On A Smarter Planet … Some Organizations Will Be Smarter-er Than Others

As planet Earth generates more data from more sensors and as this data comes together for better prediction … there will be plenty of winners and losers.

The losers will be those organizations still coping with information overload, unable to make heads or tails of what they know (Enterprise Amnesia).  They will miss the obvious.  Their costs will soar, their customer satisfaction will drop and confidence in their brand will erode.  You will get duplicate mailings from them.  They will try to sell you something you already bought from them weeks ago. 

The winners will be those organizations that make better decisions, faster.  How fast?  Fast enough to do something smart as the transaction is happening, not minutes, hours, or days later. 

The closer to real-time an organization can operate, the more competitive it will be (Enterprise Intelligence).  They will be more efficient in how they deliver their products or services, their customers will be happier, and they will be able to stop many more bad things (e.g., fraud) from happening before they happen.

Hence my ongoing obsession with real-time sensemaking systems and my beef with batch systems. Just to be clear, not all batch systems are bad.  In fact, there are a number of things batch systems are well-suited for, like end-of-month accounting cycles, or end-of-night audit in hotel property management systems.  There are even some forms of data mining, pattern discovery, outlier detection, and so on, where after-the-fact data analysis (batch) is well suited. 

That said the closer to real-time one can get the right answer and respond, the better.   And milliseconds matter.

Heck, when a casino can be cheated out of $250,000 in 15 minutes, what good is an hourly algorithm?

So when the IBM marketing machine asked me what I was working on, I explained the importance of real-time sensemaking this way: imagine trying to cross a street but you can only see how the traffic looked 5 minutes ago.  This struck a chord and is, as of this week, a TV commercial.

Who’d a thunk?

Net Net: Organizations not engaged in real-time sensemaking are going to find themselves getting Dumb and Dumber.

 

LINKS TO MY COLLEAGUES ADS:

IBMer Julia Grace’s TV Commercial

IBMer John Cohn’s TV Commercial

 

RELATED POSTS:

Ubiquitous Sensors? You Have Seen Nothing Yet

Why Faster Systems Can Make Organizations Dumber Faster

Enterprise Amnesia: Organizations Have Lost Their Minds

 

Enterprise Intelligence – My Presentation at the Third Annual Web 2.0 Summit

Intelligent Organizations – Assembling Context and The Proof is in the Chimp!

Comments

[Rama Ramakrishnan]

Jeff: Provocative and interesting post.

Couldn't agree more about data-savvy being an increasingly important driver of business wins and losses.

But I do believe that batch systems have a role to play and will continue to be important for a long time. On the "analytic journey", if real-time analytic systems are equivalent to "running", batch analytic systems are equivalent to "walking". And most firms out there are still "crawling".

Leapfrogging from crawling to running will be impossible for them and batch analytic systems will be a reasonable halfway house.

Loved the traffic analogy and the ad!

[Clay Robinson]

Jeff, real-time is essential. But to forecast what is going to be happening, we need to match real-time to historic activity.

A casino loosing $250,000 is a travesty (in their mind), unless they also have history to match with real-time data that says certain types of folks that win get cocky and don't know when to walk away from the table and then "give" $500,000 back to the casino in the next 15 minutes.

The winners will be those who can tie real time to history.

Thanks for a great blog!

[Roger]

Great ad for a powerful notion.

Also, you look like a rock star! You should consider updating your blog photo with a still of you about to cross the road...

[Mecredy]

Very impacting video as usual. I wonder what it will take government to see the imperative that the casino sees.

[torrent download]

The winners will be those who can tie real time to history.

[Bob Patterson]

Jeff - I would add that real time information is of two types - the obvious, more transactional data and the "connections" amongst thoughts, facts, impressions that are a result of reflection on that data. We can have all the data and fancy algorithms we want, but success is a function, IMO, of our ability to put the puzzle together based on our experience. In my business, one can also see how different cultures often come to different conclusions based on the same data. So algorithms based on the Anglo Saxon cognitive model may not "compute" for an Islamic model. Such differences can, again IMO, have significant and often detrimental effects on the outcomes.