11 years, 4 months ago

Visibility, Context, Correctness & Responsiveness — active information meets change-friendly

This week on active information, I offer some observations on the Pew Big Data report in the context of one of my top projects: evolving business-technology architecture and practices to accommodate continuous change. (a.k.a. change-friendly)

My change-friendly tenets:

  1. You can’t change what you can’t see (Visibility)
  2. Context is king (Context)
  3. Not every change is the right change (Correctness)
  4. Delay is the enemy of change (Responsiveness)

The post teaser: “Big data ushers in a new era of visibility, for good and evil. But, visibility without timely, intended action, isnt all that big.”

The post: Visibility, Context, Correctness & Responsiveness … – Input Output.
Related posts:

  1. Active Information: Streaming through Computational World, Changing change via experimentation platforms
  2. Lessons from Bechtel on making information valuable via APIs — active information
  3. Roadmap for Digital Government: Information Centricity — Active Information
11 years, 7 months ago

This Is Generation Flux: Meet The Pioneers Of The New (And Chaotic) Frontier Of Business | Fast Company

“In a big company, you never feel you’re fast enough.” Beth Comstock, the chief marketing officer of GE, is talking to me by phone from the Rosewood Hotel in Menlo Park, California, where she’s visiting entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. She gets a charge out of the Valley, but her trips also remind her how perilous the business climate is right now. “Business-model innovation is constant in this economy,” she says. “You start with a vision of a platform. For a while, you think there’s a line of sight, and then it’s gone. There’s suddenly a new angle.”

Within GE, she says, “our traditional teams are too slow. We’re not innovating fast enough. We need to systematize change.”

“The business community focuses on managing uncertainty,” says Dev Patnaik, cofounder and CEO of strategy firm Jump Associates, which has advised GE, Target, and PepsiCo, among others. “That’s actually a bit of a canard.” The true challenge lies elsewhere, he explains: “In an increasingly turbulent and interconnected world, ambiguity is rising to unprecedented levels. That’s something our current systems can’t handle.

“There’s a difference between the kind of problems that companies, institutions, and governments are able to solve and the ones that they need to solve,” Patnaik continues. “Most big organizations are good at solving clear but complicated problems. They’re absolutely horrible at solving ambiguous problems–when you don’t know what you don’t know. Faced with ambiguity, their gears grind to a halt.

“Uncertainty is when you’ve defined the variable but don’t know its value. Like when you roll a die and you don’t know if it will be a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6. But ambiguity is when you’re not even sure what the variables are. You don’t know how many dice are even being rolled or how many sides they have or which dice actually count for anything.” Businesses that focus on uncertainty, says Patnaik, “actually delude themselves into thinking that they have a handle on things. Ah, ambiguity; it can be such a bitch.”

“Technology forces disruption, and not all of the change will be good. Optimists look to all the excitement. Pessimists look to all that gets lost. They’re both right. How you react depends on what you have to gain versus what you have to lose.”

Yet while pessimists may be emotionally calmed by their fretting, it will not aid them practically. The pragmatic course is not to hide from the change, but to approach it head-on. Thurston offers this vision: “Imagine a future where people are resistant to stasis, where they’re used to speed. A world that slows down if there are fewer options–that’s old thinking and frustrating. Stimulus becomes the new normal.”

via This Is Generation Flux: Meet The Pioneers Of The New (And Chaotic) Frontier Of Business | Fast Company.

11 years, 10 months ago

Active Information: Streaming through Computational World, Changing change via experimentation platforms

My latest posts on the HPIO Active Information blog:

Streaming through a Computational World — (most popular post to date)

To take advantage of the computational world, or the nearer term internet of things, we need to infuse smarts throughout our data collection networks.  We need to employ up-front and intermediate filters, traffic cops, aggregators, pattern detectors, and intelligent agents.  We need to get over being data hoarders, and have the astuteness to leave data behind.

Busting cultural resistance via experimentation platforms — (changing change)

Culture, mistrust of the data, lack of interest. These very human factors are adoption barriers for 46% of the respondents. Yet, these barriers aren’t new. Nor, confined to big data and advanced analytics. To change a culture, you need to bring proof to the table.  And proof requires hands-on experimentation and real-world data. We need data to prove that we need data. How will we get that?

Related posts:

  1. Recent Active Information Writing: Crash-proof code, data lessons & infographics
  2. Active Information Writing
  3. Active Information: Reclaim the “I” in CIO, Big Data & Collective Intelligence
12 years, 3 months ago

Data Thought for Tomorrow

Over on Active Information, I wrote a post inspired by a recent consult.  As I was thinking about the post, and the consult, I scribbled and then preview tweeted the following:

“Data isn’t just a mechanism to manage the business you have, it’s a tool to learn what business you could be in.”

Read the post.  Implement the message.

Related posts:

  1. Active Information: Data, rather than brute force and sheer will, wins races
  2. Recent Active Information Writing: Crash-proof code, data lessons & infographics
  3. Active Information: Data-Driven Business Innovation