WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

Knowing what information is captured about you, stored and the digital profiles that is created behind the scenes as you browse the web is a first step in regaining control over our digital twin so we can have better digital lives.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

Surveillance is part of the web browsing experience mostly due to ads and social beacons. Trying to block them off not only degrades the user experience but may not provide the expected benefits as it may provide a different type of surveillance. Ad blocking does not appear to be the solution after all. So what can provide more privacy when surfing the web? The question remains open.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

Daily activities leave digital traces that can be leveraged to improve processes and deliver value in organizations. We often overlook this data in organizations but we should realize that companies such as Facebook, Google, Apple and others have invested huge amounts of efforts to dig into the data exhaust of our digital and physical world activities in order to extract, infer, predict our tastes and behaviour. If it works for them, it should work for us as well, no?

AI and Big Data are being applied to identity verification by a startup that has received 25M in funding and is poaching employees from Google.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

AI and other techniques will provide enhance capabilities to deter theft and privacy violations. They will become essential tools in digital transformation of businesses. For example, UBER is using Onfido to verify that people are who they claim they are, thus making their service better able to curb credit card theft, and protect drivers by ensuring their passengers can be tracked is they behave inappropriately. 

A great reference if you are in the market to build your own eCommerce solution.

Use this link to access the Forrester report for free on solutions to help protect your organization from the digital threats your corporation faces on its brand, cyber presence or physical locations.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

First, the paper describes the various risks you may face in a digital world. If you don'T know the difference between OSINT, TECHINT, SIGINT, HUMINT, CHINT then you must read it.

Good to know.

Second, it lists the various ways in which you can protect yourself.

Interesting.

Finally, it lists tools you can use to secure your company.

Useful.

GE's industrial Internet means that in the future they may be best known for their infrastructure than their products and devices. Watch for it.

More importantly, the industrial internet and Predix tools came out of a strong digital transformation vision carried out by an exceptional Chief Digital Officer (CDO), Linda Boff. See her profile for more details: http://cdoclub.com/us-chief-digital-officer-of-the-year-linda-boff-on-digital-transformation-at-ge/ 

I wrote about GE industrial internet in the past: see here http://www.scoop.it/t/digital-transformation-of-businesses?q=ge 

Whichever you select, use a password manager. Do it now.

(in french)

Afraid that Google and others know too much about you? Want to know how to live and work outside of the major tools and solutions? This blog post offers a list of solutions to help you do just that.

A detailed how-to article on how to build a chat bot using Zapier, a popular online programming automation tool.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

Robots or "bots" will become more and more common in the near future as they integrate seamlessly into our most common chat programs such as Facebook messenger. They will become popular because they allow any company to have a presence inside popular mobile apps and do not require any installation from users: they just type in requests and get responses in return. Directions, orders, and information will be streamed by those autonomous programs to help you fulfill daily tasks. This article highlights an important aspect of bot programming: they will become easier and easier to create, especially for common and recurring problems.

The company automated insights uses its AI tools to automatically write summary of baseball games (http://bit.ly/2a9g7qR), financial portfolio (http://bit.ly/2a9gG3T), and many other. This blog describes many of these applications. 

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

I wrote about automated insights in the past (http://sco.lt/7FRff7) as it was starting and have been watching ever since. It is important to take notice that AI has been hired by the Associated Press to write summary texts that go straight to the wire without human intervention (http://sco.lt/7FRff7). 

This is a trend worth watching as it means AI is slowing replacing human workers with machine intelligence in fields that were previously though impossible - here the redaction of human readable texts and stories. I wrote about data on why no job is safe from automatization and robotization (http://sco.lt/64xeyX).

Anyone putting together a digital strategy must absolutely consider the use of such AI tools in the coming years, and thus have a roadmap with trials starting as soon as NOW.

Gartner has mapped the different skills, technologies and functional areas that digital marketers should master.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

Although I've never been a fan of the transit map analogy, I find this one captures one key message for marketing professionals: digital marketing is different than traditional marketing in the tools, technologies and skills required. As the diagram shows, they are more akin to software programming than they are of the traditional marketing curriculum. For those  that do not yet have those skills in-house, get help. For those that have the skills, make sure they are sharp and remain up-to-date because this technology world changes rapidly.

Explain what dark traffic is - actually direct in google analytics - and explains how to reduce it in order to improve analytics results.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

Analytics is an essential of digital transformation and very often the primary reason to go digital as it provides ability to monitor exactly what customers are doing, of ten in realtime. However, managing and exploiting the analytics data requires very careful analysis and planning and posting such as this one provides methods to improve the quality of your analysis and improve the visibility you get from your digital investment.

Every company has products, websites, systems and solutions that require a changelog to be kept to ensure end users know about the changes as they occur. This is the perfect tool for that.

A blog post that describes tools and solutions to help become paper free.

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

There is no need for paper anymore and solutions like this show that it is possible to go paper free quite easilly especially given the ubiquitous availability of mobile phones and cloud internet access. I have been doing much of these steps since 2010 when I acquired a fujitsu scansnap paper scanner and started to systematically scan every document I receive via snail mail.

Face recognition, gender detection, and age estimation are all now possible with this open source suite of software code. This should pave the way for wide adoption in all kind of applications, from retail store security cameras to hand held camera devices such as the narrative camera or others. I can think of so many use cases - both good and bad - where this technology can be deployed. Just a question of time...

http://getnarrative.com/

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/parashoot-smart-wearable-video-mini-hd-camera 

http://www.getperfectmemory.com/ 

This guy is obviously biased towards Magento but it is nice to see different solutions compared as is the case here. In particular, look at slide #9. Thank you Francois Medioni for the reference.

Been tracking this technology landscape since its beginning in 2011 when it only referenced 150 companies. This remains one of the best tool to make CMOs and other executives understand that marketing is technology enabled and a leader in digital transformation in the organization.

Amazing reference of over 800 companies that deliver solutions for marketing automation and other marketing activities.