in police interrogation and the technical ability over ride "the right to silence" or "not to self incriminate oneself", which exists constitutionally in certain judicial domains. This potentially provides a quite dangerous tool to state authorities in certain draconian regimes. Although, it could be considered more humane than water boarding.

As ever, with technological progress comes ethical questions about control of acceptable use of potentially beneficial innovations. So who is going to do this for the Direct Human AI interface?

Will We Ever Get Smart Data?

Recently IDC released its analysis on trends with Smart City investment. Apparently global investment in Smart City Infrastructure and Services is growing at an annual rate in excess of 25% per year and 2018 expenditure is expected to top $80Bn.

IDC's analysis suggests that one of the leading areas of spend is on surveillance technology in China, with authorities emphasising their ability to use facial recognition to rapidly recognise and locate wanted criminals.

This news comes fast on the heels of china's recent cyber security legislation which as introduced last June. The text of China's Cyber Security Law has not been made available in English, but basically it prohibits the storage of sensitive personal data on Chinese citizens outside China. China also requires all websites operating within China to be licensed (with a Bei'An licence).

This effectively provides the authorities with strong control over what happens with data and web sites within China as access to external websites is filtered and controlled via "The Great Firewall of China", which also acts as a choke point on performance.

In Europe, GDPR is about to go live in about a month's time with its own increased controls over the management of personal data. It is probably safe to say that a lot of large corporate organisations will be struggling to be fully in control of compliance. Any company which is still recovering from legacy problems caused by cost cutting following the 2008 recession, or which has grown rapidly via Merger and Acquisition activity or has lost control of "Shadow IT" as a result of DIY acquisition of SaaS services, is likely to be struggling to get to grips with where all its personal data is, let alone to assess whether it complies with the requirements for (a) data subject consent, (b) only holding the amount of personal data that is necessary, (c) ensuring that the data is properly protected and (d) being able to deliver the right to be forgotten.

This is probably the time where we need to look for Machine Learning based approaches to help identify personal data, where it is, who accesses it and whether it meets the test of not  exceeding the minimum amount legally required to fulfil the tasks for which it is collected stored and managed. It would also help in identifying all the data associated with an individual, requesting the right to be forgotten. However, if we ever are going to trully have control, then its probably time that the concept of smart data (i.e. self managing according to policy rules) technology was introduced, so that data understands its own importance, sensitivity, context and environments and can self certify compliance (or not) when policy rules are subject to change.