Has Big Data Lost its Mojo?

A number of surveys were published during 2017 which suggested that Big Data has lost the CxO mind share that it had.

The overall impression gained was that business leaders are putting their emphasis on Artificial Intelligence (in particular Machine Learning) and IoT, whilst CIOs and Technical Leaders are worrying about Security and Lean (Agile and DevOps). 

At the same time the consumer and gadget end of things are focusing on wearables, voice and VR/AR based devices (implying other types of AI are getting important). 

Somewhere in the mix, people are worrying about culture, product management and marketing, and organisations designed around empowered product teams.

There almost appears to be an assumption that big data has been cracked and apps are easy. Also, data governance is not really getting the attention that it should do and vendors are pushing APIs for integration.

This suggests not just a gap between business vision and technical capability to deliver, but also that the consumer led boom in exploitation is going places which don't necessarily fit well with classical business environments. Open plan offices are not the place where people should all be talking to their digital assistants.

The lessons I draw from this are than business management teams need to start thinking holistically about what is needed to deliver their new business (i.e. digitally augmented) strategies and models, but also about what the future workplace looks like. Is the office finally dying?

They also need to get real about data. It needs to be managed using lean data principles. Integration and security are vital to get right. IoT and other exploitation approaches are going to emphasise Big Data's importance further. So it's vitally important to develop data specialists who understand your business and are networked with the right people. A recent article in the Harvard Business Review suggests that most organisations have focused on technicalities and need to look at a more immersive approach and organisational issues too.

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.

Digital Adoption Framework

A lot get's talked about Digital, but there are few comprehensive approaches to adoption available for reference. 

This is why I was interested when I came across Vadrim's DAF diagram, reproduced below. Enjoy!

Blockchain Frenzy

You cannot pick up a business publication these days without seeing something written about Blockchain or Bitcoin. Blockchain has pushed Big Data, IoT and Digital Business Models onto the sidelines. This has been accompanied by a huge rush to invest in the technology and thousands of start ups being established, hoping to exploit the technology.

Yet if you read the articles written about Blockchain, it is difficult to get your head around the subject. Recently, I read a comment by a Consultant who specialises in Blockchain noting his complaints about the complete gibberish being published about it. So I decided to educate myself on the subject and was relieved to find an introductory talk on the subject being run by the Business Information Systems Group of the BCS. 

What I learnt was:

- Blockchain is a protocol for a Distributed Ledger;

- It creates read only transaction records which are cryptographically protected by Hashing;

- Transactions are contained within time-stamped blocks; each block is hashed; the blocks are chained together in such a way that their hashes are based on their position within the chain;

- The main parties participating in the transactions get complete copies of the chains;

- Parties can only view the records which relate to them;

- The ledger can deal with anything of value and does not have to be limited to money;

- It is possible to apply some conditional business rules via "smart contracts".

The speaker has a great web site www.distlytics.com on which he has provided some good resources for learning more. It's worth a visit.

Put together, this makes for a highly resilient (to fraud or denial of service attack) means of exchanging value or valuable assets without the involvement of trusted 3rd parties. It also provides confidentiality, traceability or provenance by default. So there are many innovative initiatives and opportunities around it. Removal of the need for a trusted 3rd party would remove the need for brokers in certain types of transaction, whether it is financial, commodity or asset based. The provenance trail could be useful in art dealing or international antiquity import and export; conveyancing of property deals could become a thing of the past and so on.

There are some issues. Some are regulatory. For example tax and treasury authorities typically do not like the unmonitored and invisible to them. There also is potential for the use of the technology for criminal purposes on the so called dark web.

However the key issue at present appears to be scalability. The scale of duplication in very large markets is likely to be unsustainable, unless new concepts are added. It appears that existing implementations are only able to sustain modest transaction rates for comparatively small sizes of market. The duplication involves significant overheads on transactional complexity, network traffic and storage.

So if Blockchain is going to involve, there is a need for a standards body or user body to evolve the protocol for performance, APIs etc. At present this is interesting as the original protocol was floated by someone or collection of people using a pseudonym. So at present there appears to be no authoritative owner to legitimise such a body.

It will be interesting to see what happens next and how market forces will shape the evolution of Blockchain.