Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: data

  • Management in an age of information abundance

    Management in an age of information abundance

    The Twentieth Century was defined by abundant and cheap energy while this century will be shaped by our access to massive amounts of data.

    How do managers deal with the information age along with the changes bought about by technologies like the Internet of Things, 3D printing, automation and social media?

    Management in the Data Age looks at some of the opportunities and risks that face those running businesses. It was originally prepared for a private corporate briefing in June 2015.

    Some further background reading on the topic include the following links.

     

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  • Business in an age of data abundance

    Business in an age of data abundance

    I’m preparing a corporate talk for next week on the changing economy and one theme that sticks out is how the Twentieth Century was defined by cheap energy and physical mobility as mains electricity and the internal combustion engine became ubiquitous and affordable.

    The picture accompanying this post illustrates that shift, Sydney’s Circular Quay a hundred years ago was just at the beginning of the automobile era. The previous fifty years had bought trams, the telegraph and reliable shipping but the great strides of the Twentieth Century were still to happen.

    At that stage the steam engine and advances in electrical transmission had bought reliable power to the masses, although it was still expensive. What was to come over the next fifty years was that energy was about to become cheap and abundant. That drove the suburbanisation of western societies and the development of industries around the availability of cheap power and a mobile workforce.

    At the time though information was still expensive, the control of broadcast networks by a few license holders and print operations by those who could afford the massive costs of producing and distributing magazines or newspapers made data difficult to get and worth paying for.

    Today we’re at the start of a similar shift in information; it’s no longer expensive or difficult to obtain.

    What that means for the next thirty years is what industries will develop in an economy where information is basically free and ubiquitous. Just as cheap energy created the consumerist economy, we’re going to see a very different environment in an age of cheap data.

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  • Twitter’s discordant note

    Twitter’s discordant note

    It’s been a bad week for the social media service Twitter with its stock pounded after the leak of poorer than expected results.

    Writer Matthew Ingham says Twitter lost its way five years ago when it started closing down access to third party developers, a move that hurt the service’s growth and user adoption.

    Twitter’s move was greeted with disappointment at the time and many developers gave up working on the company’s APIs.

    With the growth of third party applications stunted, there was little reason for new users to come on board and so Twitter is now disappointing the market with its results.

    Basically Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and his team reaped what they sowed in restricting access; they kept control of their data but it’s cost them users and hurt their share value.

    Twitter’s woes show that the economics of  cloud and social media services reward business that share data. While there may be some commercial and legal limits to what information can be shared, the default position should be to make data available.

    In an information rich society, those who contribute the most get the rewards. This is the point Twitter’s management missed.

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  • The high cost of distrust

    The high cost of distrust

    A lack of trust in technology’s security could be costing the global economy over a trillion dollars a panel at the Australian Cisco Live in Melbourne heard yesterday.

    The panel “how do we create trust?” featured some of Cisco’s executives including John Stewart, the company’s Security and Trust lead, along with Mike Burgess, Telstra’s Chief Information Security Officer and Gary Blair, the CEO of the Australian Cyber Security Research Institute.

    Blair sees trust in technology being split into two aspects; “do I as an individual trust an organisation to keep my data secure; safe from harm, safe from breaches and so forth?” He asks, “the second is will they be transparent in using my data and will I have control of my data.”

    In turn Stewart sees security as being a big data problem rather than rules, patches and security software; “data driven security is the way forward.” He states, “we are constantly studying data to find out what our current risk profile is, what situations are we facing and what hacks we are facing.”

    This was the thrust of last year’s Splunk conference where the CISO of NASDAQ, Mark Graff, described how data analytics were now the front line of information security as threats are so diverse and systems so complex that it’s necessary to watch for abnormal activity rather than try to build fortresses.

    The stakes are high for both individual businesses and the economy as technology is now embedded in almost every activity.

    “If you suddenly lack confidence in going to online sites, what would happen?” Asks Stewart. “You start using the phone, you go into the bank branch to check your account.”

    “We have to get many of these things correct, because going backwards takes us to a place where we don’t know how to get back to.”

    Gary Blair described how the Boston Consulting Group forecast digital economy would be worth between 1.5 and 2.5 trillion dollars across the G20 economies by 2016.

    “The difference between the two numbers was trust. That’s how large a problem is in economic terms.”

    As we move into the internet of things, that trust is going to extend to the integrity of the sensors telling us the state of our crops, transport and energy systems.

    The stakes are only going to get higher and the issues more complex which in turn is going to demand well designed robust systems to retain the trust of businesses and users.

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  • Video and the internet of things

    Video and the internet of things

    A few days ago we discussed how 4k video cameras are going to change the sports broadcasting industry.

    Yesterday executives from modular data center supplier VCE held a media lunch where they discussed some of their industrial applications. One of the areas they discussed was the monitoring of power stations with large resolution cameras.

    The 4k cameras are trained on machine rooms with software watching for irregular conditions such as excessive vibrations, leaks or smoke. Should something out of the ordinary be detected, warnings can be triggered and potentially affected equipment spun down.

    With the 4k resolution the cameras are able to watch large areas and like the sports coverage can zoom in for a detailed view of an affected area.

    The use of 4k video cameras shows how the internet of things won’t just be about the data gathered from smart devices but also matching the information coming from IoT equipment with that of other environmental factors.

    For companies like VCE these sort of applications are an opportunity as they need large amounts of data storage and processing power in local centres.

    In many respects these small scale data centers are a large scale example of the fog computing being touted by companies like Cisco where most of the operational tasks are carried out by local equipment with only reports and exceptions being transmitted to the cloud.

    This sort of application also shows the demands different industries are going to have for local data processing and storage with the VCE executives suggesting hospitals, mines and sports stadiums are also going to need these facilities.

    For VCE – a troubled joint venture between Cisco, storage company EMC and computer virtualisation firm VM Ware – these are the sort of clients they are hoping to find to keep their business running.

    Regardless of VCE’s prospects, the need for equipment to manage the data being collected by devices on the Internet of Things and 4k video is going to grow. That could give us one of the clues of where the jobs of the future are going to come from.

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