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.

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.