Digital Sleep Tech Proliferates

We spend almost a third of our lives sleeping, yet we are still amazingly ignorant about sleep itself. We know though, that modern living has disrupted our whole approach to natural sleep and that electric lighting is so prevalent, that not only do we not align ourselves with the natural patterns of going to sleep soon after darkness falls and rising with first light, but that we live in a "light polluted" environment which increasingly makes it difficult to go to sleep.

As someone who used to travel a lot for business, I hated trying to sleep in hotels. Not only was I in an unfamiliar bed, but hotels are often quite noisy at might and modern hotel rooms are full of electronic gadgets with LED lights which glow in the dark. I used to lay towels over the crack at the bottom of the door and turn everything I could off at the wall or place room service menus in front of the offending lights. I also tried a sleep mask, to limited effect. so it was interesting to see recent research which suggests that one brain hemisphere usually stays active all night when someone sleeps in an unfamiliar place. This effect has been described as akin to having a neurological night watch.

More interestingly, scientists have also re-discovered the fact that people used to sleep naturally in segmented sleep patterns, usually of two stretches of about four hours each. Roger Ekirch published a book in 2001 documenting over 500 literary references to first and second phases of sleep at night. A pattern which appears to have begun to be disrupted in the late 18th century as growing affluence and changing technology gradually eliminated our natural sleep patterns.

People tend to worry about their appearance if they don't sleep well, as this causes unsightly dark rings and bags under the eyes. However there are more serious physiological effects. Recently, scientists have begun to link poor sleep to obesity, heart disease and diabetes, as well as a host of other side effects such as grumpiness and having a low sex drive. Also, numerous studies have shown that poor sleep can affect driving ability as much as alcohol consumption. Working night shift is also considered a factor that can cause factor according to the World Health Organisation and studies have shown that nurses who work extended periods of night shifts, tend to die prematurely.

So it is interesting to see what is happening in the Wearable Technology space to help people improve their sleep, as several interesting devices have come to market in the last year. These devices contrast with others such as muse from interaXon which is focused on relaxation and meditation and aim to improve sleep quality.

Insomni Light - This is perhaps the simplest device on the market. Basically, sleep scientists tend to talk about 4 different states characterised by brainwave activity. The Insomni-Light sleep mask uses LED lights to relax the user, which it claims will help take your brainwaves into the Delta state associated with deep restorative sleep. At present this is just about to go on sale.

Cereve Sleep System from ebb - This basically uses a head band  on the forehead to cool your head (and brain). A bedside unit supplies cool liquid to the head band and maintains it at the required temperature. Ebbs site claims that 80% of users find that this improves the quality of their sleep. The site also claims that this is FDA cleared for safety and effectiveness.

Dream - from Rythm -  this is a device that I personally use and have written about before. It is a headband which helps you get off to sleep by using several different strategies: playing soothing sounds, helping you time your breathing to encourage sleep, or meditation to break agitated thought patterns. It also monitors your sleep and, whilst you are in deep sleep, it plays you "pink noise" to improve the quality of deep sleep. It will also bring you gradually awake by playing gentle noise during light sleep around the time your alarm is about to go off. It is claimed to improve deep sleep quality by up to 30%. My experience is that it improves over time and that I average just over a 20% improvement per night, although his varies considerably from night to night; on my best night ever, I got an 80% improvement.

The information that it provides is useful feedback and I have learnt a lot about my sleep from it, as yes, I am sad enough to plot it out on graphs using a spreadsheet. It seems that typically I spend 20 to 40 minutes per night in Deep Sleep. Although on one memorable night I achieved 119 minutes of Deep Sleep. I also tend to spend about 80 to 120 minutes per night in REM Sleep (the state usually associated with dreaming). Over the period that I have used it (about 8 weeks) the amount of Deep Sleep that I get every night has increased by around 5 minutes which is a lot when compared with a typical 20 to 40 minute period. My REM sleep has also increased by about 15 minutes, which again is a significant percentage increase, .

The period that I actually spend asleep has not changed significantly, at not quite 15 minutes per night, compared with a typical night's sleep of 6 hours twenty minutes (or 380 minutes) or under 5%. So the material improvements have been in quality rather than quantity. As REM and Deep Sleep are both considered beneficial. This is witnessed by the fact that I feel less tired and have lost the deep circles under my eyes which were there previously.

NuCalm - ReNu headset - This is part of an overall system utilising suplements, electrodes, the headset and a sleep mask. The electrodes provide microcurrent stimulation in the form of beta and delta waves associated with REM and Deep Sleep, and the headset provides sounds (which ReNu calls neuroacoustics) to relax the mind, deal with stress and assist with sleep.

Although this is a very complete system, it is not designed like the others specifically for sleep, so may be a bit clunky for people trying to just improve their sleep. 

Thynk Relax Pro - This is a device which you attach tot he back of your neck. It uses electrical neck stimulation to help you relax and improve sleep.

Common to all of these devices, is the need to use them over a period of time to achieve noticable improvements. As these are all promising 1st generation products, I would expect that we shall see evolution and enhancement. There may be further crossover to integrate all approches: light, sound, cooling and electrical stimulation. There may be further features to work on sound cancellation, as none of the products considers the impact of ambient noise on sleep. Additionally, I would expect improvements in form factors to improve sleep comfort and avoid headsets falling off during the night. Furthermore, feedback and use of machine learning is bound to improve overall effectiveness and the tailoring of device performance to individual users. However, I think it is safe to say that a New Dawn on sleep improvement and self help has arrived.

N.B. all pictures were copied from the manufacturers publicly released pictures on various websites and the copy right does not belong to me. So please respect these rights if you intend copying and re-using for any commercial purpose.

Aligning Digital Exploitation with Operational Capability

All Enterprises Are Not the Same

One of the tenets of Digital As Usual (DAU) is that most businesses are not pure play digital organisations. In almost all cases there are operations and activities which are essential to either fulfilling service or delivering a product which need to be managed as well. The Digital Adoption Framework assumes an Industry Categorisation Model as illustrated below.

The Industry Categorisation Model identifies 5 Categories along a continuum of Industry Product Nature. At one end of the continuum are “pure play” digital organisations, whose products are Information and Content based. These consist of Market Platforms like eBay and Compare the Markets.com who provide a platform, through which other organisations and people sell their goods and services, as well as Publishers and Providers of Content who provide videos, e-books, podcasts, news, music etc. At the other end are Extractor and Grower type businesses, such as coal mines and cocoa growers who provide natural unprocessed products. Off course not all businesses fall neatly into just one category. A major energy company such as Shell or Exon may straddle several categories along an Upstream (exploration, drilling and extraction) to Downstream (transport, refining and distribution) activities.

So why is this important when thinking about digital businesses? Well each different type of business operates in different ways, has a different level of dependency on capital assets and has different opportunities for exploiting digital technology to augment its business model. Additionally, the whole concept of Lean Delivery via Design Thinking, Agile Delivery and DevOps may have different opportunities and constraints as well as nature of delivery in each category.

Some Examples of Exploitation

The diagram below looks at the potential for exploiting Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies according to Industry Category.

The “X”s in the table represent significant opportunity for exploitation against a generic type of Use Case. So for example AI technologies (machine learning, visual recognition, natural language etc.) can be used to provide insight and learning in every type of organisation, but there is very little opportunity for them to add to “customer experience” in say mining or farming. Again there is huge potential to build AI capabilities into consumer products, e.g. Alexa in Amazon’s Echo, but there is little opportunity to enhance a product such as iron ore or tree trunks produced from a Natural Product Extractor or a Grower. 

Alternatively for IoT, see diagram below, the opportunities are pretty limited for an Information publisher, but there are many areas where a farmer could use it to track livestock and monitor soil conditions and crop conditions, as well as control assets such as vehicles and trailer equipment.

This moves us onto exploiting iterative approaches within an organisation. The other night I was talking to someone from a major pharmaceutical company. Drugs take years of research to identify promising candidates for a problem and to test for efficacy and safety, as well as meet regulatory demands. There is little opportunity to exploit Iteration in this type of product development. But for the company overall, there are opportunities around internal processes and with Agile Marketing.

Agile Marketing is a growing area of adoption within industry and works well for consumer driven businesses. At its core is the use of small integrated product teams which focus on market research, product promotion, delivery of marketing and promotional materials, advertising and the information analysis systems used to support marketing data analysis. These teams tend to work in multiple sprints testing out marketing promotion hypotheses and rapidly identifying which approaches produce optimal results, to improve overall revenues. 

Iterative development also its quite different for delivering an oil tanker or a film, to the development used to support a consumer service. In the case of the former, iterative design, development and continuous testing techniques are used to deliver a single integrated complex product over a period spanning many months if not years. In the latter they are used not just to deliver the product, but to continuously keep it fresh, up to date and moving ahead of competition that is playing catch up.

So it's important not to adopt a one sized fits all approach, but to really get down to what can work for your organisation. This is part of what I talk about in my book.

The Trivia of IoT

You know that something has become too trendy when you key in the subject and some other random item and find that you get lots of returns. So yesterday, I tried it out with IoT.

So what do you get with IoT and Bathroom? Well a polemic on the bathroom of the future. Yes, we will have smart toilets which are not only eco friendly but diagnose medical conditions: Pregnancy, bacterial conditions, PSA levels, sugar levels etc. Smart showers are already here for the eco-friendly trendy set. They minimise wasted water, go straight to the temperature that you like and give feed back via LED lights on how much water you have consumed. Then there are smart toothbrushes which give you feedback on toothbrushing technique. Finally,  there is the smart mirror. This allows you to catch up on the news and weather forecast, whilst brushing your teeth. You could also monitor any of your smart household devices, such as your smart toaster, at the same time whilst also checking incoming messages. Sounds like hell doesn't it?

So I decided IoT and Underwear would then be a suitably trivial query. Well you get responses on the usual fitness app equipped wearables for monitoring pulse and other vitals whilst exercising. There's also smart yoga pants, which provide feedback to help you form the right posture when exercising. But there is also a quite exciting smart bra device, the iTbra, which can help monitor the wearer for signs of cancer. This has the potential to replace the expensive, stressful and quite uncomfortable process of having mamograms with something which monitors circadian temperature changes to detect abnormal patterns. Apparently this is based on a proven technique which has existed for decades, but was previously too cumbersome to use, due to the need for lots of cables going to instrumentation. IoT does away with the cables and allows for a potentially more accurate test which can be completed within a few hours of monitoring.

So, I then started thinking like a teenager and yes there is a smart tampon. The my.Flow  is there to help avoid the embarassement of blood staining the wearer's clothing, which would be a mortifying experience for anyone. As a man, I don't think that I should comment any further. But moving on to men, yes you can indulge in the smart condom, or i.Con. Actually its not a condom, but a ring you can slip over the top to monitor your performance statisitics during the act of copulation. Do we need it? is it useful? I'll leave it to you to decide.

So what do we learn from this trivia and is there a serious point. Well, its obvious that soon we will not be able to escape the World of Interconnected Smart Things (WIST). It has become pervasive across almost any field that you can think of (including farm fields of course). With it comes the danger of people who want to exploit it perniciously. So we need to start thinking about protecting ourselves and privacy and security in our homes and daily lives. However, this goes beyond the simple steps of securing your WiFi, protecting your passwords and identity, to seriously ensuring that your networked home and persona are well and truly protected in a systematic way and that you have separation of "concerns" and firewalls between your virtual world and the rest of the world.

2018 - The Year of The Cyborg

Whilst most pundits are focusing on AI, VR, AR and Machine Learning, it is clear that the Digital Frontier has moved on to Human Integrated Computing (HIC). Though not everyone uses the same terminology, so you may see Human Computer Interface, Brain Computer Integration and a number of similar terms to describe basically the same thing.

So this year has seen the IEEE's 6th International Conference on Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs) and the Hackaday Competition for the Greatest Human Computer Integration (with a prize of US$50,000). Clear themes from both events were the avoidance of direct implants and using any number of techniques to communicate between people and computer devices. 

A lot of these are based upon reading brain waves or nerve impulses and there is a strong theme of applications around things which help people recover from debilitating accidents or deal with disability.  However it is clear that recent advances in the ease of applying machine learning to solutions has been a clear game changer in interpreting brain waves and nerve impulse signals. The ability of machine learning to recognise how to filter out extraneous signals and focus on what matters to the application is key to this.

Additionally, in a wider social context there is a fringe trend towards people choosing to "self adapt" with home grown technology implants into their bodies. This trend, sometimes called Trans-humanism, involves implanting anything from magnets, through chips to specific devices into their bodies to provide a variety of single function applications. Although Lukas Zpira refers to it as "Body Hacktivism" and espouses a creed of "taking control of our destinies by continuously reinventing the self".

So what does this mean in terms of realisation in practical day-to-day life? Well there are a surprising number of products which are either ready for market or close to release, as well as any number of technical concept demonstrators. These include:

Prosthetic Limbs,

Exoskeleton Devices,

Turning Thought into Speech, see Nuros's Nuos software

Eyeball Tracking,

Remote Controlled Limbs, e.g. CTRL Labs Wrist Band,

Additional Limbs, e.g. a second pair of arms on a backpack - Keio University's Fusion 

Accessing Human Memory,

Improved Physiological Measurement of things such as Blood Pressure,

Detection of Emotions.

Though, to my mind one of the more interesting things is the research being conducted by 

researchers at Drexel and ISAE-SUPAERO into aircraft pilot'scognition during extreme incidents and how they deal with the sensory overload of multiple sound alarms, flashing indicators and situational awareness when an accident occurs during flight. Their research involves attempting to monitor how they deal with such incidents, using functional Near Infra Red Spectroscopy (fNIRS) to quantify brain activity response in the Anterior Prefrontal Cortex. So far they have demonstrated its feasibility and the fact that in real life, the overload is higher than in a simulator and pilots make more mistakes. In the future it should be possible to use this to assist in optimising instrumentation design, reduce cognitive overload and the likelihood of errors.

All this represents practicable and achievable goals in the evolution of the path towards the dreams of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg who are pursuing full embedding of computers into the brain with their Neuralink and Building 8 programmes. But as I mentioned in a previous posting there are immense issues around not just technical practicalities, but ethics, security, phsychology, dealing with potential information overload and long term upgrade capability to be addressed before these goals become safe, let alone desirable.

DevOps 2018 Report

Puppet has published its 2018 State of DevOps Report. This year they have examined the premises on adoption and confirmed that most successful adoptions follow a project by project approach, with a single project pioneering the way and gradual cross poliantion of practice whilst it is matured.

The project focuses on 2 aspects of adoption:

• CAMS - Culture - Automation - Mearsurement & Sharing

• a 6 layer maturity model from 0 to 5, which broadly follows a simplify and Standardise Approach, Followed by Process Practices, then Automation and finally Self Service capabilities.

One of the themes of the report is the gap between teams practicing DevOps and Senior Management. It still appears that DevOps adopters continue to struggle with cultural aspects associated with empowerment and reporting.

Anyway, for anyone interested in the Lean Aspects of Digital Business Models, this is essential reading.

Digital Era Customer Contact and Experience

In the 1980s, The theory of Customer Care was propogated widely at the same time that call centres started to evolve into contact centres. The subtle difference between a call centre and a contact centre being that a contact centre is supposed to deal with customers through all media of communication: letters, telephone calls, and direct contact in person if somone knocked on your door. With the '90s, email was added and then websites and latterly mobile apps have started to grow traction.

In parallel with this we have seen all sorts of mechanised and automated technologies arrise to help improve productivity and efficiency. IVR or Interactive Voice Response (which really is not that interactive), Power diallers to fuel direct telemarketing campaigns, backed up with scripting to ensure consistency of message were also introduced followed by features such as distributd call centres, off shoring, workflow based load balancing etc.

The touble with all these approaches has often been that they focus on work load balancing, limited levels of scalability and cost efficiency rather than personal experience. Offshoring also intorduced problems with culture and language, as well as greater possibilities of fraud and exposure of customer data to theft and exploitation, as "solid legal contracts" have proven to be paper tigers in protecting confidentiality. In fact in some countries, such as Singapore, which have reutations for innovation and fast moving companies, customer experience is terrible.

This just does not cut it in the modern digital age, when customer experience and reputation will make or break a company. We now have people pondering the future of the contact center and whether there will be any people in them to take calls with the advent of AI and chatbots as well as the use of IoT to collect customer behaviour information and change the model by which companies interact with customers.

The real issue is that many of these advances can be uselfull exploited in situations which suit "self serve" activities such as "how can I fix my thermostat or change my account settings". They don't particularly work well when there has been a service failure or a billing mix up. Assumptions that Generation Next Letter in the Alphabet will always want to contact you via a certain technical chanel are also wrong. Peoples contact method decisions are often affected by context. If they are not allowed to use mobiles at work for instance, or they are in an airport and have lost their mobile phone or iPad and urgently need help with a travel problem, then other contact options are needed.

The new technologies offer opportunities, but greater effort needs to be put into creatively exploiting them and designing a great customer experience. So it is interesting to see that a company like Creston is establsihing a global network of Customer Experience Centres to show exactly what it can do for people. It will also be interesting to see how Creston exploits this interaction chanel to improve its customer offerings as well.

Cyber Aggression versus Authenticity

In a week when EU officials expressed the fear that "British Agents may have bugged Brexit Planning Sessions", it is interesting to note that President Trump has decided to reverse a previous Obama administration framework for controlling the launch of cyber attacks by the US.

Sabine Weyand expressed the EU officials' fears following an incident in which Britain requested that slides from an briefing meeting should not be released to press. this has led to all mobile devices and ipads being banned from meetings, in case they are used to spy on them or leak secrets. Trump's move undoes measures designed to ensure co-ordinated and considered response by the US's intelligence community to perceived threat. The exact reasons for this have not been disclosed, but given the president's penchant for action, the political pressure that he has suffered following allegations that Russian organisations may have interfered with the presidential election and the fact that a considerable number of potential foes may be looking for ways to hit back at the US following sanctions placed on Turkey, Russia and Iran, it is not surprising that he might want to be able to react quickly without engaging multiple layers of decision making and delay.

At the same time in an almost polar opposite direction, key operators in the digital world are emphasising the need for "brand authenticity" in the way in which they market and sell their products to today's modern consumer. This is discussed in some detail in this quarters magazine from Nimbus Ninety, an organisation focused the London Digital Ecosystem. They also discuss some interesting thoughts from academia about how Socrates railed against the idea of writing things down and how this would damage young people's minds, in a strikingly similar way to which modern social media is being accused of damaging generation Z's cognitive attention spans. Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose.

UK Government Destroys UAVs' Value Proposition

The UK Government has just ammended the Air Navigation Order of 2016 to ban the use of small Unmanned Automated Vehicle (UAV) aircraft and Remote Piloted Vehicle (RPV) aircaft (sometimes referred to as "drones") near people, private buildings, airports and large public events. Additionally, there's a height restriction of 400 feet. It is also pproposing to introduce a registration and licensing scheme, backed up by "safety tests" for operators or in effect the intrduction of a driving licence.

Whilst one can understand the need to assure safety around airports and large public events, this appears to have totally destroyed any means of usefully using the technology for valid reasons.

Firstly, Amazon, there's no chance that "drone based delivery can now be introduced into the UK.

Then, the police and border security people should give up because it cannot be used for any kind of patrol and surveillance work which helicopters often use.

If you are in mountain rescue, give up, you cannot fly the aircraft over 400 feet. Even if you did and were searching for someone to rescue, you risk breaching the 50 metre proximity rule when finding the people you are looking to rescue.

Use in many applications of building and engineering surveying now risks being outlawed.

Hobbyists should give up. If the aircraft takes off or lands within 50 metres of you, its a breach and there is a risk that someone will wander into whatever remote field that you have found and create a breach of he law.

Kids who have been given small flying helicopters with remote controls, are not even allowed to fly them in their own gardens or within their bedrooms without causing a breach.

At the same time, there does not appear to be any concern about privacy in the arrangements or regulation of what is an acceptable or safe design.

Note, for heavier aircraft, the rules become more onerous...

So, this looks like a well intended piece of legislation has largely hashed the issue and broken the value proposition for everyone. this can only be due to the lack of public awareness and therefore participation in any consultation process before the regulations were formulated.

The Renaissance of the City State - Digitally of Course

This week is London Tech Week, a series of co-ordinated and themed events aimed at promoting London's place in the Digital World. So the week was kicked off with a talk by Sadiq Khan (Mayor of London) at the Francis Crick Institute (Crick was one of the pioneers in DNA research) where he spoke about London's "leading position in AI"; apparently London has 745 AI focused companies, which is more than twice the number in Paris and Berlin combined. He also spoke about his ambitions for London to become the world's leading smart city, which will obviously be a challenge given the competition from Bangalore, Singapore, China in general and quite a few American cities even before some unexpected contenders such as Moscow are taken into account.

Yesterday TechXLR8 kicked off as one of the major combined exhibition and conference events, combining a huge number of themes: IoT, VR/AR, Cloud, DevOps, a platform for small start ups (known as project Kairos) as well as pretty much smart everything or SmartX. TechXLT8's theme this year is "changemakers" across technology, business and society and the opening talks were quite focused on the national and smart city impacts coming.

So Greg Williams (Editor-in-Chief of Wired) mentioned that 13 of Europe's 47 or so Unicorns (digital companies worth more than $1Bn) are based in Britain. Gavin Patterson (the outgoing CEO of BT) emphasised how BT is preparing to invest in the next new wave of connectivity infrastructure such as FTTP, 5G and quantum key networks with pilots for 5G and quantum key networks having just been announced. This investment is aimed at keeping Britain as the "leading digitally enabled nation" in the world.

Juliet Bauer, Chief Digital Officer for NHS England, discussed the recently published Digital Roadmap for the NHS and how this should drive a revolution in the way in which citizens access and receive treatment from the NHS as well as a shift towards greater prevention of health problems before they become serious.

Paul Copping, Chief Innovation Officer for Greenwich, discussed some of the challenges for cities moving to a Smart City model and the architectural issues around defining what a "City Digital Platform" really looks like and some of the questions around the blurring of lines between local city  authority provided services and private digital service providers, especially with respect to access methods. He also discussed issues of future integration and interoperability between adjacent metropolitan areas and how to marry architecture with public procurement processes. Though what he did not mention was the need to deliver iteratively in small chunks and experiment to continuously fine tune solutions before investing too much or how to abstract changing technical standards within service wrappers to deal with obsolescence across the long time frames needed to implement anything at this scale.

Colin Rhys, VP Virgin Hyperloop for Middle East & Asia, spoke about how Hyperloop could make commuting distances such as London to Edinburgh on a daily basis quite feasible, extending the footprint of cities outwards. His tag line "live in the forest, work in the city" offers the prospect that digital enablement plus fast transport means that the "virtual city" of the future will spread far beyond the natural physical boundaries of a cities geography and extend almost like a virtual state into the rest of the country or continent in which it is located. This has implications far beyond the traditional turf wars between metropolitan and rural councils over "who owns whom" for the purpose of local taxation and implies that all these councils need to collaborate more effectively for collective good. This means that we need to rethink socially our ideas about cities and rural communities and address a whole host of issues around community identity, legal frameworks, representation, pooing of investment and resources, as well as how to deliver the grand scheme that a Smart City is base upon.

The Chief Data Officer

Many organisations are experimenting with the concept of a Chief Data Officer. Although according to Raconteur most are struggling with the concept as well as making headway with the concept of managing data for value.

It seems that there are a number of problems:

• Business Understanding of the Role and Data Issues;
• Resourcing, Funding and Provisioning Data Initiatives;
• Current Starting Points for many Businesses with Poor Data Quality;
• Focusing too much on compliance and not enough on Value.

Personally, I would suggest that there is a value staircase for Data Management starting with Compliance and Protection on the Bottom Rung and then progressing through Quality, Integration, Sourcing (external data feeds), Insight & Intelligence to Adaptive Control (involving use of machine learning, experimentation and up to the minute data feeds to optimise control).

It is difficult howver to obtain value if a business tries to progressively work its way upwards through this staircase if it attempts to do everything in the first one before attempting the next step. The scope is too wide. Instead busnesses need to prioritise a business problem or opportunity and address a vertical slice down this value staircase to deliver value quickly. Progression can be achieved by addressing the next opportunities and reviewing what is needed in each step to improve overall capability as each increment is implemented.

However, probably the biggest issue is the role. What is the difference between a CIO, a Chief Digital Officer, a CTO, a CSO, a Principal Data Archiect and a Chief Data Officer? These all overlap and are often confused in scope. Many businesses are handing the Chief Digital Officer role back to the CIO, so it may be time to do the same with the Chief Digital Officer, because if they are separated the CIO's role is hollowed out to just look at the plumbing and not the value to the business.

It is also important to delegate data quality and integrity to business managers responsible for exploiting data in their day-to-day operations. IT may provide the policy framework, tools and measurement framework for managing data quality, but line management needs to take responsibility and include data quality in their personal objectives, just like they do with budgets. Otherwise value will never be achieved.

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.

Asia's Digital Dragons

Asia's Digital Appetite

According to experts in McKinsey, Asia is grabbing the opportunities available from digital to try and leapfrog traditional economic leaders in the west and compensate for historic lack of investment in infrastructure. They single out India, Indonesia and China as the countries with the most energetic approaches and the most innovation. They cite greater appetite for social media take up and openess to mobile and other new technologies as drivers to greater innovation.

This position is supported by Gartner's identification of Asia's 10 leading digital disruptors:

• Tencent
• AliBaba
• Baidu
• Ant Financial
• JD.com
• DiDi
• Xiaomi
• Yahoo Japan
• Naver
• Lufax

The interesting fact about this list is that it is dominated by Consumer oriented businesses. B2B opportunities are yet to be exploited. Even so, the power house that is AliBaba is reputed to dwarf western giants such as Amazon. So Asia is currently playing to its numbers and culture to establish scale.

Garnter recommends that western enterprises operating in Asia should consider adopting local platforms to guarantee penetration and better customer experience in Asian Markets.

Future Digital Directions in Asia

A recent survey of global CIOs by Logicalis showed that CIOs in the Asia Pacific area have been disappointed by slow progress overall in adopting digital business models. Like CIOs in other parts of the world they have seen typical barriers such as Organisational Culture, Scale of Investment, Legacy Infrastructure, Skills and Security holding them back.

However, overall they are typically planning to address them with moves to simplify and modernise infrastructure, work closely with other business colleagues to address specific opportunities, improve training, invest in culture change and generally increase security investments.

In doing so, they are preparing to lead change and more B2B services are likely to emerge, balancing Asia's digital economy.

Digital Engagement Surveys

At this time of year, Nimbus 90 performs a survey into technology trends and issues concerned with adoption. This is based on the opinions of 100s of senior IT professionals working in the UK and is part of their symbiotic business model, research funded by suppliers and supplemented by knowledge sharing networking events.

I have just been looking at last years survey report which was interesting in how positive it was. There was a strong focus on re-inventing business models, with a high emphasis on customer experience and expectations.

The thing which really struck me was how few organisations saw a digital model as a cost cutting exercise. Although the number looking to improve operational efficiency slightly out stripped those looking to launch new products.

Key benefits anticipated included innovation, agility, customer engagement and better decision making. Though, quite sanguinely, expectations around customer loyalty were quite muted. Perhaps this was early recognition of the greater volatility of customer loyalty within the digital world when compared with traditional ways of doing business.

The one thing which did not come out was much use of AI or Machine learning. This has been a bit of a theme this year. So it will be interesting to see what comes out.

Also, sponsorship of Digital Programmes appears to be all over the place at the moment with CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, CMOs and CDOs all in on the act. Although surprisingly few COOs appear to be involved. Some of this is obviously diue to different corporate structures and sizes. but again it would be interesting to see what happens.

A Day In the Life of a Product Manager

Getting up super early, Marjory K'Ting rushed her breakfast of extra strong coffee and a bagel so that she could catch the red-eye commuter train to Doontung where they were holding today's consumer workshops for the Zeting shopper app, MyWay. 

On the way she read through the latest KPI scores for the current version app. It was showing good overall trends, though she noticed that one of the target segments, for young professionals was not responding as expected to the app. What was going on here then?

On arrival she headed straight to the KafMeUp coffeeshop whose owners had agreed to let them run their workshop in am area set to one side.  There she found Zak, her super keen intern assistant lounging around outside just as KafMeUp's proprieter Ivan Blunt arrived to open up.

Inside they started to set up at their reserved area with signs inviting passersby to drop in and participate in exchange for a free breakast, paid for by Zeting. As they were doing this, Gordan Keek, one of the developpers and Susan Chain (the retail specialist) turned up and started to fill up on pick-me-up sized mugs of coffee.

Just as set up was complete, and KafMeUp's staff were ready to open up, the first customers came in. Zak's role was to meet and greet the customers and invite representative members of the public to take part in the workshop. Arty Tariq, the lead tester then arrived and joined the group, panting heavily as his train had been delayed and he had run all the way from the station to get there on time.

Gordan was their to demonstrate the current prototype for the next release of the MyWay app. Arty would capture their responses, helping refine detailed requirements, design features, usability concerns and identify appropriate test cases.

Marjory and Susan were going to review the current user experience, focusing on a couple of scenarios which had recently been identified as priorities from customer feedback. Before she started, she asked the team to see if they could explore the young professional segment issue as well.

By mid morning, they were exhausted. They had spoken to 50 or so shoppers and office workers who stopped by the coffee shop on their way to work and had a pile of material to analyse. In the taxi, on the way back, Marjory spoke to the team and got their gut feel response from the morning's work. Overall, it seemed that the work had confirmed a lot of their initial research and assumptions, but that there was a perception problem around the app with young professional who did not feel that it catered to their ethical concerns or help with finding green sourced and sustainable products. Also there was a lack of coverage of certain classes of lifestyle service and product which they liked.

She was going to have to address that soon. Which meant another meeting with the solution architect, the analyst and the project manager to see what could traded against these new requirements. Arriving at the office she quickly called up her diary and scheduled a meeting to discuss how to accommodate this within the forthcoming release.

Slipping down to lunch in the nearby deli-cum-eatery she started to think through the implications. Retailing would need to research and add lines. She would have to update the targeting and messaging of the marketing campaign for the new release. The media company used would need re-briefing and she would probably have to present an update to the Integrated Product Team and then she would have to re-forecast the numbers for the current release's performance, the costs of the new release and the anticipated uptake and revenue for the re-defined release. The product road map would also need updating and Oh! she needed to do a quick first impressions adjustment to the forecasts for this afternoon's operating plan review with the CFO and the CMO.

A few adrenalin filled  hours later she had, survived the monthly operating plan review, but with new actions to confirm her gut feel projections with more definitive estimates. Although, it was not all bad, if they met the young professional consume segment's needs and got the message through to them, then there could be a revenue boost of anywhere between 10 and 30%. They just needed to execute well.

Back to planning again, she added all her new tasks to her to do list and went downstairs to see what was going on in the Integrated Product Team's End of Day wash-up. Progress was good, and most of the issues raised appeared to have a doable action, but the bad news was that young Kendra, their graduate app developer had accepted a job offer from GitYrRox and would be leaving next month. 

Now she just had to survive the evenings drinks at the local cocktail bar whilst the ceremonially on boarded the new operations team lead Justin into the team and took pictures of him wearing a funny hat for the internal magazine. She hurriedly, phoned to leave a voicemail for her partner, asking him to leave a snack out for when she got home later that night and headed off into the social fray. ...

This is a mythical story about a product manager in an integrated product team. The aim is to convey a little of what is involved, but also how important collaboration is across the end-to-end process of developing and delivering products, whilst innovating iteratively in a customer focused manner. It's all part of The Way of DAU

Digital Patterns

Most software developers are familiar with the concept of a pattern. They use them to describe types of programming problems which can be solved in the same generic manner.

This was originally developed to support the indexing of re-usable code and trading in 3rd party off the shelf code components, with the idea of improving overall development productivity and quality. The quality aspect arising from the assumption that such code would be designed to be flexible and robust in many scenarios.

The idea was not actually that novel as it replicated the concept of group technology in manufacturing, where a group technology code defines the shape, size and manufacturing characteristics of 3D parts or components. The idea being that groups of machines could be set up to manufacture families of parts more quickly than traditional methods where machines were grouped functionally and work meandered all over a factory between the functional groups of machines. 

Anyway, patterns have become such a useful metaphor that developers will often describe what they are doing in terms of what the pattern is and therefore what tools and approach they are using. Consequently, the concept of patterns has also been adopted to describe aspects of solution architecture and encourage design re-use within enterprises.

So I have been struck recently by the fact that going digital or adopting a Digital As Usual model might be facilitated by certain organisational patterns.

For example, Lean and Agile solution development is usually product and product team based. The product team integrates the viewpoints of several functions involved in developing and exploiting the product typically including users, product owners, analysts, developers, testers and DevOps engineers. This might be called the Product Team Pattern.

Some approaches to delivering digital products also look at mass customisation via standard features. The principle being that a product is constructed from a number of features for which there may be a number of standard options. The product is then tailored to a customer's needs by selecting which features and which options the customer wants. This then gives a tailored product experience with most of the benefits of a bespoke product, but better economics and more consistent quality because each feature and each option is standardised. This might be called the Adaptive Product Pattern.

A recent article in the SLOAN MIT Management Review, Is Your Company Ready for a Digital Future? described a "Future Ready" pattern, in which it identifies a combination of Customer Experience and Process Efficiency capabilities as delivering this type of pattern resulting in low cost innovation, superlative customer experience, modular agility and the ability to exploit data as a future asset. Whilst this complements the thinking in "The Way of DAU", it struck me that perhaps there are other patterns out there which need to be identified. 

Any thoughts anyone?