Unlocking value with cognitive

"Scientia potentia est" is an aphorism commonly attributed to Sir Francis Bacon. Knowledge is indeed Power and has been proven to be so many times throughout history in peace, in war, in exploration, in business and in human interactions. As we progress towards the end of the second decade of the 21st Century the phrase is probably more true than ever especially in business - "who knows wins".

At the beginning of the digital revolution we focused on the storage of limited amounts of structured data. Digitisation was the name of the game and as companies moved from paper to computer they invested in databases, document processing and a completely new infrastructure which enabled them to capture and store information. This is now the norm although the battleground of storage is far from behind us.

The storage challenge today is less the volume of data but how to manage and secure it and fundamentally how to bring data together in a single corpus of knowledge to provide the basis for value rather than volume. The answer is of course Cloud..... or is it? A recent survey by Skyhigh found that the average business used 1427 different cloud services, each one a repository of the companies information, few however linked and managed as part of a whole. The CIO has the unenviable task of keeping a semblance of control at a time where data, especially unstructured data, is literally exploding in volume.

Then came the search engines and analytic capabilities. We can easily find the correlation of the people who purchased red cars and also purchased the upgraded in-car entertainment. We know where they live and also the fact that they purchase red cars predominantly in certain months. However do we know why?

This is where Watson comes in. Not a person but a technology. The ability to ingest (literally) vast amounts of structured data as well as even greater amounts of unstructured data such as audio streams, photographs, video streams, articles from publications, facts, fiction, opinions, raw data. The data can come from within the company and from outside the company, from other companies, from open sources, from social media, from the press. In fact the sources are limited only by your imagination. No longer is the companies own corpus of knowledge the pool from which insight and power is derived.

Physicians seek to understand their patients, however the data available is overwhelming. Watson can ingest and process millions of times more data than a physician can aspire to read in a lifetime. Imagine taking an image to check for a cancer and being able to compare this image against hundreds of thousands of similar images with a technology which is not programmed in the traditional sense but which can reason and determine probability similar to a human. Watson can provide insights which would have been improbable or even impossible for a human to derive even if time was not a limiting factor.

?ESKá POJI??OVNA captures and transcribes 1000 hours of audio a day from calls made to its call centre. Once digitised the information is merged with the email correspondence and analysed by Watson and the insights relayed back to the company. The result: a much better knowledge of it's customers, the ability to react to micro trends as they appear and before they turn into mega trends and insights into the effectiveness and training needs of members of the call centre team. The system becomes smarter with deeper insights every day as the knowledge base increases by yet another 1000 hours of call information. The centre manager captured it well: "This kind of agility allows us to deliver a much more responsive service to customers and act on new opportunities much faster, sharpening our competitiveness." Imagine if this data were fused with other sources such as social media chatter, historic data, weather data..... the possibilities are endless.

Weather data? - yes. Few humans are not impacted by the weather in our daily lives. For some it is just a matter of wearing the right clothing appropriate to the conditions. For others, such as farmers, it can determine their very existence. However if you are making a small purchasing decision: T-shirt or pullover? or deciding when to sow the seeds and which seeds to select, insight into the weather makes a difference. This is why IBM has brought the Weather Company into its portfolio of capabilities. Weather data fused with other sources provides insights which, when extrapolated into the future can make all the difference to a companies success. Again, Watson technologies are used to identify patterns which would otherwise go unnoticed based on the fusion of structured and unstructured data.

The value of data is immeasurable - it is the capital asset of most organisations. Every organisation has invested in protecting its data however even here cognitive analytics plays a role. Building strong defences against intruders is good however building smart defences is better. 80% of all data concerning security on the Internet – including blogs, articles, videos, reports, alerts, and other information cannot be processed by traditional security tools. It’s this unstructured data which often proves most valuable in detecting and stopping threats before they cause harm. Watson for Cyber Security can process this information and provide insights which won’t replace security analysts, but rather enhance their knowledge. This is especially important for companies as threats are ever increasing, the information available is growing and there is a significant skills shortage in the security industry.

Knowledge and insight is indeed power and the ability to gain insights from structured and unstructured data will differentiate companies, governments and institutions. If you do not gave a digital strategy which encompasses these elements then it's time to think because your competitor may already be ahead.

My views are my own.