Wake Up Call: Don’t Let Buzzwords Shield You from the Transformation

You don’t need to live here in Silicon Valley or work in the high-tech industry to appreciate the level of change taking place right now. It’s absolutely transformative. Yes, it’s inescapable, I’m going to use buzzwords. But, I promise to have them be meaningful and deserving of use in this post.

I imagine I could easily write a short book over a weekend about change, based on the observations I’ve made in 30 or so years of being directly involved in the technology industry. But, I’m also promising myself to keep this post fairly short. The intent is to provide value to business leaders in terms of how to view today’s change, while also providing insights into what’s happening to interested lay persons that are having their lives changed – seemingly, by the hour.

Let’s tackle concepts like the Internet of Everything (IoE) and Big Data. These two concepts are neither new nor hard to understand. Enabling things to participate in the Internet is not new. In the late 1980s, myself and a tiny slice of the world population were on something interesting & useful that we didn’t really have an easy name to describe. Interesting & useful because we were doing things that later would be called e-mail, social networking, and --- yes --- even shopping. Think more Craigslist, rather than Amazon style shopping. Those devices first participating in the ‘net were personal computers (and larger academic systems). Today, in an IoE words, we’re talking about --- well, everything. Everything being your home thermostat, alarm system, watch, car, TV, phone, garden system, front door, garage door, sauna and the list grows all the time.

Just a handful of years later in the early 90s, however, with the advent of the “world wide web” and especially the first web browsers, the amount of people globally that suddenly had awareness of the Internet grew explosively. And, by the end of that 90s decade, the Internet Age freight train was steaming down the track at full speed. A few companies at the forefront, like Cisco, were describing as best they could what was happening and especially what was to come. This discussion of the “Internet Age”, “eCommerce”, and the “New Economy” were met with much rolling of eyes. People got tired of the hyperbole and the .com mania and didn’t appreciate the transformation. Now, witness 15 years later, how many aspects of our lives globally are changed forever by the same forces that were then scoffed at by many (“What, people are actually going to send credit card information over the Internet and shop? Yeah, right…”).

Today, we are in the midst of another transformative change, like that original one not long ago but even more profound. Again, there are calls about keeping ones eye on the ball and not getting left behind and, as well, those that roll their eyes about the lack of perception about the changes that are swirling all around them. Proof from a business standpoint comes easily not only in victims like Kodak that missed the transition of film to digital cameras. But, even more recently, how Airbnb and Uber absolutely exploded onto the scene in a (sometimes, literally) violent way. These two companies are used for good reason to illustrate the example of how multi-billion dollar companies can take change too casually and have upstarts that have no stature, no physical assets (hotels/properties, taxis/vehicles), and yet still massively disrupt these established industries overnight.

The point to understand is that we’ve seen nothing yet, really. The Airbnb and Uber examples are great ones because of the power of transformative thinking coupled with awesome technology. Awesome doesn’t necessarily mean powerful or alien. The companies they disrupted in the industry had equal access (if not better access, you could argue) to technology. But, awesome in the sense of how this powerful capability exists literally for anyone to step up and have an innovative passion to leverage in new & constructive ways. Also, consider, that in the immediate handful of years ahead of us, projections are that 5 billion people and 50 billion devices will be brought online. Let that sink in a bit in terms of the ramifications (Billions of new customers? More sharing of information by a broader set of the world population? More political strife and social change?).

What is happening right now with IoE and Big Data is that we now have the technology (compute power, vast storage, fast data transport) to do amazing things, pervasively. Let me make it really simple. Anytime you wondered in business or in persona life “why can’t you do that better?” or “this could be a hell of a lot more effective, if you simply did…” --- now, we have the ability to do actually do those things. Examples:

1. Why is my auto insurance company charging me for insurance based on my zip code, age, miles driven, and all the other traditional factors, when, we have the technology to show them how I drive, when I drive, where I drive, and other factors that really influence their risk and the bottom line?
2. The healthcare industry works with standard protocols and practices of how to run their business and maximize limited resources like staff, hospital beds, equipment, and the like. Then, why don’t they analyze what actually occurs to patients, how, when, and why in terms of treatments and their characteristics to not only maximize their revenue, but also to provide better care?
3. Why don’t those in agriculture better understand how much to fertilize and water their crops for maximum effectiveness of the nutrients reaching the roots, so that they not only waste less resources, but derive better harvests and produce less runoff pollution into the environment?
4. Why doesn't the company, that has thousands of franchise sandwich shops, better gauge when people come in at the busiest times, know what they will order, how much of each ingredient to have on hand, understand how the line flows and processes to change, and when customers are hovering near a display case and may not be finding the brand & flavor of potato chips or cookies they like?

Are these use cases new to you? In fact, these are not future examples, but things that are already in place and being further refined by innovative companies. There are many other examples that you can find if you do some poking around and some I can’t share that are early stage or soon to be released. Let’s go back to the theme that, just as we’ve modeled the natural world with software for decades to do useful things for us, we are now at a point where that modeling can occur at a massively scalable & transformative level for the physical world.

 IoE is most often associated with sensors and there’s a good reason for that. We have the ability with microelectronics and the overall state of technology I described (powerful, vast, fast) to do the type of sensing and then analysis & decision making (Big Data equals --- powerful parallel process of vast amounts of data) that will deliver an entirely new reality for our lives. Also, I would be remiss to say that everything is peachy and the future is nothing but bright. I believe that the world has some fundamental & serious problems that will continue to bring forward (financial, political, environmental) reckonings to us. The least of which are the privacy and security concerns with a lot of this change. Those that want to survive (thrive) in this new reality will need to stay mindful (innovative) in their thinking about the possibilities and solutions to these problems.

 I’ve seen statistics that nearly half of the members of the board of companies have responded to a survey that they are not overly concerned about the ramifications about digitization and the continued technology revolution going on out there. In a few years, when you see those companies in the rear view mirror because they've stalled on the side of the road, it’ll perhaps be clear who those board members were.

I'll force myself to stop there and hope this was interesting to you and brought some information that was of value.

Do you have examples of what you see out there that is particularly impressive to you, or possibly things that you’re working on that will take us into the new reality?