WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

In this brief, we highlight why Canada needs a digital identity system, how other countries have made progress in this area and the lessons we can learn from those experiences to build a system in Canada.

Think of the trends we’ve seen emerge in recent years:

• Sensors and actuators, including implantables and wearables, that let us capture more data and impressions from more objects in more places, and that affect the environment around them.
• Ubiquitous computing and hyperconnectivity, which exponentially increase the flow of data between people and devices and among devices themselves.
• Nanotechnology and nanomaterials, which let us build ever more complex devices at microscopic scale.
• Artificial intelligence, in which algorithms become increasingly capable of making decisions based on past performance and desired results.
• Vision as an interface to participate in and control augmented and virtual reality
• Blockchain technology, which makes all kinds of digital transactions secure, verifiable, and potentially automatic.

As I keep repeating, CAPEX is both a prerequisite to play in the big boy cloud and confirmation of customer success. Both IBM and Oracle are tens of billions of dollars in cloud infrastructure CAPEX behind Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Oracle’s spending has at least ticked up, but their spending is not enough to keep pace, much less to have any hope of catching up to the infrastructure of the big three.

Economist Andrew McAfee suggests that, yes, probably, droids will take our jobs -- or at least the kinds of jobs we know now. In this far-seeing talk, he thinks through what future jobs might look like, and how to educate coming generations to hold them.

The notion of value creation and capture is a core component of business and the models that drive it. While historically viewed with a traditional product mindset, several emerging forces will alter this basic tenet of business.

Google has gathered so much data, in so many areas, that it’s now crunching it together and creating features that Apple can’t make—surrounding Google Maps with a moat of time.

For most companies, agile is confined to software development—but it doesn’t need to be. Increasingly, forward-thinking companies are taking advantage of the same agile techniques that have transformed software development. Now they are successfully deploying these techniques in other core business units, from marketing to human resources to finance. When companies implement agile across their entire organizations, ways of working improve dramatically. Agile methods are more collaborative and creative and can be more efficient than other business models. But companies must first understand why their current business structures need to change.

Taiwanese e-commerce platform OwlTing wants to change the way consumers think about their food. This year, it launched the world’s first blockchain-based app for tracing food products — including pork. And the process is pretty simple: by scanning a sticker on a slab of pork, OwlTing customers can quickly access information about everything from a piglet’s date of birth, to the vaccines it received before its slaughter. There’s a lot more to blockchain technology than learning obscure facts about a pork chop, however. For producers, using blockchain-based technologies to trace food through processing and shipping means that they might be able to avoid widespread food waste should a contamination arise — and even save lives. And it is not just small companies that are interested in this technology. The largest retailer in the world, Walmart recently partnered with IBM to develop their own pilot blockchain system. VICE News Tonight visited Taiwan to see how blockchain is affecting pork production, and then to Walmart to find out why the company thinks consumers are going to benefit from this technology.

Digital transformation - extending and exposing business processes outside the organisation - by implementing a digital strategy – a statement about the organisation’s digital positioning, operating model, competitors and customer and collaborator needs and behaviour through the delivery of digital solutions defined in a digital architecture – a future state application, data and technology view to achieve digital operating status - is potentially (very) complex. Digital architecture does not exist in isolation entirely separate from an organisation’s overall enterprise architecture. Digital architecture must exist within the within the wider enterprise architecture context. Enterprise architecture provides the tools and the approaches to manage the complexity of digital transformation. 

The AI Index is an open, not-for-profit project to track activity and progress in AI. It aspires to be a comprehensive resource of data and analysis for policymakers, researchers, executives, journalists and others to rapidly develop intuitions about the complex field of AI.
AI is the new electricity, and is transforming multiple industries. The AI Index will help current generations track and navigate this societal transformations. It will also help future generations look back and understand the AI's rise.

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology point out that when automotive transport arrived, a whole group of workers—horses—were displaced, never to be employed again. They lost their jobs and vanished from the economy.
I would add another historical precedent. Offshoring in the last few decades has eaten up physical jobs and whole industries, jobs that were not replaced. The current transfer of jobs from the physical to the virtual economy is a different sort of offshoring, not to a foreign country but to a virtual one. If we follow recent history we can’t assume these jobs will be replaced either.

Blade Runner 2049 misses modern strides in artificial intelligence, which is now capable of performing creative work alongside humans. The newly-emerging field known as “generative design” seeks to incorporate the computer more actively into the design process. In these kinds of computer applications, the designer uploads a “seed geometry” — akin to a keyframe reference drawing an animator might use — and then sets a series of requirements ranging from the aesthetic to the functional. The software then searches through a series of procedurally-generated designs based on the seed geometry and surfaces those that meet the requirements. The designer can select one of these “solutions” for production or to function as the next seed geometry and the process begins again.

ARK expects autonomous trucks to reduce the cost of trucking from 12 cents per ton-mile to 3 cents during the next five to ten years.

The robots are coming. We (as in the people who attend TED talks and things) tend to think we will probably be fine. You know, knowledge folks and all. We might not be. What will be our coping mechanisms? What can we do to be OK?

The era of easily-faked photos is quickly emerging—much as it did when Photoshop became widely prevalent—so it’s a good time to remember we shouldn’t trust everything we see.

The annual reports released by public corporations to their shareholders are known for being among the driest and dullest documents known to humanity. They’re usually full of tiny print, never-ending financial statements, and inscrutable charts. But Estée Lauder just released its 2017 report and it is a thing of beauty.

The Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies provides insights gained from evaluating more than 2,000 technologies. The eight added in 2017 include 5G, Artificial General Intelligence, Deep Learning, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Digital Twin, Edge Computing, Serverless PaaS and Cognitive Computing.

Forrester says that CIOs must act as VCs and recommends they support early-stage tech companies and have their own technology scouts. As CIO Angela Yochem told me in 2015, she has set up a process to find “capabilities that are not yet commercially available” and “quickly absorb, test, and utilize emerging technologies, and discard them if they are not appropriate and don’t give us a leg up on our competition.”

Tech giants including Baidu and Google spent between $20B to $30B on AI in 2016, with 90% of this spent on R&D and deployment, and 10% on AI acquisitions. AI investment has turned into a race for patents and intellectual property (IP) among the world’s leading tech companies.

The technology radar is a living document to assess the risks and rewards of existing and nascent technologies. I've come to believe you need two radars: one for yourself, to help guide your career decisions, and one for your company, to help restore sanity to purchasing decisions and technology direction. I discuss building both kinds of radars, but first, I describe how this concept came to be.

Singularity University has been talking about purpose for some time now. They describe a focus that is audaciously big and aspirational, causing significant transformation to an Industry, community, or the planet. There is a clear “why” behind the work being done, something that unites and inspires action. They call this a Massive Transformative Purpose.