Fridge cams and robot projectors

A Happy New Year to you all, and welcome back.  The first week back after the Christmas break always seems longer than 5 days, and the things we talked about before Christmas a dim and distant memory. But, we son get back into the swing of things, and this week I've been having some discussions about setting up a Digital transformation team - I dont think it wil be called that, but that's it's working name.

We've also had a Process Improvement Unit Steering Group where we had a report form a recent event to improve and streamline the production of our prospectus which has been very successful.

I'm doing a bit of work over the next few weeks to help another University review its IT systems and services, and I've spent a day there getting to know the IT staff.

Finally, I've been keeping my eye on what's been going on at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. New technologies often appear in the consumer space first, and it important we keep up to date with them. Things that have caught my eye this year include wearable gadgets, which are getting smaller, and more integrated with clothing, 3D printing, which is quickly becoming mainstream, and virtual reality.

Some of the weirder gadgets include the smart fridge cam
 
which takes a picture of the inside of your fridge everytime the door opens so you can check what's on the shelves whilst you're shopping.





And the Tipron - a cross between a robot and projector. Apparently it learns the layout of your house and can wander into your bedroom and project the weather forecast onto the wall...  Spooky!

An inspirational morning...

This morning's session was brilliant - 4 excellent speakers, and we started with a solar eclipse!  A couple of weeks ago we'd decided to put the start time back, to allow people to watch it, and I've spent the last few days worrying that it would be cloudy and we wouldn't see anything. But, the sun was out - before the moon moved over it of course, and delegates got a great view - through the special glasses of course - don't they look cool!

We had four speakers - the first three talking about future trends and the last truly inspiational. Because of staring late we didn't have a break, but well done to all the delegates, and speakers for sticking with it. I was chairing the session, so wasn't taking notes for this blog, so these are just a few of my thoughts and memories.

The first session was Nick Jones from Gartner talking about trends in mobile technology. He covered the different platforms, operating systems, apis, app development tools etc, and what we should be looking out for. Secure the app and the data, don't try and secure the device was a key point. Watch the consumer space, that's where the innovation is. And we need to up our game in terms of user experience. Think gamification and employ psychologists for really good UX.

Next was Michael Wignall, National Technology Officer for Microsoft UK, who talked about when Digital Life meets Digital work. I think I can best illustrate the world he described by sharing the video he showed. Two different women, one a scientist looking for project work, and one an executive looking for a scientist.



What was really cool about that - all the technology in it is either in beta or in development right now. And no-one logged in to anything!


Third up was LJ Rich, presenter on BBC Click, journalist and musician. Boy was she lively. Her talk was pure "presentational caffeine".

 It was a brilliant, manic look at so many different examples of new technologies, especially around the internet of things. Who could forget the device that makes cauliflower taste of chips.



or brain controlled wearable cat ears (I so want a pair....).

Or this water based interface - great for playing games in the bath!



Out final speaker was Baroness Grey-Thomson. Luckily she didn't mind being called Tanni. One of the greatest paralympians ever. Winner of 11 gold medals, holder of over 20 world records, and 6 time winner of the London marathon.

She was truly inspirational. The whole room was engrossed. Very funny, interesting, personable, and some great anecdotes with serious messages.  Ejected at the age of ten from a cinema for being a fire risk in her wheelchair, she was taught the most appropriate response by her mother  "I have never spontaneously combusted in my life". She told us to always do the best we can, to be nice to people around us, that "technology can help me to make the best contribution I possibly can", and that parking in a disabled space without a blue badge should be a criminal offence! Truly inspiring end to the conference.

Looking ahead to 2025

Jeff Haywood, VP for Digital Education at Edinburgh University
Post compulsory education in an even more technology rich world.

Technologies are not in a vacuum, but are socially shaped
They arise and are used in response to need
By 2025 there will be new technologies that we can't imagine today.

What sorts of things will we have to take account of over next few years?

Over next few years, we will see an increasing desire to develop an HE system that is fit for purpose in the 21st century. Political desire for change and modernisation will be in a policy agenda. Big consequence for the systems we use, and for the suppliers.

NMC horizon report in 2014 set out the significant challenges impeding higher education technology adoption in 3 categories:
Solveable
Low digital fluency of faculty
Relative lack of rewards for teaching

Difficult
Competition from new models of education
Scaling teaching innovation

Wicked ( complex to define, much less address)
Expanding access
Keeping education relevant

"IT has been extremely consequential in higher education over the last 25 years, but principally in output enhancing ways that do not show up in the usual measure of either productivity or cost per student"
Quote from William Bowen in October 2012

Things we have to look out for
Data based research for all. Will be a significant challenge we all have to grasp. So much data out there, can buy processing, storage analysis tools cheaply. Everybody can do research. How do we bring this in, give people the skills in analysis, data visualisation etc. We will have to engage with it.

Digital data and longevity. This is not just about research data, but our own data. How do we help people create, document, use, store, share and preserve data?

Bring your own technology. Not a threat, but an opportunity. People bring stuff that we don't have to buy, procure, manage or refresh. We would be foolish to ignore or exclude this. How do we capitalise on this? Support it without feeling the need to own or support it.

Open is going to grow. Open data, open science, open publications, open education. Is becoming accepted, and normal by default. Open virtual laboratory. Open Shakespeare. How do we capture citizen science? It will happen anyway.

Technology futures that will impact education:

Security, identity, surveillance, malevolence
Ubiquity of fast internet
Mobile everything and wearables
Internet of things, consumer devices and instrumentation
Semantic web and ubiquitous information, find and digitise on demand
Intelligent agents. Helping us to do things at scale.
Data driven world, analytics, predictive, on demand compute
Personalisation. Me+free+easy models will dominate
Video/audio will be easier than text
Speech recognition. Any voice instantly.
Real time translation. May not be a dominant language in future. Will radically change international collaboration
Digital/physical co presence. Think Princess Leia in Star Wars. Will radically change virtual meetings.
Social Internet. Collaboration and mass crowd sourcing
3d printing will be common, fast and cheap.





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Diamond and MOOC hype

Our new building, The Diamond is really coming along now - it looks fantastic. The base layer of the cladding is on, you can see the pods inside, and the spiral staircase has been installed. hopefully the aluminium cladding will start to go on in the next few days. There's a great webcam of the construction site here. This screenshot taken a couple of minutes ago shows the huge study pod from the east of the building, and the cladding panels stacked up ready to go on the left.

We're on target to open for September 2015, and this week we've been having discussions about commissioning and fitting out the building. There's a lot of work for us to do!  The network to commission - this building will increase the size of our campus network by 10% - the teaching technologies in the pool teaching space to install and commission, over 700 PCs to install, and all of the creative media spaces to be kitted out. We'll be looking to dedicate people to work on this to make sure everything goes to plan.

Also this week we've had an call with a Gartner analyst about the future of technolgies in teaching. Some of the up and coming ones including Learning Analytics and Adaptive Learning, and existing ones such as MOOCs. Interestingly Gartners latest education hype cycle have MOOCs heading off into the trough of disillusionment, and disappearing before they ever reach a plateau. That's mainly due to a lack of a sustainable business model for them, and their view is that once the hype surrounding them has gone, they will transform into something different. This year's hype cycle has some interesting stuff on it - must find time to study it in a bit more detail.

The network always wins

Every day there is a special lunch for CIOs with an invited speaker. Today was the author Pete Hinssen and he was fantastic! His latest book, The Network Always Wins I supposed to be very good, but I shall let you know as we were given a copy!

His topic was disruption and he gave a fascinating, entertaining and humourous talk. I hope it was recorded as I'd like to show it to colleagues. I took some notes of the key points he made which are below, might be a bit disjointed but should give you a flavour of what he was talking about.


Technology has never been more interesting, and has never been more disruptive. Technology has become normal.
For example, in July 1980 10 megabyte hard drive was on sale for $4000.
Today you can buy a bracelet which turns into a drone which flies out and takes the perfect selfie, then turns back into a bracelet again. ( note to self. I want

Technology is addictive today. The world is hooked.
Technology is relevant today.
In the old world, technology was special. Not any more.
Impact on society huge.
Huge changes in technology trigger changes in society.
Media, marketing and advertising, and retail have been disrupted.
Even software has, it used to be expensive and difficult now it's cheap and easy.

Information is core to everything we do. Information behaviour changes faster than information systems. It isn't static anymore. It flows.
We are all now connected.
But, networks run on platforms, and there are only five key ones, known as GAFAA they are:
Google; Apple; Facebook; Amazon; Alibaba


Key question for us - in this age of disruption are we going to be active or passive?

Cloud companies are springing up all ver. There's a new "sharing" economy with more than 7000 new platforms in last year. Some examples:
Rent the runway. Rent an expensive bag or dress for an evening.
Trunk club - for men who hate to shop. Get a box of stuff a month. Keep what you like, send back what you don't.

Airbandb Is enormous but it has an IT dept of 3 people. They do everything with Amazon web services


Everything is a network. Not about technology anymore. Networks are being fuelled with information.
Linear thinking is gone.
Organisations have to become networks.

Silicon Valley is changing. Because the role of technology is changing. A 26 year old in a hoodie could be the next big player.


We are in the age of disruption. Radical innovation is here. Look at the driverless car. Google have started delivering shopping in California. Why? Because they have Google maps, lots of algorithms, drones, driverless cars and robots. Soon a driverless car will deliver your shopping and a robot bring it to the door.

Watch the documentary called "Humans need not apply" about machines taking over jobs currently done by humans.

This year a robot built out of lego and a smartphone broke the world record for solving a solve a rubrics cube.

Summary - Technology is changing society and economics. Innovation is non linear.
Can we as CIOs reinvent ourselves to be active and not passive in this era?


Great talk, and my favourite slide was this one to illustrate a particular organisational culture....



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Top ten business trends and strategic technologies in education

Next session is looking at business trends in education and what strategic technologies we should be implementing to support them.

The goal: scaleable, affordable, quality education.
Because:
More people will need more skills
More people will need to re-skill more often
More people are more mobile

Also, cognitive machines will start to take over some jobs. Back in 2004 it was still accepted that a computer would never drive a car. Will be need for massive education and reskilling programme.

So, what are the top ten business trends?



Even prestigious research institutions are realising the importance of student success. Taking care of whole student cycle from recruitment to getting them into the right job.

The top technologies we should be concentrating on are:




Most self explanatory. Adaptive learning, when student and teacher discuss how learning can be made better. Exostructure is SOA by another name. ie not just infrastructure. Services are connected to from outside.
Digital assessment. If we do more online learning, which we will have to do for scale, will need to have way of assessing, and to know who we're assessing, and to trust them to be not cheating.

Then can start to match them up. Not a one to one relationship.



Gartner have provided us with a toolkit to look in more depth at the trends and technologies, to put them in an order relevant to us, and to add new ones.
So my action plan is to make a top ten list relevant to the University of Sheffield. To socialise this with stakeholders and CiCS to get some joint ownership. To build the lists into strategic and tactical planning and refer to hem frequently. And to refresh the list every 6 months.


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Futurology and the end of Digifest

Final talk was from a Futurologist - Ray Hammond. Accepting that "Futurology" was an odd name, Ray began by postulating that we have no language for future technologies. This causes problems with adopting new technology. Some good examples:

What we now know as the projector, was originally called a magic lantern
The train - an iron horse
A fridge - an ice box
The car - a horseless carriage

Currently we have something called a mobile phone.  The language  "mobile phone" is as much use to describe its future as "horseless carriage" was to describe the future of the car

A recent report has estimated that 47% of jobs that exist today won't exist in 20 years time. So, how do we prepare students for jobs that don't yet exist? We need to ensure that they have instilled in them a love of constant learning and adapting to change

There are 6 drivers for the huge changes we are going to see over the next 20 years:

Asymmetric population growth.  The population will rise in sub-saharan Africa, in SE Asia, and in other parts of the developing world.  In 20 years time 50% more people will need fresh water, food and energy. Can we find it on this planet? Big technology driver.

Continuing climate change

Energy. We will need cleaner energy supplies at a time when demand is rising

Continuing modern globalisation. When done ethically and sustainably, this is the greatest force for good. Brings a future to the poorest people. Offers opportunity for growth and development.

Medical revolutions in:
DNA decoding
Stem cell treatments
Nanoscale medicine
Will mean that we will all live longer

Accelerating and exponential technology development

He then gave a scenario about what the world might be like in 30 years - where an implant called Maria is behind his left ear.....

)


Great talk, and an appropriate end to what has been an excellent two days. I think the format - a mixture of plenary sessions, workshops, panel discussions and expert speakers worked well. And the slightly wacky festival atmosphere was very appealing.

There was a groovy booth where you could have photos taken

a digital dream wall, where some great artists illustrated our suggestions on the future of education

and some of us got to take the table decorations home from the Digifeast!

Top Ten

As well as large sessions, there's round table discussions, workshops and one to one sessions with Gartner analysts to schedule in. This afternoon I had a session with Simon Mingay who ran a workshop for us recently on service portfolios, discussing with him our latest thinking on where we might go with our service catalogue and transforming it into a portfolio. It was great, well worth it. Lots more to think about now.

This afternoon finished with a session on the top ten strategic technology trends that CIOs should be aware of and factoring into their planning over the next three years. In summary they are:

Mobile Device Diversity & Management
Mobile Apps & Applications
The Internet of Everything
Hybrid Cloud & IT as Service Broker
Cloud/Client Architecture
The Era of Personal Cloud
Software Defined Anything
Web-Scale IT
Smart Machines
3D Printing

Most are self explanatory and not surprising. But a couple of interesting ones.
So, some notes about each one. I might not quite have grasped some of them, but I use the excuse that it's late in the day and I'm tired. :-)

Mobile Device Diversity & Management
No single vendor will dominate, will still be multiple phone and tablet platforms.
Will be many form factors, screen sizes, interaction styles, platforms, architectures. Knowledge workers will use at least 3 to 5 devices by 2016.
Will be management and security issues but many opportunities including new ways of working.

Mobile Apps & Applications
Will be much richer User Interface models – Voice, Video, (gestures, eye tracking).
Microsoft, Google and Apple will battle for leadership.

The Internet of Everything
Connected stuff. Lots of it.

Hybrid Cloud & IT as Service Broker
Hybrid is the future. Along with garlic bread.
It's about linking internal systems with external services.
Combining services to add value.
ITs role will be as an adviser, broker, provider and integrator.

Cloud/Client Architecture
This is very important. It's also very technical. My mind might have wandered off a bit here....

The Era of Personal Cloud
Center of each user's personal digital ecosystem, a unique collection of services for each user, assembled and evolved by each user.
It's the glue connecting the devices and services they choose to
use daily.

Software Defined Anything
Everything will be programmable.
Will have implications. Not sure I understood what they were.
We will live in an API economy though.

Web-Scale IT
A pattern of computing that delivers the capabilities of large scale cloud service providers, eg Amazon, Google. They have had to build their own infrastructure. Some of their best practices will leak down to our environment, eg DevOpps.

Smart Machines
These are cool, and I've blogged about them before.

3D Printing
Growing area. Will be lots of opportunities. Work out what they might be for us.

The end. Thank you.



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Much more than robots

Session on Smart Machines, the next big disruption.

Apparently the era of smart machines is emerging now.

So, what are they?
Robots aren't necessarily smart!

Some common features:
They encroach on human space: Do what we thought only humans could do
Surprise: We didn't think technology could do that
Some smart machines are only clever brute force automation eg the Google Self Driving Car

Some technologies smarter than others. Really clever ones are self learning, autonomous, self guided, adaptive, creates its own rules, seeks data to test hypotheses, detects novelty.
Deep learning, eg language translation.
If if's not autonomous, it's not smart. Have to be able to do things on their own.

Some examples
Movers - autonomous vehicles
Kivas. Work in warehouses, collect items for dispatch

Robotic pack animal. Follows soldier. Recognises voice commands



This truck is used in mines. Autonomously drives, navigates around people, rock slides etc.




X47b drone just being developed. Can land and take off autonomously
Curiosity Rover on Mars another good example.

Sages - information based helpers
Virtual personal assistants
Showed a video clip from an Apple vision for a Knowledge navigator, produced in 1987. Demonstrated many of the things we have now, voice recognition, context etc. Siri hasn't quite got there yet.


Google are building a set of personal assistant technologies. GoogleNow.

Smart advisors
Focuses on content, is an expert on particular areas.
IBM's Watson best example. Can be delivered to a smart phone. Some examples of its use:
Clinical oncology. Recommending treatment plans. Can digest and analyse scientific knowledge in seconds.
Accelerating medical research. Retirement account planning.
All done with co development

E discovery
Can digest numerical data eg sales reports, and create textual analysis using AI technologies. Removes perceptual biases.
This is a good example of a textual analysis from a completely numerical sales report.




Doers
Baxter. World friendliest robot. Grab it's hand and show it what to do.
Robotic personal assistants. Observant, predictive. For people who need physical help.

This is a whole new way of people and technology working together to be far more effective than before.
Will be competitive advantage in using these technologies.

Smarter machines and smarter people will raise performance and lower costs.
But will there be significant unemployment? Truck drivers?
Will in some cases replace people. But will also assist, advise, help and extend people.
By 2020 there will be personal smart machines. Bring your own robot? Consumerisation will play big role in development of smart machines.

Expert advisors, Watson type machines, will start to take off in 2015
Personal agents by 2017
Autonomous vehicles by 2023

Some actions for us:
Can we exploit technologies like Watson to provide smart advisors using our specialist knowledge?
Could any part of our organisation benefit from being advised by smart advisors?
Look at implications of virtual personal assistants, security, privacy etc. Our employees and customers will use them, and we need to be prepared.
Smart machines will assist, advise, extend, observe and help knowledge workers to perform non routine tasks. Look at where we could pursue smart machine technologies.

Really interesting talk, showing that smart machines are so much more than Robots. Watson looks really cool. How could Universities, with our huge amount of specialist knowledge, use it?

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Has ePaper finally arrived?

One day I'll make it to CES (Consumer Electronics Show) which has just started in Las Vegas. Being a bit of a gadget girl I'm sure I'd be in seventh heaven, and it's always good to see your initials trending :-)

Today PaperTab was revealed - a collaboration between Intel, Queen's University Canada and Plastic Logic (a British firm). A flexible, paper thin tablet which looks and feels like paper. You can flick through a document by bending the screen, and join them together to make bigger displays. Will paper ever be the same again?

What next?

One of the hardest things after a conference is putting what you learned  into practice. It's so easy to come back and just get back into the same old routine.

The Gartner one I've just been to was different from most others I go to as it covers every sector, and only a small number of attendees are from education. There were just over 4000 attendees, nearly half of them at CI O level, and a real mix of areas covered. It's good for us to look outside of our sector and see what the rest of the world is doing.

So these are just my first thoughts on what I think we need to be doing and the areas that we need to concentrate on.

Most of the current trends are driven by the consumerisation of IT, BYOD (bring your own device) and the wide adoption of social media, all fuelled by mobility and cloud services.

Taking social media first,  we're getting pretty good at using it in the department. I posted about it a couple of weeks ago, and it was picked up by Brian Kelly in his post here, which gave us a lot of kudos! It is definitely here to stay and isn't going to go away at all, so we really do need to find ways of making it work for us. My biggest challenge is getting more of the department to engage with it.

Mobility is another area we need to prioritise. We have been ahead of the game in terms of the development of our mobile app, and we need to really push ahead with it again. I know we have plans for doing so, and have found some resource,  but we need to put the development of web based, mobile, transactional services at the forefront of what we do.  We need mobile friendly web sites and services as well as dedicated apps.  There's also the question of having the right infrastructure in place, including pervasive wireless, and good support structures.

Cloud is another area where we have begun to develop, our mail and calendar services for all staff and students are in the cloud, and increasingly our document storage is as people are moving to Google docs and Dropbox. There's still a lot more we can do, and we need to consider cloud based services alongside in house ones wherever it's appropriate. The development of SaaS and IaaS will make this increasingly an option .

There's some great developments coming up, including context computing,  and tracking them through things like the Gartner hype cycles is a challenge which we need to address and then choosethe ones to implement to bring the biggest benefits.

So, we need a reliable, robust infrastructure, with an agile development framework so that we can respond quickly to changes and move more towards innovative services rather than keeping the lights on. So, that's Monday sorted as we work out how best to achieve that!

Context computing

A good session this morning on context computing.
Context is based on a set of principles and technologies designed to make services more usable, relevant and fun. Using more information sources, more social information leads to  hyper personalisation of services.  It's the integration of mobile, social, digital and physical worlds.
Theres a lot of it already about. Face recognition and emotional detection already being used on vending machines in Japan so they can make judgements about what you might want. 
Smart products exist, eg glasses with electronics in so know when full or empty and can order your next drink.

Consumers are motivated by emotions. Detection of emotions will be increasingly important in next few years.

By 2014 40% of smart phone users will opt in to context services that track you. Will trade off some privacy for better services.

Last decade of Internet dominated by search, a pull technology. Next decade will be dominated by proactive push technologies.  Will be personalised and involve social information and be  multi channel.
Information will be key, and will be collected in  4 key areas:
Intent. What does user want or want to do?
Environment. The current state of user. Where are they, what are they doing. Social dimension, community
 Identity, validating who you are, reputation information.

 Will be very complex, and one of the biggest challenges will be that all this information comes from different places. Currently no standards. Will require sophisticated information models.

New technologies being developed such as Emotion ML, a mark up language to tag events with emotional context.

Mobile consumer application platforms becoming increasingly important as most of the information necessary for contextual computing  will come from mobile devices.  Many different architectures exist, Apple and Google are taking an early lead, but lots of others coming up eg Appcelerator and Kony. Gartner have a  magic quadrant for MCAPs which is worth a look.

Ensemble interaction being developed, ie  interactions that cross more than  one device. Eg TV and mobiles. So, you could be watching TV, like the look of some clothes someone is wearing,  point mobile phone camera at screen, find what they're wearing and buy it.  This is already possible.  A  NFC (near field communication) enabled phone will pick up information from smart posters. 
Smart posters exist  in Japan with web cam in it, looks at you and decides about what sort of advert to show you and enables you to pick up a discount voucher on your phone. 

Starhub have developed  smart changing rooms which detect the RFID tag in clothes you're trying on and chooses the music to play. Hmm, not sure about that one!

Social media very important to context. Can deduce influencers.already developing " Pay with a tweet" for music downloads, Ie pay for a music track by tweeting about it. 

Managing risk, the dark side of context aware computing.
Gartner predicts that Google, Microsoft, Nokia and Apple will continuously track daily journeys and digital habits for 10% of the worl'ds population by 2015.
Some people will find this creepy and won't want it. Some will see that it gives them better services and see the advantages. 
Privacy will be important. Need simple, transparent privacy policies, and easy ways to opt out, and to correct deductions about behaviour.

Good session to finish the conference on, and some interesting things on the horizon. 

How Internet giants plan to take over the physical world

Final session today was another Maverick one! This was looking at how traditional business models and industries might be disrupted by the large Internet companies moving into them.
Everything will be connected in 2016 and beyond.
More than 25% of commercial and tourist places will be found on social networks allowing users to check in
Over 10% of consumer items will have an IP address
20+ billion devices will be connected to the Internet
More than 50% of US population will have a profile on a social network

So, if everything is connected to the Internet , Internet business modules will apply in the physical world, and will take away market share. Google could take over parking. Connect parking spaces to internet, mash up with google maps....

A few areas were explored and presented as battles. 

Battle 1: Retail
Amazon vs the retailers.
By 2016 more than 5% of digital transactions will be initiated from an image, video, audio or sensor captured in the physical world. Can already take a picture of an item in the Amazon app, and it will recognise it and direct you to one click purchase. So you can be in a shop, comparing prices, and ordering from amazon. 

Battle 2: Advertising
Google vs print, broadcast, signage
By 2016 more than 5% of search queries will be initiated from an image, video, audio or sensor captured on a mobile device not a keyboard. Already possible in google. Take a picture of things, google will search. When this image recognition improves, anything in the physical world is a search term.

Battle 3:  Manufacturing
Google vs standard manufacturing.
3D printing can already manufacture things with moving parts etc. in future will be able to manufacture toys at home. Google already has a 3D model warehouse. 
Will manufacturers get into selling 3D models?  

Battle 4 public sector
Radnet. A public sector service in the US for measuring for radiation
vs
Pachnet. A portal for the Internet of things. If you use search term "radiation" find everything streaming information about radiation levels, lots in Japan. 

Battle 5: Payment
Apple iTunes vs Visa, MasterCard etc
Mobile payment will soon be mainstream in phones, but who will get the payment transaction? Visa, MasterCard etc wants to be behind transaction, but what if apple have own payment system, so charged to iTunes account. What if apple could bring transaction cost down?

Battle 6: Social public services
Social workers vs Facebook
Research has shown that with the right algorithms you can determine depression etc in students. By analysing their Facebook updates. Also, when they display those symptoms, others in their social networks reach out to help them.  Won't put social workers out of business, but could be complementary to them.

Battle 7: Car insurance
Google vs insurance companies
Pay as you drive insurance exists in some places. In other places you pay premium at beginning of year. Pay as you drive is based on the mileage that you do and is now starting to look at other factors including how fast you accelerate and decelerate, also where you go.  Who's better at tracking driving? Satnav paired with an insurance company? Or Google via your android phone? 

Battle 8: Healthcare
Currently sites like WebMD are reference sites only, no attempt is made to give medical advice. But, if you commie this information with smart phones? There are already apps to calculate risk of skin cancer, do blood analyses. Currently assessing risk not making diagnosis. But if they get better? Remote diagnosis and Internet prescriptions?

Lots of opportunities. Sometimes only need a little bit of extra technology, image recognition, NFC, location awareness, to have big impact. 

Finished with a picture of what looked like a shop with a guy scanning items in it. Only it wasn't a shop, it was a subway wall in Korea covered with a picture of items on shelves. You can take a picture of the items, and it adds them to you shopping basket and delivers them to you, shopping whilst waiting for the subway.   Online sales have increased by 130% since its introduction?

Emerging trends

Another Nick Jones session early this morning, on emerging trends  - what's hot, and what should we be looking out for. 

1800 different technologies are currently being tracked by  Gartner on their hype cycles. We need to be good at tracking technologies, and focussing our attention on the most relevant ones. Also need to be aware that opportunities don't come from technology alone but from the intersection of technology and society. 

Seem trends to watch:

Lifelogging -Lots of examples, including twitter where  200m tweets per day are sent.  Being driven by ubiquitous CCTV and mobile phone camers, instant upload to social media, Image tagging and search, cheap storage.
Lots of business opportunities, especially in data analysis and predictive modelling. 

Technology in healthcare, including  on-body monitoring technologies. Bluetooth 4 allows mobile phone to talk to low power sensors. Eg blood pressure sensors.  This is leading to new preventative services and analysis of risk.  Also a trend for individuals to take more responsibility for their own health.  Evidence based healthcare a trend to track.

Internet of things. More a concept than a technology, based on  embedded low cost sensors and low cost wireless communications or near field communication.  Whole generation of new, smart products. You can already buy intelligent plant pots where plants tweet when they need watering. In the near future there'll be  10s of billions of smart objects.

Predictive analytics. Passive data capture through sensors, cameras, social media, and real time processing. Lot of interest for sales and marketing, hyperpersonalisation, healthcare.

Natural user interaction making the experience of interacting with technology more friendly. Multitouch and gesture recognition. New displays including 3D. Natural language systems. 

3D printing. Costs are falling and a personal  3d printer is now about € 2500. Is going to revolutionise manufacture. Recently in the  UK a drone aircraft has been designed, printed, assembled and flown in a week.

Robotics will have a  massive impact, especially in healthcare.

Gamification.  A deep understanding of motivation and reward and behavioural design into applications. Lovely example of a speed camera in California where at the end of each month, all drivers who have been under the speed limit are entered into a lottery to win the fines of the people speeding. 

All organisations need to decide which technologies to track. Are tools you can use including the  Hype cycles. If you have a high tolerance to risk, adopt technologies at the beginning of the hype cycle. High risk can give high reward, so you can be selectively aggressive. 

Must have an emerging trends and technologies group which must talk to the business about how they can be used.   Conduct a regular trend scan. Be proactive and follow a process. 

Will machines take over the world?

First session this morning is a Maverick session, not recognised Gartner research, but a personal view. "Judgement day, letting machines run the world."  How far can we use machines to make decisions?

We're moving from automating the simple, to automating the complex. In the next 40 years there will be big changes to what machines can do.
Why do machines make better business decisions than humans? When we make business decisions we think we're acting rationally.  But, it's anything but rational.  Lot of behavioural factors affecting decision making, we're very influenced by behavioural and cognitive biases. Good example, why is there always a €250 bottle of wine on wine list, so you spend more on medium wine so you don't look like a cheapskate.

 Also, so many pressures on decision making, we find it difficult to cope with them. Very volatile economic climate, information volumes exploding,. We're now creating as much information in 2 days as we did up to 2003. Impact of social media, pervasive mobile computing, loss of control.  Traditional decision making methods can't cope. 

Motivation systems can force bad decisions. Eg in a recent fatal airline crash, the pilot ignored 15 automated warnings to go round again.  Turned out pilots were being given bonus if they saved fuel and this was a contributory factor. Pay for performance incentives work best for mechanical tasks. For cognitive tasks, monetary bonuses can result in worse performance. 

Business decisions are all about predicting the future, choosing between different future outcomes.  Machines win in all areas. Machine-based algorithms beat humans on clinical diagnosis, hiring staff, predicting the wine harvest....

Predictive modelling is big business now, and growing.  Machine based models can ask the questions that no-one dare ask and challenge perceived wisdom. Talent management algorithms can be used to hire staff, it lowers turnover, improves retention and has better employee effectiveness.

Machine learning is well established and growing in sophistication. Combination of statistics and brain models. Cognitive chips launched by IBM in August 2011, a combination of programmable and learning synapses. 

Most big business decisions are made by a small team of people with little transparency. Quality of decision making today is not good. Research shows that the more people are involved, the better the decision. Collaborative decision making is a technology that allows people to be involved in decisions, brings greater transparency, and improves the decision making process. 

IBMs Watson computer, massively parallel probabilistic evidence based architecture, developed to win a game show, Jeopardy  in the US. They give you the answer, you have to give the question. It beat two of the champions. and you can see videos on YouTube. It worked by looking for patterns in masses of data, not thinking like we do. Often humans got the answer, but Watson got there quicker.
Will see a new generation of modelling tools over next few years to analyse masses of complex data. 

Machines now can do more than we ever envisaged. We are just at the start of this new wave of technologies. Machines won't replicate what we do, but they imitate what we do. 

Today, we are in a phase of augmented decision making. Humans plus computer agents are better predictors than either on their own. Already in use in supply chain planning and insurance underwriting. Algorithm and model design will become the must have skills during the next 10 years. 

Within 10 years we will be able to hand over most of running a business to machines and they'll do it better than us. Computers will control operational decision making. Humans will focus more on strategic decisions, innovation and risk management.

In the far future, systems that run corporate entities will be linked together, Skynet based economic system! They'll share data and make rational decisions about how resources should be allocated, potentially optimising the global economy. 

Some impacts? Humans  may lose key skills, pilots already forgetting how to fly planes because they rely on computers so much. It may stifle real innovation, and too much automation could cause a system that's too big to fail, or cause massive shocks to the global economy if the models are wrong

Futurists and mindsets

The second session I went to today was delivered by a futurist, and was supposed to tell us what IT leaders need to know about the future. Very entertaining, and delivered in a very energetic style, and he got us to do some small group work, looking at the years 1987 to 2017 and diving them into computational eras. Interestingly most groups came up with the move from mainframe, to internet, to social, but very few groups did anything about the years up to 2017 which is a very long time away in technological terms. Smugly I can say that our group did, thinking that it would be the era of human augmentation. We also worked on what technologies we would stop offering to make way for the new ones, I think he meant services not technologies which led not some debate in our group. Apparently, sustainable successful organisations manage 3 interconnecting technology portfolios. Now, next (3-5 yrs), and later (more than 5yrs). Later is 5 years plus. Most people focus on Now, dream about Later and forget Next. Big data, social media, mobility, and cloud are the four big changes we should be concentrating on when we move our horizons out to 3 years away. Quite entertaining, but not an awful lot I didn't know already.

Next session was the winner of the EDUCAUSE leadership award, Marilyn McMillan, from New York university. She talked about the issues facing IT departments in connecting clients to "sun never sets" services, and especially the introduction of service management. Very relevant to us as we're on that journey as well. These days our customers expect services to be available all the time, just to work, to be able to access them easily but securely, to know what's changed, and how to report a problem and get it fixed.
Requires great deal of process maturity to get provide all of those expectations. To demonstrate customer expectations, Marilyn referred to the Beloit college mindset list, which I'd never heard of, but you can see here, together with past lists so you can see how things have changed.

She finished with her thoughts on leadership, RAISE:
Results with others, for others.
Alignment of purpose and vision
Interdependence needs fostering, can't work on our own.
Sway, and be swayable. Influence, and be influenced
Enthusiasm. Renew your own energies, and uplift the energies of others

Good session.

Is a magazine a broken iPad?

Someone sent me this today - a one year old who thinks a magazine's a broken iPad!



It's lovely, and reminded me of our granddaughter, who has been playing with my iPad since she was just 3, and has needed virtually no instruction on how to do it.  It's been picked up a number of bloggers and commenters today including CNET, who suggested that it would make us weep or giggle, and even if we giggled it would be out of fear for the future. Certainly not in my case - it's just the way things are going and the way kids learn to interact with things.

Off to EDUCAUSE next week, so expect a few conference posts - will try and keep on top of the interesting sessions, but you may have to read them in note form.

Consumerisation of work

Consumerisation of work is happening, can't stop it, have to accommodate it. Can be embraced and managed. Professional people like using their own tools to do the job. Changing nature of work, more communities instead of teams. Need to make employees more self reliant, empower them, so have to relinquish control of the tools they use to do their jobs.

What drives consumerisation?
Social factors: Personal preference, peer influence, personal goals.
Performance: generally speaking consumer products perform better that enterprise devices, easier to use, also have tools the employer doesn't provide such as microblogging,
Economic: consumer technology often costs less as market is bigger, affordable personal purchases, responsibilities and costs transfer to individuals.

Consumer devices have huge diversity in model, OS and capabilities. Smart peripherals are developing. Displays you wear on your wrist to see tweets. Bluetooth devices accessing cloud services.

Rigid standardisation is impossible. Can't hold the line at one platform.
Need to look at new ways of managing and delivering. Standardise on protocols, not platform.

Some possible exceptions:
It's possible that some organisations might standardise on Apple only policy.
Some may have security and compliance demands become too onerous to support multiple platforms
Support costs of diverse devices and platforms may prohibit it

Consumerisation of applications. Exponential growth of apps from app stores, will hit 80 billion by 2014. Many are free or cheap eg Dropbox, document editing and annotating. Corporate app stores being developed. Much easier to develop and deploy applications.

Consumerisation of services. Emerging device plus cloud services eg Kindle
Affordable cloud alternatives to classic applications eg google,docs.
Cloud services for data management, backup, file sharing.
Communication and collaboration in the cloud eg social networking, VOIP, microblogging.
Are challenges including security and support, but can be overcome.

Future technology developments include improved user interactions across multiple devices. Smart TVs interacting with smartphones.
Flexible displays. Transparent displays, looks like pane of glass when turned off.
Mind based interfaces. Already developed is a small hat with EEG sensors plugged into mobile phone which analyses brain signals which can act as remote control for other things.

Technology scanning needs to keep up with consumer technology developments.

Consumerisation of me. Personal informatics. Applications which exist to help you support your personal goals, collecting and analysing information:
Life logging, interpersonal informatics, health and exercise, personal brand management, email sentiment analysis, reducing emotional influence in decisions, email analytics, mobile apps for cognitive behavioural therapy.
Will throw up all sorts of issues in the enterprise. Keep an eye on this!

Corporate Benefits of consumer technology include user satisfaction,technical superiority, performance, cost reduction, innovation

CIOs are trying to balance 4 conflicting goals:
Social goals. Keep the employee happy. Much of the demand for device choice has a social component.
Operational goals. Have to keep the business running. Use of employee owned devices has support implications, what if employee loses own phone?
Financial goals. Have to manage costs. Issues such as roaming data, fixed data caps are a challenge with employee-liable contracts
Risk management. Stopping bad stuff happening, especially in areas such as security and data leakage.

CIOs need to decide how innovative they want to be:
Defensive- enforce rigid control
Reluctant toleration - allow more choice
Opportunists - explore new models such as bring your own
Aggressive - rip up all assumptions. Go for it!

Supporting "bring your own" technology:
Provide community resources.
Provide time limited support
Deliver secure and supportable applications
Have a contingency plan
Educated users
Suggest resources
Outsourcing

Recommendations:
Understand where consumerisation is already being used in your organisation
Review your technology strategy and propose how consumerisation is going to be accommodated
Harness employee enthusiasm for consumer technologies
Create an organisation that can accommodate and profit from consumerisation
Monitor key consumer technologies to better understand future application opportunities and support challenges

Good talk as always from Nick Jones.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Clouds, and the Internet of Things

Yesterday I was at the HEFCE  Cloud Advisory Committee, where we oversee progress on the workstreams that came out of the £12.5m from the University Modernisation Fund for Cloud Computing. Most going well, some slippage but being caught up, and there's some exciting developments which I 'm sure will benefit all of us in the sector. Hopefully there'll be a comprehensive news release and web page available in the next week which I'll be sure to link to which will give you more information.

Today has been an interesting day today. Two of our Unions were taking industrial action, so there was some organising and planning to do to make sure all services were covered, and I had an interesting "Back to the Floor" time when I worked on our main reception desk to help cover lunchbreaks. Luckily it was quiet, and nothing too difficult came up. It was good - nice to meet our customers. Interestingly not a single student who came in knew anything at all about the action - despite having been sent an email about it. More proof, if we needed any, that students don't read University emails often.

Today I tried to settle down to write a presentation I'm giving at EUNIS in a couple of weeks. It's so long ago since I agreed to do it that I had to look at the web site to see what title I'd submitted. Luckily its one I've got plenty of content for - Challenges Are What Make Life Interesting. Trouble is, I've got more challenges than I can fit in a 30 minute talk!  One of the biggest challenges facing us is the consumerisation of IT, and I read an interesting blog post about it yesterday from Brian Madden which sums it up well - The consumerisation of IT is about the fact that today's users can do whatever they want, and you in IT can't stop them even if you wanted to.  He calls it FUIT, and if you're interested you can read why in the post.  I'm looking forward to reading his next post where's he's going to give us some tips on how to deal with it.

The other topic I like to cover in these talks, especially for non IT people, is the Internet of Things. The  way everything is becoming connected to the internet. The fridge that will text you to tell you you've run out of milk, the washing machine that knows when it's broken down, alerts an engineer and orders the right part, smart buildings, the digital wine rack, (I don't keep wine long enough to need one) - the list goes on and on - the BBC had a good article on it today. Interesting stuff, and could lead to all sorts of applications and developments.

Disruptive trends

The second session yesterday morning at the Gartner HE conference had a great title: Enabling and disrupting macroforces affecting the expanding education ecosystem.

Basically we were looking at trends affecting education, started with an interesting comparison, showing that there are few new ideas, just new circumstances.  The Rhind Papyrus dates from 1600 BC, and contains geometrical and arithmetical formulae in what seems to be some sort of reference or revision document. It would have sold for about the price of a small goat.  Now we have iPhone revision apps containing very similar information, retailing at about 1/400th of a small goat. But given that an iPhone cost about 1.5 times the cost of a small goat, perhaps a different ROI calculation is needed!

A number of different macroforces were examined including changes in demand for education, especially globally.  There’s also the move to decrease public funding, and involvement of other suppliers in education provision. Education is continuing its transformation into a business with all the cultural and managerial impact that has.

Interestingly, the speaker suggested that the Green movement has lost momentum, and green IT is now more about cost savings than being green. I’m not sure whether I agree. There is uncertainty about the infrastructure, and whether it is sufficient for future developments. It is already difficult to build data centres in London because the power grid can't take it, and in India there are more people with access to mobiles than toilets. Green issues are not in the top 10 of CIO business priorities according to Gartner, although it does appear at number 9 in the UCISA Top Concerns survey as something likely to increase in priority.

In terms of the economy, Cost control is the word of the day (has it ever been any different?), and we need to understand the cost of our services.

Technology changes include the death of distance, or the huge increase in connectivity, coupled with consumerisation of IT. Facebook has 0.66billion users – that makes it the third largest country in the world behind India and China!

Some interesting heat maps about what our current priorities are – in a recent CIO survey the top strategy in every country surveyed was developing or managing a flexible infrastructure.  Technology, governance and cost all featured high.  There was little focus on the business, or customer facing services.

One of the other trends we looked at was outsourcing, especially the possibilities of outsourcing parts of the infrastructure. Interestingly Education is bottom of list in terms of percentage of outsourcing compared to other sectors.

In one of the later sessions as a group we had to list what we thought were the most disruptive trends affecting us, and then vote on the top, in the three different areas of technology, business and society. In summary:

In technology
Consumerisation and mobility came out top

In society:
Employability, and changing modes of learning eg lifelong and workplace learning won

In business:
Funding and Internationalisation were the most popular.

There are many ways of analyzing these trends and the affect they might have on our business, and Gartner provides tools such as the technology radar screen and the hype cycles. But, all trends need to be analysed from a business perspective, not a technology one.