Technology & Data as a Service

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If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them - Bruce Lee

W. Edwards Deming said:

Learning is not compulsory, neither is survival.

Humans find safety in group-think and familiarity. Unsurprisingly with current velocity of change, the more people start to cling to safety. This is not a negative statement, it's our nature, we are built like this. We are also the people that are enthused and enthralled by the opportunities to create, collaborate, and innovate and we are leading the charge in an exponential acceleration of change.

The Future, impossible to predict

Estonia’s e-Residency program is built on blockchain, UK lawyers are testing blockchain in the house buying process, even the Government have projects looking at how innovative new technologies can improve the house buying process, they are incredibly forward thinking in their digital push. Yes the Government is forward thinking.

What do I see

The history of SaaS is coming to an end, and other emerging technologies are pushing through, so where and what does the future hold.

What sets you apart from competitors when you consider technology and data

• Internally - employee skills for the future
• Customer experience
• Industry efficiency / competition

How we arrived at this moment:

We are experiencing exponentially accelerating change, starting with a move from legacy toward our pure SaaS state for the last 20 years, in reality the first major players (Netsuite and Salesforce) put in their flags c.15 years ago.

Salesforce.com release v1.0

Look around

Today, businesses and consumers access SaaS, even unaware that they do. If SaaS is described as software accessed through the browser whilst hosted/managed by an external party, then Snapchat, Google, Netflix, WhatsApp, BookFace, and many other people call ‘websites’, are SaaS products/applications. If you use this catchall, the term is historical and a signal of the start of an internet/online rebirth.

SaaS = internet.

The Internet as we used to call it, now “online”, is where you access content/function from the coding of HTML5 / CSS / Ruby On Rails / Node.js, all meshed in various guises providing services or solutions you went hunting.

Think what you use: on your TV, phone, tablet, laptop, managing bills, banking, friends & family. Our lives are intertwined with technology and we barely acknowledge it.

No longer only for large companies, the public now can have their own application environments, SQL servers, tap into artificial intelligence code and machine learning libraries, using freely available data tools. People collaborate and share knowledge and discovery for free, feeding the evolution of this exploding technology and data world.

The acceleration of advancement is phenomenal. Github, a place born from slightly geeky people looking to share, collaborating, and control, was purchased by Microsoft. The company that almost hesitated too long in the SaaS revolution. They did adapt and they moved their strategy, with innovation creating some incredible products. Now they move into the open-source world, what do they see you think?

Empathy

I feel sorry for the younger generation moving through education. They are expected to work toward careers that in all likelihood do not even exist at the moment, even unimaginable to us. We should be educating our younger generation on creative problem solving, critical thinking, and other tools (obviously as well as STEM etc), to prepare them to adapt, evolve, and move like water through the minefield of career choices when the time comes. We are all prone to the risks of change, without adapting and evolving our knowledge and skills, there are risks of becoming devalued in the demand and supply chain of talent in companies already evolving.

Demands

With the increased use and awareness of technology and data, there are increased demands and expectations. There is misunderstanding and misinformation, it's sometimes seen as a solution rather than a supporting tool to enhance humans and inform critical thinking.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are 2 areas misunderstood, they are incredibly complex and require careful and knowledgeable design and use, you do not just switch it on.

The use of data has become a badge of control and knowledge, data is not knowledge, it is not understanding.

Its very easy to jump to assumptions without some form of understanding on the flaws as well as strengths of data. Taken on face value, eating cheese increases your risk of dying from being tangled in your bed sheets - it must be true, the data says so.

We must be careful of our own biases and frameworks, challenging ourselves before we stand and present facts as knowledge. 

Skills and understanding have not grown as fast as the technology and data revolution, and so we see explosions in job roles that look to support the growing demands in these areas, to support, inform, and to protect from the dangers of mis-allocation of capital and misinterpretations of data.

Concluding Ramblings

• There is no shame in not knowing
• You are natural in the desire to want to remain safe
• You are not expected to keep up
• Support and help the young to think differently, to learn the tools to adapt
• Understand yourself
• You only have to ask the people that know, understand, that spend sleepless nights trying to keep up themselves
• “Take no thought of who is right or wrong or who is better than. Be not for or against”

Some ‘Fun’ numbers

Online Use

• Total population: 7.71 billion
• There are 4.4 billion active internet users worldwide—that’s 58% of the global population. (Statista, 2019)
• Mobile users: 4.68 billion
• Social media users: 3.48 billion (up 9% from last year)
• Social media users on mobile: 3.26 billion (up 10% from last year)
• On average, people are spending 6 hours and 42 minutes online each day.
• 88 per cent of UK data breaches are caused by human error (source)
• By the year 2022, PCs will only make up 19% of IP traffic while smartphones will account for 44%. (Cisco)

Information Security

• A company falls victim to a ransomware attack every 14 seconds. (CyberSecurity Ventures, 2017), In 2021 it is predicted to be 11 seconds (source)
• 91 percent of hacking attacks begin with a phishing email (source)
• The average cost of a malware attack on a company is $2.4 million. (Cost of Cyber Crime Study, 2017)
• The average cost in time of a malware attack is 50 days. (Cost of Cyber Crime Study, 2017)
• Experts predict that ransomware damage costs will rise to $11.5 billion this 2019 CyberSecurity Ventures, 2017)
• More than 90,000 websites are hacked daily. (Hosting Facts, 2019)

Corporate Technology Data Approach

• More than 40% of all data analytics projects will relate to customer experience by 2020. *Gartner
• Two-thirds of all customer experience initiatives will use IT by 2022, a jump from half in 2017. *Gartner
• 44% of companies have already moved to a digital-first approach for customer experience. *IDG
• 56% of CEOs said digital improvements have led to revenue growth. *Gartner
• By 2020, 25% of customer service operations will use virtual customer assistants like chatbots, up from 2% in 2017. *Gartner
• 45% of C-level managers say that they don’t know where to start when it comes to creating digital transformation strategies. (Celonis, 2019)
• Organisations that are data-driven are 23 times more likely to convert leads and 6 times more like to retain them. (Advance 2000, 2018)