As society and business drown in big data we’re relying on algorithms and computer programs to helps us wade through the masses of information, could that be a weakness?
As society and business drown in big data we’re relying on algorithms and computer programs to helps us wade through a flood of information, could that reliance be a weakness?
Apparently Giggs appears in the search results for Canute because of the footballer’s futile attempt to hold back a tide of information about his love life.
While Google’s algorithm seems to have made a mistake, it’s only doing what it’s been programmed to do. A lot of trusted websites have used the term ‘Canute’ or ‘Cnut’ in relation to Giggs so the machine presents his picture as being relevant to the search.
Confusing Ryan Giggs and King Canute is mildly amusing until we consider how critical algorithms like Google Search have become to decision making, there are no shortage of stories about people being wrongly billed, detained or even gaoled on the basis of bad information from computers.
By the end 2021, just eight years away, the Pentagon sees “autonomous missions worldwide” as being one of their objectives.
Autonomous missions means local commanders and drones being able to make decisions to kill people or attack communities based on the what their computers tell them. The consequences of a bad result from a computer algorithm suddenly become very stark indeed.
While most decisions based on algorithms may not have the life or death consequences that a computer ordered drone strike on a family picnic might have, mistakes could cost businesses money and individuals much inconvenience.
So it’s worthwhile considering how we build the cultural and technological checks and balances into how we use big data and the algorithms necessary to analyze it so that we minimise mistakes.
Contrary to legend, King Canute didn’t try to order the tide not to come in. He was trying to demonstrate to obsequious court that he was fallible and a subject to the laws of nature and god as any other man.
Like the court of King Canute, we should be aware of the foibles and weaknesses of the technologies that increasingly guides us. The computer isn’t always right.
Mediocrity is something we have to avoid if we want to do great things.
“You have to understand Paul that we are building a structure designed to last twenty-five years,” sneered the consulting engineer as we sat in a site meeting on a high rise construction site just inside the City of London.
I sighed deeply and let the matter of cladding fire protection water tanks slide and pondered nearby St Paul’s Cathedral, wondering what Christoper Wren would have thought about the mediocre architecture being thrown up around his masterpiece.
The consulting engineer was a suitable person to build mediocre buildings, he and his firm were only on the project by virtue of the property developer being from the same masonic temple and the calibre of their shoddy and visionless work reflected their suitability for the project.
Apart from the pedestrian architecture and engineering, the lack of foresight extended through poor design right through to not allowing enough for future expansion of the building’s communications – by the early 1990s it had already become apparent modern office towers were going to need plenty of space for network cables and the lack of which probably contributed to the structure being totally refurbished in the mid 2000s.
That day was the beginning of the end of my engineering career as I found I didn’t much care for being patronized by mediocrities all too often encountered in the building industry in the mid 1990s.
At the time most of the architecture in London was pedestrian and bland late Twentieth Century mirror glass. The real tragedy being that modern construction techniques give architects and builders possibilities that Wren couldn’t have dreamed of.
Mediocrities patronizing those who don’t share their narrow, bland look on life will always be with us, thankfully we don’t have to accept them in our lives.
If we want to build great things that push the boundaries or change the world, then those grey mediocrities have no role in our lives.
Where that consulting engineer and his masonic friends are today, I have no idea but it’s not likely they built any of the iconic buildings that now dot London’s skyline.
Saving money on technology is often a bad investment as the V8 Supercars found
“We were penny wise and pound foolish” says Peter Trimble, Finance and Systems director of the V8 Supercars, about the IT setup he found when he started with the motor sport organisation 18 months ago.
The V8 Supercars were like many businesses who had outgrown their basic IT setup and were struggling as a result.
A touring organisation – “a travelling circus” as described by CEO David Malone – with 15 races in Australia, New Zealand the US has some fairly unique challenges as contractors, teams and a dispersed workforce put demands on the businesses which a basic small business system struggles to cope with.
What Trimble found at the business were employees struggling with cheap internet connections and antiquated, inadequate servers.
Focusing on the pennies and missing the bigger picture is a common problem when managements skimp on technology which leaves their staff spending more time on IT problems than getting their jobs done.
Basically the $80 a month home internet connection doesn’t cut it when you have more than two or three workers and the server that worked fine when those people were in the same office becomes a security risk when a dozen a people are trying to login over the Internet.
It wasn’t surprising the V8 Supercars management decided to go with a cloud computing service – in this case Microsoft Office 365 – and invest in proper, reliable internet connections.
What the Supercars found that being penny proud and pound foolish with IT doesn’t work for a business, office tech is an essential investment.
Paul travelled to the V8 Supercars in Launceston courtesy of Microsoft Australia.
How a cloud computing service wants to radically change customer service and business
“Nobody got girls on the helpdesk” says Mikkel Svane, founder of online customer service company Zendesk.
Mikkel hopes to make customer service sexy again as businesses find they have to focus on keeping clients happy.
This is a reversal of management thinking of the 1980s where, as Mikkel says, “customer service is a cost centre, outsource it, don’t spend any time on it and don’t let customers steal any of your time.”
Now the internet gives customers to tell the world about a company’s service, the days of outsourcing or disregarding support are over.
Mikkel Svane and Michael Hansen of Zendesk
Cloud technologies are changing how software is used in business, as Mikkel found when he and his partners started Zendesk.
It became very obvious that building something that was easy to adopt, web based and integrated with email, websites. Something easy to use that didn’t clutter the customer service experience.
Something that moved from managing the customer service experience to focusing on customer service.
We built it, put it out there and customers starting coming.
A lot of these companies thought they could never implement a customer service platform. Suddenly small companies found they could compete with bigger competitors.
The appeal to investors
Having customers signing up proved to be a big advantage in Silicon Valley, no-one knew anything about a Danish company, but with local customers starting coming on board US Venture Capital firms understood what the company does.
That customer base proved powerful as Zendesk has to date raised $84 million dollars over four rounds of VC funding and is looking at a stock market float with an IPO in the next few years.
“Silicon Valley has a great tradition of building businesses.” Says Mikkel, “coming to Silicon Valley was such a big step for Zendesk, in taking it from being some little startup to being a real company that could scale very quickly.”
A question of scale
Groupon is a good example, when Mikkel and his team first met the Groupon team the group buying service was a team of four guys in Detroit. Groupon founder Andrew Mason personally signed off on the initial Zendesk subscription.
“What the hell is this company, we don’t get it.” Mikkel said at the time.
Three years later Groupon was the fastest growing company in history with thousands of support agents on their systems supporting hundreds of thousands of products.
Despite Groupon’s recent problems, Svane is proud of how Zendesk helped the group buying service with growth that no business had seen before.
“With Zendesk they got not only a beautiful, elegant system they also got the scale and the trajectory. Imagine if they’d tried to do that with an Oracle database? You’d have never been able to grow so quickly.”
On being a good internet citizen
In the past we talked about platforms – the Oracle platform, the Microsoft plaftorm – today the Internet is the platform.
“We are a good citizen on the Internet platform,” says Mikkel. “Shopify is a good citizen of the internet platform, these type of tools are easy to integrate. We are all good citizens of the Internet platform.”
Having these open system is the great power of the cloud services, they way they integrate and work together adds value to customers and doesn’t lock them into one company’s way of doing things.
The threat to incumbents
Vendor lock in has been a curse for businesses buying software. The fortunes of companies like Oracle, Microsoft and IBM have been built holding customers captive as the costs of moving to a competitor were too great.
Cloud services like Zendesk, Shopify and Xero turn this business model around which is one of the attractions to customers and it’s why huge amounts of money are moving from legacy solutions to cloud based services.
Another reason for the drift to cloud services is the reduction in complexity, the incumbent software vendors made money from the training and consulting services required to use their products.
Having simple, intuitive systems makes it easier for companies to adopt and use the new breed of cloud services.
Focusing on the business
Mikkel’s aim is to help businesses focus on their customers and products rather than worry about IT and infrastructure. In the long term it’s about helping organisations establish long term relations with their clients.
“Companies today realise that it doesn’t matter how much it matters how much I can sell to you right now, it pales into in comparison of how much I can sell you over the lifetime of our relationship. This ties into the subscription economy. It’s much more important for companies to nurture the long term lifetime relationship.”
Having a long term relationship with customers is going to be one of the keys for business success in today’s economy.
The days of transaction based businesses making easy profits from skimming a few percent off each sale are over and companies have to work on building long term relationship with customers.
Services like Zendesk, Xero and Salesforce are those helping new, fast growth companies grab these opportunities. For incumbent businesses, it’s not a time to be assuming markets are safe.
