As the amount data flooding into our lives explodes, we’ll all need to think about how we can get the skills to manage and understand data.
As we all get buried under a tsunami of data, the challenge is managing it. The MIT Technology Review this week looks at the rise of the data scientist, a job title unknown a few years ago.
The problem for industry is the skill sets required to become a data scientist are fairly esoteric.
Data scientist has become a popular job title partly because it has helped pull together a growing number of haphazardly defined and overlapping job roles, says Jake Klamka, who runs a six-week fellowship to place PhDs from fields like math, astrophysics, and even neuroscience in such jobs. “We have anyone who works with a lot of data in their research,” Klamka says. “They need to know how to program, but they also have to have strong communications skills and curiosity.”
Over the last twenty years we’ve done a pretty poor job teaching maths and statistics which is going to create a skills shortage as industry struggles to find people qualified to figure out what all of this data means.
The thing that really stands out with McKinsey’s predictions is the degree of reskilling the workforce is going to need, today’s workers are going to need an understanding of programming, logic and statistics as much the kids currently at school.
If you’re planning on being in the workforce at the end of this decade right now may be the time to consider getting some of these skills.
Just as businesses will be separated by how they use Big Data, workers may too find those skills divide the winners from the losers.
As the amount of data flooding into our lives explodes, we’ll all need to think about how we can get the skills to manage and understand data.
Big data and mobile computing are changing the way business operates as maps become an important part of our normal work and leisure time.
“Work the Way You Live” is Google’s motto for their enterprise maps service which the search engine giant hopes to make as ubiquitous in business as it is in the home.
At Google Atmosphere the company showed off their mapping technology and how it can be used by large organisation. It’s a compelling story.
The technology behind Google Maps is impressive – twenty petabytes of images, one billion active monthly users, 1.6 million map tiles served every second and a target of getting those tiles onto the users screen within ten milliseconds.
Maps are one of the Big Data applications that cheap computing makes possible, until a few years ago even desktop computers would have struggled with the sort of mapping technology that we take for granted on our smartphones today.
Rethinking products
Adding mapping technologies to products allows businesses to rethink their products. A good example of this is the internet connected treadmill.
Using the treadmill a jogger, or a walker, can map out a route anywhere in the world and the screen will show them the Google Street View as they travel along the route. The treadmill even adjusts to the changing gradients.
The Google Maps driven treadmill is a trivial example of the internet of machines, but it gives a hint of what’s possible.
The search for truth
The success of a map depends on whether it can be trusted – this is what caught Apple out with their mapping application which was released before it was ready for prime time. Google, and most cartographers, take seriously errors and changes.
In the early days of Google Maps, the company would pass errors and changes onto the private and government mapping providers they licensed the data from. It could take months to fix a problem.
“It was really hard, you have to get maps from all over the world to create the product,” says Louis Perrochon, the Engineering director of google maps for business.
“That’s a limitation if you work with third party data so we started a project called Ground Truth where we build our own maps.”
Google pulls together its Street View data, satellite images and information sent in from the public through their Map Maker site and the Maps Engine Lite to build an accurate map of an area.
Changing consumer behaviour
Having accurate and accessible maps has changed the way consumers have behaved; “this revolution hasn’t happened slowly,” says Google Enterprise Directore Richard Suhr, “it’s happened really quickly.”
“Customers have become savvy about spatial. What this means is that businesses are starting to rethink the problem.”
“What are the exciting things I can do with maps, what else can I do with my data.”
That’s a big question of all businesses – how they use the massive amount of information in their organisation will mark the winners from also runs over the next decade. Maps are one way to visualise their data.
While Google Atmosphere was a marketing event for the companies mapping technologies the message is clear – mapping is changing the way we work and play and it’s affecting business.
How is mapping changing the way your business works?
How the V8 Supercar races use the internet and networks shows why businesses need reliable communications and the way organisations are using cloud computing.
How the V8 Supercar races use the internet and networks shows why businesses need reliable communications and the way organisations are using cloud computing.
My relationship with sports cars is similar to horses – I have a vague idea of which end water goes in and where not to stand.
So Microsoft’s invite to the Launceston V8 Supercars to showcase their Office 365 cloud service as the race’s official sponsor wasn’t expected but it was a good opportunity to see how a sports organisation uses modern technology.
Riding the cloud
At the opening media conference V8 Supercars CEO David Malone and Finance Director Peter Trimble described the IT problems the organisation had in the early days.
To properly meet their needs V8 Supercars would have needed a bank of servers, cumbersome remote access software and a full time team of several IT staff for their scattered workforce and constantly changing locations.
With cloud services, they eliminated many IT costs while simplifying their systems.
That staff can now access documents regardless of location is a very good case study of where the cloud works well and understandable that Microsoft wanted to show off what their services can do.
Networking the cars
When challenged about the point of car racing, enthusiasts cite how the sport is a test bed for the motor industry.
The motor industry is one sector leading the internet of machines with one car manufacturing executive recently describing the modern motor vehicle as being a “computer platforms” on wheels.
Pit crews monitoring in car systems
Eventually we’ll see our cars connected to the net and reporting everything from the engine’s servicing needs to the driver’s musical tastes.
That’s reality in today’s high performance racing, both the drivers and the cars are in constant contact with the crews as sensors report everything from engine performance to the foot pressure the driver is putting on the accelerator pedal.
As continuous data feeds from the cars is essential to the teams the event has its own trackside network with receivers located along the course that are used for both vehicle telemetry and the video feeds from both car mounted and fixed cameras.
Owning the rights
In what’s becoming the future of sports broadcasting, the V8 Supercars organisers run their own camera crews and provide the feed to their broadcast partners and media outlets.
This allows them to control all the rights across TV, cable and online channels.
Having full control of the pictures also gives the V8 Supercars more revenue through signage and sponsorship by guaranteeing advertising placements which wouldn’t be available if they didn’t manage the feed.
Connectivity matters
Spaghetti Junction as the various feeds come together
Getting the images out to the media and broadcast partners along with delivering the in car data to the racing teams is major challenge for organisers. The communications centres resemble a giant bowl of cable spaghetti as various groups plug into the network.
It’s no coincidence that part of the deals the V8 Supercar management strike with track owners and governments includes providing fiber and microwave links to the venue.
That single factor illustrates how vital communications links are to a modern sporting event.
Another important factor is that everything will be packed up and taken away. Following Launceston, the entire show is packed up and moved onto Auckland, New Zealand. This in itself is a major logistic challenge which would fail without good connectivity and reliable systems.
the fleet of trucks ready to move on
It’s easy to dismiss the V8 Supercars as a bunch of testosterone driven rev-heads, but the challenges in staging these complex events fifteen times a year shouldn’t be underestimated.
We also shouldn’t underestimate how important communication links are to any business. It’s why debates about the need for high speed internet services are last century’s discussion.
Something that’s missed when we talk about Big Data is the risk of false positives – if you dip into the stream, you can prove anything against person.
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him said the 17th Century French politician Cardinal Richelieu.
Today those six lines could be written on a social media site or be six disparate points drawn from a database. Without context those six lines could condemn us.
Something that’s missed when we talk about Big Data is the risk of false positives – if you dip into the stream, you can prove anything against person.
The world isn’t black or white, there are fifty trillion shades of gray and that’s why it’s important to think before posting an image on the web, firing someone or calling the cops.
In an era where we’re quick to judge and condemn people, the stakes are very high.
Software company Evolv is an example of how businesses can use big data
One of the predictions for 2020 is that decade’s business successes will be those who use big data well.
A good example of a big data tool is recruitment software Evolv that helps businesses predict not only the best person to hire but also who is likely to leave the organisation.
For employee retention, Evolv looks at a range of variables which can include anything from gas prices and social media usage to local unemployment rates then pulls these together to predict which staff are most likely to leave.
There are some downsides in such software though – as some of the comments to the VentureBeat story point out – a blind faith in an alogrithm can destroy company morale and much more.
Recruiters as an industry haven’t a good track record in using data well, while they’ve had candidate databases for two decades and stories abound of poor use of keyword searches carried out by lazy or incompetent headhunters. The same is now happening with agencies trawling LinkedIn for candidates.
Using these tools and data correctly going to separate successful recruitment agencies and HR departments from the also-rans.
It’s the same in most businesses – the tools are available and knowing them how to use them properly will be a key skill for this decade.
A good chart can help tell a story, all too often though graphs are designed to mislead.
One way to illustrate a story is with charts. All too often though misleading graphs are used to make an incorrect point.
A Verge story on Groupon shows how to get graphs right – clear, simple and tells the story of how the group buying service’s valuation soared and then plunged while it has never really been profitable.
The vertical axis is the key to getting a graph right, cutting off most of the y-axis’ range is an easy way to mislead people with graphs. In this case you can see just the extent of Groupon’s valuation, profit and loss over the company’s short but troubled history.
Since its inception, The Verge has been showing other sites how to tell stories online, their Scamworld story exposing the world of affiliate internet marketing sets the bar.
Using graphs well is another area where The Verge is showing the rest of the media – including newspapers – how to do things well.
For Groupon, things don’t look so good. As The Verge story points out, the company’s income largely tracked its workforce which grew from 126 at the start of 2010 to over 5,000 by April of 2011. Which illustrates how the business was tied into sales teams generating turnover.
The spectacular growth of Groupon and other copycat businesses couldn’t last and hasn’t. The challenge for Groupon’s managers is to now build a sustainable business.
For investors, those graphs of Groupon’s growth were a compelling story. Which is another reason why we all need to take care with what we think the charts tell us.
Supply the mobile base stations for data hungry customers is one of the great challenges for telcos. How they resolve this will create some unusual alliances.
“Last year’s mobile data traffic was nearly twelve times the size of the entire global Internet in 2000.”
That little factoid from Cisco’s 2013 Virtual Networking Index illustrates how the business world is evolving as various wireless, fibre and satellite communications technologies are delivering faster access to businesses and households.
Mobile data growth isn’t slowing; Cisco estimate global mobile data traffic was estimated at 885 petabytes a month and Cisco estimate it will grow fourteen fold over the next five years.
Dealing with these sort of data loads is going to challenge Telcos who were hit badly by the introduction of the smartphone and the demands it put on their cellphone networks.
A way to deal with the data load are heterogeneous networks, or HetNets, where phones automatically switch from the telcos’ cellphone systems to local wireless networks without the caller noticing.
The challenge with that is what’s in it for the private property owners whose networks the telcos will need to access for the HetNets to work.
One of the solutions in Dr Pepper’s opinion is to give business owners access to the rich data the telcos will be gathering on the customers using the HetNets.
This Big Data idea ties into PayPal’s view of future commerce and shows just how powerful pulling together disparate strands of information is going to be for businesses in the near future.
But many landlords and wireless network owners are going to want more than just access to the some of the telco data — we can also be sure that the phone companies are going to be careful about what customer data they share with their partners.
It may well be that we’ll see telcos providing free high capacity fibre connections and wireless networks into shopping malls, football stadiums, hotels and other high traffic locations so they can capture high value smartphone users.
One thing is for sure and that’s fibre connections are necessary to carry the data load.
Anyone who thinks the future of broadband lies in wireless networks has to understand that the connections to the base stations doesn’t magically happen — high speed fibre is essential to carry the signals.
Getting both the fibre and the wireless base stations is going to be one of the challenges for telcos and their data hungry customers over the next decade.
Paul travelled to the Cisco Live event in Melbourne courtesy of Cisco Systems.
