Big Data: The Hidden Asset in Born Digital Organisations.

This examines one of the critical factors that will enable born digital organisations to propel the trajectory of their competitive advantage. The world is changing fast and born digitals (those shaping the digitally social future) continue to innovate game changing technology based on a hidden asset helping shape the digital future. Born digital organisations have been using Big Data successfully in their businesses enabling them to change the face of technology and society.

Born digital organisations like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, FourSquare, and many others, have embodied and embedded social sciences into core business models ensuring they are better positioned to thrive irrespective of economic uncertainty. They understand that social sciences play a significant role in disrupting markets in a digitally social world. It is this hidden asset that will become increasingly important as it gives them a solid foundation to ethically harness social data to help advance the human condition.

On the backdrop of the world becoming increasingly interconnected, a phenomenon inherent in this Big Data era is the vast amount of social data that is digitally produced as humans go about their daily lives. The circulation of social data throughout the wider social-ecosystem will virtually have no limit as technology innovations introduce all kinds of everyday things in society that can be connected and context aware.

For instance, Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, suggests that virtually everything human beings own in society will have its own internet address and, as the momentum continues, "home appliances, keys, wine cellars, the dog's collar - everything" has the possibility to be affected[1]. The significance of the phenomenon has also influenced traditional organisations. Ford recently opened a Big Data lab in the Silicon Valley highlighting what they now envisage is an integral part of the automotive future [2].

Researchers and entrepreneurs around the world have been developing systems that will optimise digital interactions. Researchers at the University of Virginia have demonstrated the commercial possibilities that can be achieved through sensors to track typical objects for household environments. This has the possibility to provide household environments with an enhanced ability to keep track of the locations of everyday household objects such as keys, remotes, kids toys and so on. Households empowered with access to such capabilities will find it much easier to keep track of all type of physical objects in their daily lives [3][4][5].

There is also greater availability of autonomous sensors used to monitor everything from weather to human digestive tracts. This produces a diversity of social data unseen until now and it has the ability to usher in the digitally social world.

Organisations that apply social sciences will be better positioned to understand what this new data is telling them in order to shape the digital future and develop products and services that can help change the lives of people for the better. Most born digital organisations already have a head start and most have successfully infused social sciences, imagination, creativity and, of course, computational thinking within their organisations. Big Data, combined with the hidden asset of social sciences, is enabling them to quickly introduce innovations to compute their way to a socially and ecologically sustainable future.

Born digitals will break away from much of the competition as they have recognised the importance of moving beyond the fields of hard science and business to truly combine the fields of social sciences into their working practices. They have established the necessary bench strength to compete in this new era. For instance, researchers at Twitter, Facebook and Google have been applying social sciences to shape the digital future through actively creating new knowledge for the field. This will become an increasingly valuable asset as digital interactions will require an understanding of human behaviours [6][7][8][9].

This advantage will not only help them to discover new types of research data about human behaviour, but it will also enable them to adopt feedback learnings into their core business models to disrupt markets [10]. Infusing and applying social sciences within their business models enables them to investigate human and social dynamics at all levels of analysis, including cognition, decision making, behaviour, groups, organisations, societies, and the digital world.

The many discussions I've had with information technology researchers and analysts about the role social data plays in shaping the digital future, prompted me to reflect on a past experience I had as a technologist in the 90's.

At that time social science researchers, practitioners, and policy makers recognised and seized upon an opportunity that enabled many with a technologist background to apply computational thinking to develop applications and instruments for the human services field (Sociology, Psychology, Social Work, Psychiatry).

A critical aspect of technology innovations back then focussed on the ability to provide the human services field with richer information on human related behaviours, perceptions, intentions, desires, concerns, and beliefs. An aim was to ensure insights were gleaned from social data to help empower children, families and communities. Although in the early days my experience in social science research was concentrated in the US, collecting, storing, and analysing this data was critical to understanding the mechanisms by which people express themselves worldwide and in diverse situations.

I had the privilege of applying computational thinking to help produce Intervention Services-Activity Based Costing (IS-ABC) as an instrument. It was an automated system of costing intervention services or programs in the human services field. Among other things, it enabled policy makers to evaluate the relative performance of programmes and interventions. In addition, it provided the foundation for Outcome Based Decision Making (ODBM) to ensure optimal and sustainable delivery of services [11].

Although, much of the focus in the Silicon Valley at the time was on technology innovations for business, I was fortunate to experience first hand how the ethical use of social data can help to change outcomes in society.

The collaborative process with the researchers in the field was an important factor that ensured the instruments I helped develop kept people at the centre of service. For instance, time spent with Metis Associates http://www.metisassoc.com/index.html  and the Annie E. Casey Foundation Family-To-Family Initiative http://www.aecf.org/MajorInitiatives/Family%20to%20Family.aspx also helped me to understand the value of social data when there is an ethical intent to use it to advance the human condition. Our analysis method (IS-ABC) was accepted and presented in 1997 at Portland State University Regional Research Institute for human services. http://www.rri.pdx.edu/

There are still many unanswered questions about Big Data and how the social sciences field will be used to help shape the digital future. The issues regarding personal privacy and how people will have the peace of mind that their information is not being used unfairly is still a work in progress. As born digital organisations contribute to social science research through their innovations they will have an advantage  – they will better understand how the rise of Big Data will influence changes as the world becomes more digitally social.

Now back to those discussions with information technology researchers and analysts – it was my experiences in the social sciences field that gave me a solid foundation to combine computational thinking and the social sciences to encode and decode real world social data signals. Moreover, the experience inspired me to innovate applications and instruments in collaboration with social science researchers, practitioners, and policy makers, placing at the epicentre of our innovations the purpose to advance the human condition.

References:

[1] Bort, J. (2012).A Whole New Version Of The Internet Is About To Be Switched On.
Business Insider.
http://www.businessinsider.com/ipv6-new-internet-switched-on-2012-6

[2] King, R. (2012). Ford Opens Silicon Valley Lab to Mine Big Data. The Wall Street Journal.
http://blogs.wsj.com/drivers-seat/2012/06/20/ford-opens-silicon-valley-lab-to-mine-big-data/

[3] Nirjon, S and Stankovic, A., J. (2012). Kinsight: Localizing and Tracking Household Objects using Depth-Camera Sensors. Department of Computer Science University of Virginia.
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~stankovic/psfiles/DCOSS2012.pdf

[4] Living Labs. (2012). Farglory LeftBank Smart Urban in New Taipei City
http://www.youtube.com/user/livinglabsglobal?feature=watch

[5] Esser, B., Schnorr, J. M., Swager, T. M. (2012). Selective Detection of Ethylene Gas Using Carbon Nanotube-based Devices: Utility in Determination of Fruit Ripeness. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 51: 5752–5756. doi: 10.1002/anie.201201042.

[6] Markoff, J. (2012). Troves of Personal Data, Forbidden to Researchers. The New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/22/science/big-data-troves-stay-forbidden-to-social-scientists.html?_r=3&smid=tw-nytimesscience&seid=auto

[7] Lin, J. and Mishne, G. (2012). A Study of "Churn" in Tweets and Real-Time Search Queries (Extended Version). Social and Information Networks (cs.SI), Cornell University.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.6855 

[8] Simonite, T. (2012). What Facebook Knows. Technology Review, MIT.
http://www.technologyreview.com/featured-story/428150/what-facebook-knows/

[9] King, G. (2011). Ensuring the Data-Rich Future of the Social Sciences. Science 331, 719.

[10] Cha, E. A. (2012). ‘Big data’ from social media, elsewhere online redefines trend-watching.
The Washington Post.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/big-data-from-social-media-elsewhere-online-take-trend-watching-to-new-level/2012/06/06/gJQArWWpJV_story.html

[11] Alford, K., Mayberry, T., Woodard, L. J. (1997). IS-ABC : Intervention services-activity based
costing. Library of Congress, Copyright 1997, TXu000778283.
http://cocatalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?Search_Arg=Intervention+Services&Search_Code=TALL&PID=5HdIf9_6UDchwoTxAYmI6uzGe&SEQ=20120518171328&CNT=25&HIST=1

Harnessing Social Data: Understanding IT's Role‎

CIOInsight:  Westpac saw a huge opportunity to use social data as a lens into both the business’ future and the relationship between brand and customer. But, selling this kind of “out there” vision to stakeholders can be more difficult than executing on it.

Read More: http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Business-Intelligence/Harnessing-Social-Data-Understanding-ITs-Role-145382/

Big Data & the Seven P’s: To Advance an Organisation’s Growth Agenda

The data intensive society in which we live, work and play has rapidly emerged as a force influencing radical changes in the competitive landscape. The business ecosystem has become increasingly digital and globally interconnected. As a consequence organisations face challenging headwinds as cycles of change that are much faster create greater uncertainty. Organisations must innovate to grow, creating new business models in this era of “Big Data”. Adaptation is critical because markets react to reality and not expectations.

In this new norm the amount of data generated in society is staggering. Its complexity and the pace at which it is generated are also continuing to accelerate. Among other things, these factors have emerged testing the future competitiveness of organisations. An organisation’s resilience will be challenged and their ability to withstand the headwinds will depend on their ability to capitalise on Big Data.

Organisations that find creative and innovative ways to grow holistically will continue to break away from the pack. As long as they continue with a quickened responsiveness and innovation cycle that keep pace with this new norm – the data intensive society – they will have the advantage over their competitors.

This has left most organisations flat footed as yesterday’s business as usual is not aligned with today’s data intensive reality, and this is a disadvantage. As organisations struggle to understand how data can open up new possibilities in this data intensive society, they remain vulnerable to the sensitive ups and downs of faster change cycles. At the World Economic Forum (WEF) 2012 this theme was recognised as another major challenge that organisations must address http://forumblog.org/2012/01/davos-2012-decoding-the-data-deluge/

Most organisations in attendance agreed the way forward to address such a challenge was to reinvent business models to ensure they align with the market and societal expectations. In addition, most organisations agreed the long-term outlook would remain a challenge and uncertain until transformations occur to shape new models. Although this may be the case for most organisations, others will need to consider reformations to align with the new reality of Big Data. Successful reformations undertaken will enable organisations to effectively compete. This aspiration and its execution will depend on an organisation’s ability to make sense of data and how it gets integrated at the core of its business. An ability to harness Big Data to improve productivity and customer experience are a few examples of business outcomes they can achieve.

The reformation that fosters a greater level of data awareness and data imagination will have more potential to move an organisation’s thinking beyond yesterday’s business as usual mind sets. Reformations must also ensure organisations establish the right climate and culture to create the conditions to innovate for growth. For instance, organisations should focus reformation initiatives to reduce the amount of cognitive effort involved in decision making for both customers and employees.

In this new data intensive society, data is described as the digital air, the oxygen that binds together the rhythm of society and the carbon dioxide that it exhales (Boyd and Crawford, 2011). Organisations that focus on data centric capability as being core to future competitiveness will be better positioned to harness data intensive possibilities as society breathes this digital air.

The vantage point in Figure A – the Seven P’s shows the different but interconnected dimensions of Big Data. It can be used to create data awareness to tap into data imagination that explores new business models and opportunities. This is critical for organisations that are competing in the digital economy. The digital economy will continue to reward organisations that recognise the significance of the radical shift that has emerged and can unleash data-centric capability to bring forth new value.

In a series of posts I will examine the Seven P’s and their influence on an organisation’s ability to unleash value in this new data intensive society. As the emergence of this data intensive society stakes out the new competitive landscapes, methods of business will eventually need to adapt.

In brief the Seven P’s are:

Possibilities: opening the imagination of an organisation towards using Big Data for disruptive competition to meet business goals and deliver new value.

Purpose: the establishment of data centric capability that harnesses innovation and creativity to ethically advance the human condition.

Process: the implementation of data centric techniques that harnesses data in an ethical manner so all units of a business can act in real time to generate value that others have not imagined.

People: utilising the knowledge and skills of data centric capability as a catalyst for innovation by exploiting data as a raw material to add value.

Profit: capitalising on transformative data to achieve organisational goals and profit motivations.

Policy: the formulation of policies for the security and privacy of data collection and use while keeping pace with advancing technology innovations (Tene and Jules, 2012) http://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/privacy-paradox/big-data.

Productivity: enabling real time cognitive decision making while reducing effort for both employees and customers. The reduction in time to make decisions creates value, freeing up the entire organisation to focus on driving results to meet goals.

An organisation’s ability to sustain benefit realisation through the Seven P’s will depend on execution and embedding them into business models. In the data intensive society, the era of ‘Big Data’ has emerged giving disruptive potential to those organisations with the vision to imagine where data fits at the core. An organisation’s ability to embrace big data possibilities for the purpose of improving productivity and customer experience will create strong signs of certainty.

The transformative use of data is a factor that will ensure organisations not only advance their growth agenda but it will improve productivity with the right climate and culture.

Organisations are struggling to understand how data can open up new possibilities. In the meantime they remain vulnerable to the sensitive ups and downs of faster change cycles. As organisations look forward to the future in the aftermath of the WEF 2012 the Seven P’s combined with the right reformations undertaken is a pathway to enable organisations to address many themes outlined at Davos and compete in the new era.

More to come on each of the Seven Ps in future posts to this blog.

Big Data - Skating with the puck

In this era of big data, organisations need to review their existing technology-enabled customer-centric business strategies. They need to rethink their approach to gain the next big competitive advantage. To succeed, organisations need to creatively harness their data-centric capabilities to positively impact real-time business operations and customer experience.

Organisations that are skating with the puck are focusing on how to leverage their customer-centric technology to consistently deliver the “next best offer” across multiple channels. They are looking to improve the customer experience while boosting employee productivity. Providing a customer with a tailored next best offer is one of the most powerful ways to cross-sell and up-sell to improve the customer lifetime value. However, for a multi-product company with countless possibilities finding that right next best offer can be a challenge. Getting the next best offer wrong decreases the value of the direct interactions with a customer and their affinity with the organisation.

In addition offering too many options decreases productivity and can turn customers off. Hick’s Law suggests the time it takes to make a decision increases as the number of alternatives increases. Hence, the number of alternative products or services and channels an organisation offers are factors which influence the time taken for the frontline staff or customers to make a decision.

Powerful data-centric technologies, such as master data management (MDM) and complex event processing (CEP), when used together, can help organisations better predict what that next best offer should be in real-time. The organisations that adopt this technology have the opportunity to detect, learn, communicate and act consistently across all channels to improve the customer experience and employee productivity.

Customers have become digitally oriented and their preferred channel is digital. Organisations that are circling the ice with their reactive approach to next best offer may find themselves at a significant disadvantage when engaging with customers across multiple channels, particularly if they fail to find creative ways to drive value through digital channels.

An organisation’s ability to create one positive customer experience is an anthesis of the true value of harnessing data intensive possibilities in this business ecosystem. Whether the customer is interacting on the social web or across traditional channels, technology like Informatica’s MDM and CEP can instantaneously suggest a tailored next best product or service. This data-centric capability not only improves the immediate customer experience, but the customer’s lifetime value, while boosting employee effectiveness and productivity. In addition, organisations who use data more broadly, mastered, to encompass the social graph and interest graph are enabling business agility. Mining historical transactions for patterns, trends, and predictors (“big data”) provides a strong indicator of future behaviour leading to appropriately tailored next best offers.

Another critical component of this approach is a feedback loop. Frontline staff at customer touchpoints provide feedback about how the customer responded to the technology-enabled “next best offer”. The offers taken up and those that weren’t through online channels can be evaluated in order to continue to improve “next best offer” possibilities, sharpening an organisation’s ability to better meet their customers’ needs.

The digital future of an organisation’s customer-centric strategy hinges on their ability to move away from the reactive business model of the past to an instant, intelligent business that better leverages its data to impact results. The first tangible outcome of this new proactive business model is to improve the customer experience and boost employee productivity by suggesting tailored next best offers. This empowers the frontline staff and customers to make smarter decisions faster across multiple channels.

The next best offers are event driven, reducing wasted effort in making offers to customers who are not ready to convert. An event can be as simple as a website activity or interacting with a frontline employee.

It is the real time suggestion of a tailored next best product or service that enables organisations to gain a more balanced, integrated approach to the customer experience. As an accelerator of their customer-centric strategy into the digital future, this advantage is a critical factor for organisations operating and competing in this new data intensive society.

Read more about CEP: http://blogs.informatica.com/perspectives/index.php/author/chris-carlson/