Technology – Albada Jelgersma Conversation

A new business model in 3 easy steps

24/11/2013 by Paul

If you like curly fries you are probably intelligent (1).

This insight comes from the University of Cambridge. The researchers analysed the data from Facebook to show that ‘surprisingly accurate estimates of Facebook users’ race, age, IQ, sexuality, personality, substance use and political views can be inferred from the analysis of only their Facebook Likes’.

The possibility to collect large amounts of data from everyday activities by people, factory processes, trains, cars, weather and just about anything else that can be measured, monitored or otherwise observed is a topic that has been discussed in our blogs many times.

Sometimes indicated as ‘The Internet of Things’ or, with a different view ‘Big Data’ or ‘Total Data’, the collection and analysis of data has been a topic for technology observations and a source of concern and a initiator for new technology opportunities.

This blog is not about the concerns, nor is it about the new technologies. Instead it is about a view introduced by a new white paper by the Atos Scientific Community called “The Economy of Internet Applications”; a paper that gives us a different, more economic, view on these new opportunities.

Let’s take a look at a car manufacturer. The car he (or she) builds will contain many sensors and the data from those sensors will support the manufacturer to enable better repairs for that one car, it can provide data from many cars for an analysis to build a better car in the future and it can show information to the user of the car (speed, mileage, gas). The driver generates the data (if a car is not driven, there is no data) and both the driver and the car manufacturer profit from the result.

Now pay attention, because something important is happening: When the car manufacturer provides the data of the driver and the car combined to an insurance company, a new business model is created.

The user still puts in the data by using the car, the car manufacturer sensors in the car still collects the data, but the insurance company gets the possibility to do a better risk analysis on the driver’s behaviour and the cars safety record.

This would allow the insurance company to give the driver a better deal on his insurance, or sponsor some safety equipment in the car so there is less risk for big insurance claims in health or property damage.

It would allow the car manufacturer to create more value from data they already have collected and it would give the driver additional benefits in lower insurance payments or improved safeties.

What just happened is that we created a multi-sided market and it is happening everywhere.

“If you don’t pay for the product, you are the product”

The white paper explains it in more detail but the bottom line is that due to new capabilities in technology, additional data can easily be collected.

This data can be of value for different companies participating in such a data collection and the associated analytics platform.

Based on the economic theory of multisided markets, the different participants can influence each other in a positive way, especially cross sector (the so called network effect).

So there you have it, the simple recipe for a new business model:

Find a place where data is generated. This could be in any business or consumer oriented environment. Understand who is generating the data and why.
Research how: a. that data or the information in that data, can give your business a benefit and b. how data that you own or generate yourself, can enrich the data from the other parties.
Negotiate the usage of the data by yourself or the provisioning of your data to the other parties.

In the end this is about creating multiple win scenarios that are based on bringing multiple data sources together. The manufacturer wins because it improves his product, the service provider wins because it can improve the service and the consumer wins because he is receiving both a better product and a more tailored service.

Some have said that Big Data resembles the gold rush (2) many years ago. Everybody is doing it and it seems very simple; just dig in and find the gold – it was even called ‘data-mining’.

In reality, with data nowadays, it is even better, if you create or participate in the right multi-sided market, that data, and thus the value, will be created for you.

(1) http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/digital-records-could-expose-intimate-details-and-personality-traits-of-millions

(2) http://www.forbes.com/sites/bradpeters/2012/06/21/the-big-data-gold-rush/

This blog post was previously published at http://blog.atos.net/blog/2013/03/18/watch-this-space-a-new-business-model-in-3-easy-steps/

Why I love my Surface 2

14/11/2013 by Paul

I was thinking about doing a piece on why I love my new Surface 2. But then i came along this great video from blogger Sean Ong on YouTube. He perfectly explains what you can do with this tablet. I cannot imagine why you would buy an iPad when you can do all of this.

Quoting the information from YouTube:

"He shows off voice control (windows speech recognition), multiple monitor support, and a variety of accessories via USB hub (including external hard drive, mouse, keyboard, and Xbox 360 controller integration). He shows how to connect the Surface 2 to the HDTV as well as wireless casting of music and video! In addition he goes through some other features, such as Spotify web player, and icloud web. Also kid friendly applications and multiple accounts."

Well see for yourself – the video is below (or the link is here http://youtu.be/wG1b0yBJHLM):

The Data ‘Explosion’ is real

30/10/2013 by Paul

In a recently published research called Ascent Journey 2016, the Atos Scientific Community considers the massive growth in data and storage as an important trend in IT.

Whilst the concept of Big Data has been around for a number of years and is relatively well understood, it is now becoming clear that everything we do is leaving a trail of data that can be analyzed and used.

Examples include the payments we make on a credit card, the books we read on an e-reader and our energy use by driving an electric car. This will lead to a new era of Total Data that, in turn, will lead to new business models, services and economic growth.

We don't yet understand all the implications of this – for businesses and society – but organizations that are able to harness and make sense of the vast quantities of heterogeneous data from disparate sources will gain valuable insights into market trends and opportunities.

An 'Ecosystem' of new management tools is taking shape, covering the various layers of the data stack in the enterprise and capable of delivering a 'Total Data' approach.

The technology that supports the Information Management Lifecycle in the enterprise is going through a profound change, due to the emergence of new solutions, many from open source background (NoSQL databases, Hadoop, analytical tools like R, visualization tools). To enable the 'Total Data' environment, the new technologies need to connect into and partly replace traditional technologies.

In some scenarios, data must be obtained, processed and correlated with insights being derived and actions initiated as close to real time as possible.

Yesterday's data is not interesting unless it helps predict tomorrow. Yesterday's traffic report isn't helpful in plotting a journey today unless it is known to represent today's pattern as well, and combined with other data can improve future congestion. Pattern Based Strategy enables huge amounts of historical data to be analyzed for previously invisible patterns. These patterns give us the power to start predicting what is likely to happen in the future, so we can plan and improve, both in real-time and in non-real time scenario-planning. For example, real time predictive analysis will plot the route for transporting donor organs across a city safely and quickly, continuously adapting the route to changes in the traffic patterns as they are happening. Another example is a country to make compliance recommendations (and potentially becoming a legal requirement) to companies for maintenance regimes for their infrastructures or industry plants using analytics on historic data and thus establishing an automated "what are the lessons learned" process.

Everything will be digital and everything will be connected.

Everything will be captured; "your life is becoming a video" – you can even replay your actions, thoughts and analyse in various forms and for multiple purposes (see http://quantifiedself.com/ for example); this is not only becoming possible for peoples life's, but anything that can be measured can be tracked, traced and put in a digital context for analysis. The ability of businesses to process this wealth of information is still unclear. What these developments – and others related such as 3-D printers and cognitive computers that will be able to replicate smell and touch for their users – mean for society, laws and concepts such as individual privacy need to be reassessed and will prove a huge challenge to governments, businesses and individuals in the 21st Century; for example long-established laws and concepts such as individual privacy need to be reassessed.

After an initial confusion phase, traditional and 'Big Data' orientated approaches to analytics will converge in a unified 'Total Data' platform.

Big data relies on its sister technologies of optimized IT networks, rapid mobilization communication tools and cloud computing. Data Analytics as a Service could emerge from a combination of Big Data, Pattern Based Strategy and Cloud technologies. Business performance can improve in areas such as increased forecasting and enhanced automation capabilities and buildt new business propositions upon the discoveries they can do using Total Data as a source of undiscovered information.

[This blog post is a rewrite of http://blog.atos.net/blog/2013/02/22/the-data-explosion-is-real/?preview=true&preview_id=1555&preview_nonce=6df2f23c80 ]

Three reasons to change the Internet now

30/06/2013 by Paul

Times are changing and we all need to adapt. The internet has had a major impact on all of our lives and continues to be a growing force in all aspects of society; in personal interactions, in knowledge management and inthe way we do business.

In a whitepaper by the Atos Scientific Community, this evolution of ‘the net’ is described and put in the context of the additional functionality we now expect from our interactions on the internet. The authors challenge the current technology stack that is making up the many, many connections and network capabilities that have to be served to make the internet do what it is supposed to do.

“The topology of the Internet has evolved through economic and technological optimization decisions to a flatter structure where major content providers and distributors get as close as possible to the access networks used by their customers”

There seem to be good reasons to have a good look at this technology evolution and make some choices to continue to enjoy the internet:

Because of the cloud computing trend, more and more traffic is concentrated between several internet powerhouses; Facebook, Amazon, Google and Microsoft. The distributed nature of the original internet simply does not exist anymore.
Because of the huge increase in mobile internet usage, the way that information is accessed, changed and presented is different from the past models – the existing networking functionality is not optimized for this type of usage.
Future scenarios predict that through the assignment of an IP address to about any device you can think of we will create a huge peer-to-peer network, where human interaction will be only a small portion of all connections; “the internet of things”. The current internet technology is not designed for this.

These changes raise some fundamental questions and these are described in more details the paper. Most noticeable the authors bring our attention to the fundamental nature of the internet as it is built at the moment, a decentralized web of processing and access points.

“On the long run, the question is raised whether the Internet will durably follow a concentration trend driving it towards a more centralized network or if we will see a new wave of decentralization.”

The whitepaper dives into the technology of the internet and shows where we are facing potential bottlenecks.

[This blog post is a repost of http://blog.atos.net/blog/2012/12/03/watch-this-space-three-reasons-to-change-the-internet-now/ ]

IT is from Mars, OT is from Venus

17/03/2013 by Paul

One of the many roles I have in my work at Atos has to do with the partnership that Atos has established with Siemens.

The challenge in my job is the fact that Atos, a pure IT service organization, needs to understand the position and the objectives of Siemens; a company focused on vertical IT that is amongst others oriented on manufacturing and industrial solutioning.

Simple terminologies like ‘services’ and ‘infrastructure’ have a fundamental different meaning when discussed as part of the Siemens or Atos portfolio.

Where parts of Siemens thinks of maintaining pumps and sensors, we think of process consulting and implementing software; and pipelines and manufacturing belts are not the same as networks, storage and servers.

Still Atos and Siemens believe there is additional value when we look to combine these elements in other and new services. Similar to our clients we are continuously looking to get this value through the convergence of OT and IT.

This topic is now also addressed in a whitepaper by the Atos Scientific community, which looks into the specific issues round IT/OT convergence and suggests methods to master the process.

“Implementing IT/OT Convergence successfully will imply that IT- and OT-Strategies will be harmonized, common governance and process models will be installed, security and data will be managed centrally and resources will be re-skilled to understand and know the requirements of both disciplines”

The quote above from the whitepaper indicates we are dealing with a multifaceted implementation that is by far not easily accomplished.

It is certainly not about tooling and seems to be more about organization and business processes. The whitepaper mentions at least 3 areas of expertise that support a successful IT/OT convergence:

Strong change management; because IT and OT are domains on their own, we need to manage the convergence in such a way that we do not negatively influence the value that each domain has on its own.
Process Harmonization; standardization of definitions and the way things ‘get done’ is necessary to avoid ad hoc solutions and costly mistakes.
A service oriented architecture; standardization in technology and making sure no technology lock-in can happen allow for the necessary flexibility when change happens.

One could argue that IT/OT convergence is not a high priority; we have been very successful without it for a very long time.

But I think it was not by choice we have chosen to look away – it was simply too hard, too difficult to achieve. The authors of the whitepaper seem to agree:

“Now, new ideas and concepts are developing around IT/OT providing major opportunities for those who understand to leverage their IT know-how to the shop floor. Now is the time to capitalize on them! “

[This blog post is a repost of http://blog.atos.net/sc/2012/11/22/watch-this-space-it-is-from-mars-ot-is-from-venus/ ]

Technorati Tags: white paper,IT/OT,convergence,ATOS,Siemens,Scientific Community,Atossc

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