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IBM Think – All for tech and tech for all

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IBM Think – All for tech and tech for all

I’ve been invited to contribute to a couple of panel sessions at this year’s IBM Think Summit in London, one of which is titled “All for tech and tech for all!”.  The Alexander Dumas influence got me looking up his various quotations which led me to something which is very apt for the event: 

“One’s work may be finished someday, but one’s education never.”  

The Think event is always thought provoking and a great place to learn, with top notch speakers, challenging ideas and great content, from keynotes to debates to customers to more detailed sessions.  This year it has moved from the Truman Brewery to Olympia London, so there will be less stairs, doors and dark corners to navigate, but it means the event can spread out with a new campus style.  I started writing this post on the day of the Global climate strike and it’s no surprise that this year’s Summit has a focus on sustainability, with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall delivering the first guest keynote after Bill Kelleher, IBM’s Chief Executive in the UK, opens the show in the morning.  

As well as two streams of content in the Showcase theatres, 3 streams of workshops for developers, a stream of lively debates (more on that later), there is a series of fast paced 15 minute sessions in the Think Tanks.  Those short talks are in varied formats covering cloud, infrastructure, security, resilience, data, AI and shaping the future.   

Topics like Quantum Computing, Advanced AI and Blockchain will get a lot of attention.  As well as the talks, debates and workshops, there will be four Campuses to explore which will host exciting experiences and engaging TED style talks sharing client stories: 

  • Cloud & Infrastructure 
  • Security & Resiliency 
  • Data & AI 
  • Shaping the Future 

I’m particularly interested in the Cloud & Infrastructure campus as this will be the first Think Summit following the finalisation of IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat.  As you may know, I’ve written about the significance of this move, with IBM positioning themselves, in my opinion, as the “Enterprise Cloud” company.  IBM’s approach is truly hybrid and multicloud.  Embracing Red Shift’s containerised OpenShift platform means you can build your codebase once and deploy anywhere – on-premise, private cloud, public cloud or at the edge.  With IoT and AI applications, edge computing, or moving servers to where the work happens because of latency issues, becomes a must.  They will also be covering their integration approach, how you modernise existing and legacy applications, as well as their way of managing this multicloud environment cost effectively, safely and securely.  They will cover the IBM Garage methodology with an experience showing how this approach helps you move faster, work smarter, and ideate more rapidly.  They will cover a host of examples of IBM Cloud deployments across 20 different industries.   

In the campus you’ll be able to get hands on with 4 activations: 

  • IBM Garage Accelerator – 3 short films demonstrate how clients have worked with IBM Garage to transform their businesses with the speed of a start-up, at the scale of an enterprise. 
  • IBM Garage Innovation Wall – Follow Mueller’s journey as they quickly define, test, and deploy a solution that changed the way their sales reps interacted with contractors, one of their primary end users. 
  • Customer Success Stories: Explore 15 cross-industry stories of client achievements of accelerated transformation based on IBM Cloud and Infrastructure (apparently this will be sushi bar style – can’t wait!). 
  • Drive Race Winning Innovation with Red Bull Racing Playseats – there’s even a competition to win a factory tour at Red Bull Racing HQ. 

On top of that they’ll be 6 demo pods, 10 business partners to meet, and 13 TED talks going on.  I haven’t got space for the other 3 campuses, but they’ll be just as comprehensive, so there will be lots to learn and a lot of ground to cover.   

Now to the Debates, moderated by Katie Derham.  I’m assuming they will be “in the round” like last year, and under the Chatham House Rule, so for a change I won’t be tweeting every other second.  IBM wants open, thought provoking, maybe even controversial debates so people can really speak their mind.  I’ll be contributing to two: 

All for tech and tech for all 

Over the past twenty years we have seen technology become fully embedded in our daily lives, and increasingly embraced across all age groups.  With an eye firmly on the future, IBM are bringing together a panel of younger and older people, to discuss where technology is heading, what problems it could solve, how it is developed and marketed and how it will be used. How should technology address the needs of the different generations in our society moving forwards, and what will need to change, so that we are truly living in an age of “All for Tech and Tech for All”?  I plan to talk about the difficulty in predicting the future, how tech could be our saviour, definitely something on creativity, and maybe something on how we aren’t educating the current generation properly for what happens next.  What sort of tech might we talk about?  Designer antibiotics, ingestible robots, smart clothing, photonics? 

Essential Education 

The world we work in is changing – and changing rapidly. For those with the right skill-sets, new opportunities abound, and new, challenging careers await; we have the some knotty problems to address – and need a innovative, creative, workforce to address them. But with the pace of change fast and relentless, how do we ensure today’s youth are prepared for the work of tomorrow – and not left behind? How might we promote life-long learning in order to capitalise on a wealth of experience and knowledge? Technology is undoubtedly driving force behind the revolution – but how can education be used to harness that power for good?  I just might mention the most watched TED Talk ever  (62 million views and counting).  That’s Sir Ken Robinson brilliant summary of his “Out of our Minds” book in 18 minutes (highly recommended, both book and talk).  We need to change the structure and priorities of a 19th century designed education system to make it fit for the 21st century.  We need to get creative.  And lifelong learning is a must.  Come along and join in the debates! 

As I finish this post, IBM Think Summit London is only 20 days away.  It’s shaping up to be quite something.  Check out the agenda, and please make time and register to attend right now!  It would be great to meet you at Olympia London, and if you’ve got any questions or suggestions in advance, don’t hesitate to contact me  or find me on Twitter.  See you there! 

Where we’re going, we don’t need roads!

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Where we’re going, we don’t need roads!

There is a Danish saying you may have heard that “it’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future”.  That’s never been truer than in today’s challenging business landscape.  The rate of change is increasing exponentially.  New technologies, new ways of working and new business models are emerging.  How do you make sense of it all and set your strategy?  This is the first of a sequence of posts to help you reframe how you think about what’s next in enterprise technology, and how it can create value for your business.  

Back to the Future

© Universal Studios.

Let’s start by going back to a simpler time and reference the iconic 1985 science fiction movie “Back to the Future”.  You’ll remember (or have been told by your parents) that the movie’s time machine is made from a converted De Lorean car that needs to get up to 88 mph to jump in time. You can click here to read about the modifications made in this car that makes it look special from others. For most of the story they jump back 30 years to 1955.  Then, in the coda to the movie Doc Brown comes back to take Marty McFly and his girlfriend Jenifer 30 years in to the future to 2015.  When Marty says they haven’t got room to get to 88, Doc says “where we’re going, we don’t need roads” and the De Lorean promptly takes off and flies to get up to speed.  That phrase was even good enough for President Ronald Reagan to use it about the future in his 1986 State of the Union address.  We’ve decided to use it for our collection of articles offering you a map of where you should be heading.  We’ll even be using the hashtag #dontneedroads when we share them on social media.  

Now that movie demonstrates part of the problem with trying to be a futurist.   Some things develop much slower than you might expect, but others start to happen much faster.  We don’t have many flying cars on our roads in 2019, but they do exist.  You just have to look at the several different makes of autonomous drone copter taxis being tested in Dubai to see that they might finally happen soon.  What has happened faster is the explosion of global connectivity, data and very personal computing in the palms of our hands, that hardly anyone was predicting from the vantage of 1985, except on Star Trek and then centuries in the future.  With today’s rate of change making predictions even 5 years out is incredibly difficult, but the planners, strategists and every level in our organisations need to be thinking in terms of rapid change and continuous improvement to survive.  

Learn from the past

To think about the future, it’s always valuable to look back at what has worked in the past and why. We’d like to pick out a couple of scenarios.  First, the expansion and consolidation of the Roman Empire.  The cornerstone of the expansion, from about 300 BC onwards was their road system, remnants of which we still see today thousands of years later.  They applied new technology to create a network of high quality, long distance highways and local roads that were vital for communication, for the movement and resupply of their armies as they expanded their territories, and then to support the populations they had conquered with trade routes.  It was so successful that it supported the growing empire for the next 800 years.

The next is Genghis Khan, founder and first Great Khan of the Mongol Empire in the 12th and 13th century, who Dave Metcalfe has written about before.  He was known for his brutality, but also practiced meritocracy and encouraged religious tolerance.  One of the fundamental tools he put in place for managing the empire was the Yam riders and their way stations.  They created a chain of relay stations, usually around 20 miles to 40 miles apart. A messenger would arrive at a station and give his information to another messenger, and meanwhile they and their horse would rest and let the other messenger go on to the next station.  A communication system that both underpinned the empire, and incidentally brought the Silk Road under one cohesive political environment.  

The common threads here are the importance of networks and connectivity to moving information, and that intelligence is what supports the expansion of power, trade and globalisation.  In today’s environment instead of roads and horses and the written word, it’s silicon, optical fibre, radio waves, and bits and bytes of data supporting our new expansion.  It’s exciting!  In the 21st century the fabric of computing has never been more distributed and more ubiquitous.  

Where we’re going, we don’t need roads

The challenge for our organisations is that they don’t have to have been around for very long before they’ve become quite complex and grown a collection of applications and systems sitting on a multitude of technologies from the edge to the cloud to the data centre.  We’ll be talking more about the Edge very soon.  But even for a mid-sized business, and certainly for a larger Enterprise, the transformation they need to face is like trying to reimagine the London Underground at the same time as keeping the trains running.  

That conundrum is what we’ll be talking about in the “Where we’re going, we don’t need roads” series.  With computing becoming ubiquitous, it means that every business (and individual) is generating large amounts of data.  To make sense of that data you need a different approach than the business intelligence and processes of the past.  That’s where Artificial Intelligence comes in.  With access to processing power in the right place, and data stored in the right way, we can apply AIs and Robotic Process Automation and machine learning, and all of the other techniques and algorithms in to an app that can give you the predictive and analytic power to automate things.  In this next phase every business needs to think about AI and automation.  

What’s next?

In our posts we will be talking about enterprise cloud technology and managing multiple clouds.   We’ll explain our framework approach to managing technology summarised as discover, transform and operate.  We’ll bring in more military thinking and talk about the breakdown of command and control to asymmetric warfare and how that applies to business. We’ll tell more stories about the rate of change of technology, and the need to think in terms of permanent reinvention of your business, but at its heart our job as technologists is to help you get more out of your data. 

So please check Twitter and LinkedIn and the IBM Blog for more content on the #dontneedroads topic, as well as more articles on cloud and business transformation here.

The “Where we’re going, we don’t need roads” series of posts to help reframe how you think about what’s next in enterprise technology is co-authored by Dave Metcalfe of IBM and David Terrar of Agile Elephant.

Sustainability might not be sexy, but life depends on it

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Sustainability might not be sexy, but life depends on it

I’m at Hannover Messe 2019 for the first time, courtesy of Hewlett Packard Enterprise.  It’s not as big as CeBIT was, but it is still a huge conference with over 20 halls of exhibitors, covering everything from Industry 4.0, integrated automation, the digital factory, industrial supply, research & technology to the digital workplace.  HPE are in hall 6, the home of digital manufacturing.  I’ll be telling more stories from here around AI, automation, IoT, edge computing and a whole lot more, but on the first day I met with Chris Wellise HPE’s Chief Sustainability Officer.  

Chris Wellise, HPE’s Chief Sustainability Officer

When I’m speaking at events I’ll often ask the audience who amongst them was born on or before 1974, because those of us that were have been alive while the population of the planet has doubled, and as humans have been around for 200,000 years, that rate of change is staggering.  We live in exponential times, and Chris is full of eye-watering quotes and statistics on a topic that ins’t particularly sexy, but our lives and the future depends on it.  Chris says that as a large scale manufacturer:

“HPE produces 7 servers, 13 networking devices and 80 TB of storage every 60 seconds!”  

That’s 5 million units a year, all which generate data, and all of which need energy and resources in their creation.  Chris suggests that by 2030 most people will have 15 devices, all generating data because “everything computes at the edge and everywhere”.   He’s seen research that suggests we will run out of gold by 2030.  Yikes!  

You don’t have to have watched The Blue Planet to recognise the effect of what we are creating and then throwing away is doing for all of our futures.  Chris believes that sustainability is key.  We have to power the digital economy in a new way, and recognise the energy and resource constraints we need to work around.  Chris believes we have to move towards the circular economy.  To be able to do more with less.  We have to think in terms of applying our technology to disrupt the status quo.  We need smart manufacturing approaches to remove resource leakages.  

HPE have been rethinking design for environment since late 80s and they are one of only a few tech companies who regularly talk about what they are doing and why, rather than it just being a topic in the corporate social responsibility section of the website.  This thinking is necessary as the numbers are so big.  There will be 8.5 billion of us by 2030.  We’ll have 21 billion devices connected and sharing data by 2020.  By 2060 we will be need to be extracting twice the raw material that we do today, unless we can think differently.  We are running out of our planet at the same time that some people don’t even accept that global warming is real.

The HPE approach is to think through every product and design for its end of use.  They can “upcycle” and reconfigure equipment for a new customer within 48 hours at their renewable technology centres in Erskine, Scotland, and Andover, Massachusetts.  The products are, on average, 89% remanufactured to be sent on to a new customer with the remaining 11% responsibly recycled.  HPE have a vast shared supply chain servicing more than 150,000 customers, helped by over 170 suppliers, and then delivering products to 140 countries.  Chris says that they think about how they can have a sustainable influence on that massive supply chain in terms of greenhouse gas targets connected to the science of what they are doing, all in line with the Paris Accord on climate change.  It’s a call to action for our industry.  The current trajectory we are on is not sustainable.  

The other concept Chris talks about is “data landfill”.  He suggest that only 6% of data we generate is actually being used, and so the other 94% is wasted data that we have used energy, raw materials and production capacity to generate (for no added value).  How do we close that gap?  

Here’s Chris at the show following our sit down, talking with me some more around the sustainability topic:

Chris Wellise talking HPE’s approach sustainability with David Terrar for IT2

I’ll carry on the discussion in a follow on post, taking the sustainability thinking through to HPE’s customers using IoT, AI and data analytics technology to change the dynamic and reduce the waste.  Like I said at the start, sustainability might not be a sexy topic, but our future depends on it! 

Check back here for more content like this, and contact us if you want to find out more.

Disclosure: HPE paid my expenses for the trip to HMI 2019 as part of their influencer programme.

Is Blockchain relevant for any Business Model?

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Is Blockchain relevant for any Business Model?

We’ve been thinking and talking Blockchain here, trying to pull the reality out from the hype since 2015. Recently I heard a respected colleague suggest that it’s applicable in “less than 1/10 of 1% of corporate processes”. At the other end of the scale it’s going to take over the world. So what’s the reality of blockchain’s relevance to any business model and why? I was recently asked to think about exactly that question as input for a book chapter (that didn’t quite happen), and my brain jumped to both the history of trade, the power dynamics involved and the context. This (chapter length, 20 minute read) article is the result. So let’s get down to business, but let’s go back to where business began in our human history, and think this question through from first principles.

TRADE

Trade. Commerce. We have been exchanging value with goods and services as long as there have been humans. How have the components of trade developed over time, what’s new, and how can blockchain add anything to what we now call the business model? The relevance lies in the basic components of trade and commerce, the ways they have changed, and in turn changed our society over time. In our history new technologies have triggered industrial revolutions, globalisation, and the sheer numbers at play underpin today’s amazing rate of change that informs all business. We live in exponential times.

Look at a timeline of the way trade and commerce have developed since the beginning. Modern humans have been around on the planet for 200,000 years. The start of human civilisation had to wait for the end of the Ice Age 15,000 years ago, and the process really began with the development of agriculture in Turkey around 10,000 years ago. Instead of everyone needing to be hunters or gatherers to find food, we cultivated our own crops and livestock, and that led to food surpluses and the possibility of new roles in our tribes and societies. Some of us could specialise in producing the food, while others could be soldiers, artisans, artists, builders, administrators, priests or priestesses. Urbanisation and the first evidence our archaeologists can find of organised civilisations date from 9000-6000 BC. That is when we see the first evidence of the bazaar, which comes from the Persian word bāzār. Trade began in these marketplaces that started at the edge of our villages, towns and cities, but soon moved to the centre of things. Over time these bazaars formed a network of trading centres to exchange food, goods and information, and those evolved in to our major trading routes.

Initially to trade with each other we developed the system of barter. Introduced by Mesopotamia tribes, adopted by the Phoenicians it spread across the world with trade itself. We exchanged goods and services for other services and goods in return. We traded in food, tea, spices, silks, animal skins, furs and weapons. Valuable commodities like salt or gold were used like currency. Actual currency came in to existence around 600BC when King Alyattes minted the first coins in Lydia, now part of Turkey.

The Silk Road started around 200BC. The most famous and extensive, ancient network of trade routes that connected the East and West through the Middle East and Southern Europe bringing silk and other goods, but also religion, philosophies, culture, ideas and even disease too. By the time of the Roman Empire lenders based in temples made loans, accepted deposits and performed the exchange of money. With the difficulties of financing long-distance trade along these routes, the Hawala system started around the 8th century between Arabic and Muslim traders as a protection against theft. It is a popular and informal value transfer system based not on the movement of currency, but instead on the performance and honour of a huge network of money brokers. The word in Arabic means transfer, or sometimes trust and that’s significant.

Later, Marco Polo travelled this Silk Road from Europe to China and around 1290 he brought back the concept of paper money to Europeans, but it took until 1661 for the first bank notes to be printed in the west in Sweden.

BANKING AND ACCOUNTING FOR TRADE

When it comes to the concept of banking itself, that really started with merchants loaning grain and produce to farmers and traders. That process developed in to what we now know as banking in Italy in the Renaissance in Florence, Venice and Genoa. The Medici bank was established by Giovanni Medici in 1397, and the oldest bank still in existence is Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena which has been operating continuously since 1472.

We also have the Renaissance to thank for the financial bookkeeping practices we still use today. In the 15th Century Luca Pacioli, a friend of Leonardo da Vinci who was also a monk, a mathematician, and an alchemist formally codified the Italian double-entry accounting system known as the Method of the Merchants of Venice. It was the first system that allowed merchants to measure the worth of their business. Pacioli adapted Arabic mathematics to provide a system that could work across all trades and nations. Banking and accounting allowed capitalism to flourish and spread throughout Europe with major centres in Amsterdam and London, and through our trade routes to New York and the rest of the World.

We entered a period great changes. From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. From the printing press to the first Industrial Revolution. From trade driven colonisation to the globalisation of the world economy that has been happening progressively since that time in the 15th century. All of this fuelled by new technologies and new forms of communication.

GLOBALISATION AND FOUR INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTIONS

The United States had been one of colonies, but by the end of the 19th century it was transforming to become a world power. In 1871 Western Union introduced the first money transfer service, based on its extensive telegraph network. As telecommunications developed in the 20th Century that led to another huge expansion in the banking sector. It accelerated business and markets towards a much more Internationally integrated economy. The first credit card was launched in 1946. Computers and the information technology they support have been developing rapidly since the 50s and 60s to the internet and the world wide web of the 90s. We started talking e-commerce, businesses began to need a website as well as bricks and mortar, and a significant portion of our buying and selling, both business and personal, went online. We’ve been regularly talking about digital since Nicholas Negroponte’s book Being Digital was published in 1995. The World Economic Forum tells us that we are the midst of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The First Industrial Revolution starting around 1750 using water and steam power to mechanize production. The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production. The Fourth we are experiencing today is characterised by a fusion of technologies across the physical, the digital and the biological. Every business is considering digitisation, digital transformation, and the way they connect with their customers, partners and suppliers. The businesses that want to survive are looking long and hard at their current business model and considering change before their competitors try and out flank them.

European banks began offering mobile phone banking in 1999, and our debit and credit cards went contactless first in the UK in 2008. During the first two decades of this century, cell phone technology, WiFi, 4G and cloud computing have advanced so that almost anyone in the developed world can afford a smart phone with “always-on” connections that allow us access to apps, maps, the web and social media. In return those devices are helping business track us and our buying behaviours so that we live more interconnected lives than ever. The first purely digital cryptocurrency appeared in 2009, and its underlying technology of blockchain, that is the subject of this post, is moving out of early adopter status to change things again, and dramatically. On top of all of this the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) means a proliferation of connected devices, autonomous objects and appliances that do our bidding that are all reshaping life as we know it.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE

It took 200,000 years for the World population to reach 1 billion, a milestone we passed in 1804. In 1974 we hit 4 billion. For those of us reading this article born on or before 1974, the population of the world has doubled in our lifetimes as we now approach 8 billion humans on the planet, growing at a rate of 200,000 more each day. Along with the amazing and accelerating advances in technology of the last 50 years, that means more of everything. More ideas. More creativity. More products in more categories. More choice. More competition. More transactions. More mouths to feed and more challenges.

So the exponential times we live in are driving the rate of change even faster. The statistics are staggering. We’ve discussed how trade has moved from barter to use of currencies, with banks and merchants getting involved, although barter is still valid. Our physical marketplaces have connected in to trade routes, evolved, gone global and been supplemented by telecommunications and the online world. What are the other ingredients of trade that we should consider, and how have the power dynamics changed over time?

BALANCING TRUST AND RISK

Back at the bazaar when we are bartering our goods or services, how trustworthy is the person we are trading with? Does that person have any certification or proof that they are legitimately who they are supposed to be? Are the goods or services they are exchanging with us genuine or defective in some way? Are they the age and condition that has been represented to us? The goods may be genuine, but are they actually owned by the seller? Are there any guarantees or warranties if anything goes wrong. Is there some insurance we can buy, or some method we can deploy to assure our goods aren’t stolen? Does the marketplace itself offer us any protection? As buyer and seller we negotiate and eventually agree an exchange of value by handshake or some form of contract, but were the terms of our agreement fair? If currencies were involved was the exchange rate valid for these circumstances, and were those currencies real or counterfeit? How is the exchange between buyer and seller actually executed? Standing face to face in the marketplace we can see each other and exchange our goods or the currency simultaneously, but if there is some production process or a promise of delivery, who will oversee and guarantee the delivery and the payment? Then as products and services get ever more complicated, and as globalisation and communications get involved, all of these issues multiply and extend across the distances involved and each link in the chain of supply from buyer to seller across a network of the intermediary businesses that join the transaction.

The key elements in this trading landscape, from the bazaar to today’s complex, technology driven markets, have always been about balancing trust and risk. Those two are involved at every stage of the process. From the beginning of trade in the bazaar to the present day we have created instruments of trust to help reduce those risks. Each buyer and seller has begun to record their transactions or tracked their assets in their own ledgers or other record keeping systems. We have minted coins and paper money with steps against counterfeiters to certify at least one side of the value exchange. We started to use trusted third parties with their own centralised systems to oversee our business transactions and to become part of the chain. The banks and their banking systems have evolved to help trade, keep our money safe, and they add further instruments to help us like letters of credit. We involve brokers to connect us with sellers, lawyers to oversee our contracts, accountants to keep our books, track our records and other third parties including governments to set, certify and verify the standards and quality of the goods and services we exchange.

All of these parties and the measures they employ reduce risk, but they add costs and inefficiencies across the business network. Each of these intermediaries charge fees for their services. They add steps in to the process, and introduce the possibility of delays in executing agreements or getting things done. They add cost and time with the duplication of effort required to maintain numerous ledgers to keep track of the transactions. They also add additional vulnerabilities. What if a bank or any of the parties’ centralised systems were compromised by fraud, a cyberattack, some system failure or by a simple mistake? The whole business network could be compromised.

CLARIFYING THE BUSINESS MODEL

So what can we do differently with new technology like blockchain? Before we answer that question, let’s explore what we now call the business model. In their 2005 paper Clarifying Business Models: Origins, Present, and Future of the Concept by A. Ostenwalder, Y. Pigneur, and C.L. Tucci, they describe the business model’s place in the firm as the blueprint of how a company does business. It is the translation of strategic issues, such as strategic positioning and strategic goals into a conceptual model that explicitly states how the business functions. Ostenwalder and Pignuer went on to develop their ideas in to their excellent book Business Model Generation. That provides an approach to discussing the business model in 9 components – key partners, key activities, key resources, value propositions, customer relationships, channels, and customer segments, all underpinned by cost structure and revenue streams. Where on this canvas can blockchain be applied to add value, increase efficiency or reduce cost?

THE BLOCKCHAIN GOLD RUSH

Blockchain technology is in the process of moving from early adopter status towards mainstream use but unfortunately, we are in the midst of a “Gold Rush”. There is too much hype and not enough substance in some of the reporting around the topic. Some companies have managed to increase their valuations simply by adding blockchain in to their name!  Beyond today’s heat, or the backlash of bad press it’s likely to cause as some of the current projects and start-ups fail, there is real value to be found “in them thar hills”.  So what can blockchain really do in practice for trade and how is it disruptive?

WHAT IS IT?

A blockchain is a distributed (peer to peer or decentralised) ledger, implemented across many networked servers, consisting of a continuously growing list of records, called blocks, which are linked across the whole network and secured using cryptography. You can have an open network that anyone can join, or more usually in enterprise implementations, a group of partners join an agreed business network. In addition to the ledger, business rules and smart contracts that execute automatically in a transaction, based on one or more conditions, can be built into the platform.

Traditional database technology always has some central party or owner giving access and administration rights that we have to trust to use their ledger. A blockchain ledger has those rights distributed to every node or partner in the network equally. This allows several parties or even competitors to share a trusted digital ledger across the network of computers without the need for any central, controlling authority. A single version of the truth. The combination of the cryptography used to safeguard each block, in conjunction with the fact that each block addition is “witnessed” and instantly replicated across all the servers in the network means that, in practice, no single party has the power or resources to tamper with the records. The ledger becomes immutable.

A few words of caution that we’ve blogged about before. An open blockchain could have any number of servers that all need to replicate every added record simultaneously. That might soak up a lot of computing power and energy, as well as not allowing much of a transaction rate through that ledger. This is exactly why enterprise implementations of blockchain usually deploy a closed or permissioned group of partners in a particular business network. That’s the position today. We’re at an early stage which you could liken to the early days of the Internet and the World Wide Web, but more on that later.

WHAT DOES BLOCKCHAIN SOLVE?

The problem we are solving here is at the core of all trade – trust. Blockchain’s key advantage is that the buyer and seller, the other parties or competitors that are involved can trust the validity of the distributed ledger without the need for any intermediary like a bank or broker or lawyer or government being involved. No reputation required. It eliminates the need for the duplication of effort that always happens amongst the parties involved, and reduces the need for those intermediaries. It changes the backbone of business. This is why the banks and financial institutions have been amongst the first to make big investments in to understanding and developing this new technology. Blockchain has the power to significantly disrupt their core business model as the key intermediary and the central overseer of trade. This is why blockchain developer skills are at a premium.

It is important to note that while blockchains contain transaction data, they are not a complete replacement for the existing database technology, transaction processing or messaging systems that they will always sit alongside and connect to.  Blockchain and the Distributed Ledger concept adds something new.  Blockchains contains verified, immutable proof of transactions or the recording of assets with benefits that extend far beyond those of a traditional database.

WHAT CAN IT DO?

Blockchain means that business networks can be simplified. The end participants in a trade, the buyer and the seller, stay the same but the need for intermediaries can be removed or reduced. The underlying transactional system can change to be simpler, more efficient and more open as all parties can share the same transaction record in the same ledger, rather than having to maintain one of their own. A secure blockchain business network can provide:

  • Enhanced privacy so that only those parties with permission can access the ledger. Depending on the application permissions might be extended to auditors or regulators where appropriate.
  • Improved transparency and auditability as everyone in the business network is working from the same ledger which is a single source of the truth.
  • Increased operational efficiency by removing the traditional extra steps and intermediaries, and streamlining the transfer of the assets and value exchange.

Here are some examples of how blockchain technology is currently in action changing things:

  • In 2006, a USA outbreak of E coli was linked to bagged spinach. It took regulators 2 weeks to conduct the trace back and determine the exact source of the outbreak. The IBM Food Trust network including a consortium of Walmart, Nestle, Unilever and others means that the same trace can now be done in 2.2 seconds.
  • In February 2017 Northern Trust launched the first commercial deployment of blockchain technology for private equity. Audit firms can now carry out audits of private equity lifecycle events directly from the blockchain in real-time.
  • IBM and shipping giant Maersk have formed a joint venture that offers a jointly developed global trade digitization platform built on open standards and designed for use by the entire global shipping ecosystem. It will address the need to provide more transparency and simplicity in the movement of goods across borders and trading zones with the digitisation and automation of paperwork filings for the import and export of goods.
  • Modum is a Swiss company who provide data services for pharmaceutical companies. Their platform uses smart contracts and external IoT sensors to track environmental conditions for pharmaceutical products while in transit to help with regulatory compliance in the European Union, which requires proof that the products were maintained in certain conditions during transport.
  • Spanish bank Santander has become the first company in the world to use blockchain to confirm each shareholder voter’s digital identity and so make it easier and more secure for investors to vote at an annual meeting.

The European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) is investigating how blockchain could combat counterfeiting. Estonia was the first government to explore blockchain technology and their e-Estonia programme connects government services in a single digital platform. The USA’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced it had signed a two-year joint-development agreement with IBM Watson Health to explore using blockchain to securely share patient data. Dubai wants to become the first government in the world to conduct all of its transactions using blockchain, with a target deadline of 2020. In the UK HM Land Registry is exploring the technology to support their stated aim of digitising and automating 95% of their daily transactions by 2022.

The complication we have today is that not enough of these projects have gone beyond proof of concept to successful, enterprise scale, live solutions.  Since the concept has been around for almost a decade that’s a problem that, collectively, we need to fix.

The potential applications and benefits of blockchain technology apply across all business sectors, and each area of the business model canvas. It can help simplify international payments in banking, or clearing and settlement in financial markets. It could revolutionise land registry for individuals and governments, or access to medical data for health and life sciences. It can improve traceability in the supply chain and asset tracking, both physical and digital, across a whole host of industries or government applications. Secure digital identity will have huge ramifications for fraud prevention, compliance and for the provision of government services.

Land ownership, intellectual property and the role of the trusted intermediary mean that the legal profession is interested too. On top of the implications of the immutable ledger, smart contracts can be encoded in the blockchain technology. Clauses can be made partially or fully self-executing, self-enforcing, or both. The purpose (and potential) is to provide superior security compared to traditional contract law while reducing the cost and time associated with creating, agreeing and executing traditional contracts. Like the banks the major law firms are looking at their current business models and client relationships, looking for new ways of unlocking value, and so they are investing and exploring the possibilities too.

CONCLUSION

We asked where on the business model canvas can blockchain be applied, and the answer is in all 9 segments. It can be used to change the relationships you have with your customers, suppliers and channel partners. Companies will need to rethink their traditional business processes and change from business as usual to harness the efficiencies and the values blockchain can release, but we need to recognise that blockchain is evolving. As we said earlier, this is like the early stage of the Internet in the 90s. Back then it was a time of huge potential, rapid change with factors most organisations were only beginning to understand. At the start the scope was limited and the user experience was clunky. Major players in the sector like Google or Facebook didn’t exist or what they do wasn’t even conceived of as being useful yet. Fast forward to now and the Internet and these companies are part of the fabric of every day life, business and personal. Today we are still at that early stage in the development of blockchain’s distributed ledger capabilities, with technical solutions to questions we haven’t even asked yet still in the future, but not far away. Relevant to your business model? Relevant to trade? Trust me, take it seriously and factor it in to your transformation planning.

Challenge me if you disagree.  Contact us if you want to talk blockchain, business transformation and digital enablement.

Global Legal Hackathon in London this weekend – an update

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Global Legal Hackathon in London this weekend – an update

What happens when you get a bunch of lawyers, coders, designers, consultants and marketing types with their laptops and cloud platforms together over a weekend?  Well, we think it will turn in to something special!

Just over 3 weeks ago Agile Elephant volunteered, along with  Cambridge Strategy Group and Pinsent Masons to host the London stream the Global Legal Hackathon (GLH). We mean this weekend, 2 days time on February 23-25 at Pinsent Masons’ london office in the City.  A winner will be declared for London on Sunday and that team will go through to a global competition with all the other cities, culminating with a winner announced at a banquet in New York on April 21.  This will be the world’s largest legal hackathon happening simultaneously in over 40 cities and 20 countries.

All of the details and how to register are at: LegalHackathon.London

It’s been a mad 3 weeks getting our act together, using social media to connect and get the message out.  Our friends at diginomica have written about it this way:

Law firm Pinsent Masons hosts upcoming Global Legal Hackathon London

Over on CompareTheCloud I did this guest post:

Join the World’s Largest Legal Hackathon this weekend

The Law Sites blog has thrown down a worthy gauntlet and challenged us to change the world for the better with:

With ‘Hadfield Challenges,’ Global Legal Hackathon Urges Participants to Address ‘Problems Worth Solving’

But just in case you haven’t seen the details, here is what it’s all about and where we are at with 2 days to go.

What is the goal of a team entering the GLH?
The goal is to apply innovative ideas and emerging technologies to progress the business of law or facilitate access to justice for the public.  Teams of 3 to 6 will come up with a prototype or proposal at the end of the hackathon to present in front of a panel of judges.  We expect ideas using technologies like AI, Machine Learning, Chatbots, Blockchain, or the Internet of Things.

Where and when?
At Pinsent Masons office at 30 Crown Place, Earl Street, London EC2A 4ES, (including their client centre on the 15th floor with stunning views over London) over the weekend of February 23-25.  18:00 start on Friday, working all day Saturday and most of Sunday, judging takes place from 16:00-18:00 on Sunday and a winner will be announced before 19:00.

Who are the Judges and Mentors?

Our judges are Christina Blacklaws, Deputy Vice President of the Law Society, Frank Jennings the “Cloud Lawyer”, and Dr Richard Sykes chair of the Cloud Industry Forum and Joanna Goodman, Author and IT columnist for the Law Society Gazette.

Our mentors, to help advise and keep the teams on track include Sophia Adams-Bhati, Julie Gottlieb, Richard Tromans, Silvia Cambie, Dennis Howlett, Alan Patrick, Janet Parkinson, Rob Millard and me.

Who is supporting this?

There are a lot of people to thank!  IBM and Microsoft are providing developers some free access to their cloud platforms.  LexisNexis & JG Consulting are our local sponsors.  The Law Society, the Society for Computers and Law and Disruptive.Live are supporting us too.  The Global sponsors are  Integra, IBM Watson Legal, the Global Legal Blockchain Consortium, Cadence, LawDroid and ONE400

Who will be Hacking?

We’ve got teams entered from LexisNexis, Pinsent Masons, Vodafone, and Hult International Business School.  Other participants are coming from IBM, Fliplet, Jurit LLP, Hook Tangaza, Sumitomo Electric Finance UK, Said Business School, Legalytics, Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyr Inc, The Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for England and Wales, European Banking Authority, The Founder, Legal Utopia, The Law Society, Bryan Cave, Queen Mary University, Thomson Reuters, Kitmobs, Look, YADA Events, Teal Legal, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, City University, Oxford University, and Westminster University.  We’ve got capacity for 110 and 12 teams, but we still need more participants to sign up.

How can you get involved in the GLH?

  • Hacker teams and team members – Anyone involved in the law, interested in the law, involved in technology for the law, or coders and technologists who want to join the fun.  We know some firms will submit teams, and other teams will form around a great idea at the GLH.
  • Helpers – We need volunteers over the weekend to make it happen and keep everyone happy.
  • Mentors – We need subject matter experts and technologists who can mentor the teams over the weekend to help crystallise their ideas, challenge them, or keep them on track.
  • Judges – We’ve got 3 great judges, but may add 1 or 2 more.
  • Sponsors – As well as the venue we will be providing food and drinks, name tags and supplies.  We may even add a main prize and additional prizes.  We need sponsors interested in helping us fund all of this – modest amounts in the range £250-500.  This is a ‘not for profit’ exercise for the hosts, but we need to cover our costs (mostly pizza and drinks).

Follow us on Social Media
We will use social media hashtags #GlobalLegalHack & #GLH2018.  Follow the GLH on Twitter at @WorldHackathon and the London organisers @robmillard & @DT.  GLH have also partnered with legal media sources  ArtificialLawyer.com and Legal Talk Network.  Our friends at Disruptive.Live will be generating video and live content and diginomica and the Law Society Gazette will be reporting on the event.

We want to have fun, and really make a difference for the legal profession.  Will we?   Please come and join us and find out!

We want you for the Global Legal Hackathon in London!

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We want you for the Global Legal Hackathon in London!

Agile Elephant are proud to be joining Cambridge Strategy Group and Pinsent Masons as the joint team hosting the London event for the world’s largest legal hackathon – the Global Legal Hackathon on February 23-25.  It’s only 3 weeks away, and we need your help!  We need hacker teams and team members, helpers for the weekend to make it happen, mentors to advise the teams and keep them on track, and sponsors to help cover the costs – this is a not for profit initiative for the 3 host companies involved, and we are delighted to be supported by the Law Society too.

So what is this thing all about?  Let me explain….

What is the Global Legal Hackathon?
The Global Legal Hackathon (GLH) is happening simultaneously over the weekend of February 23-25 in more than 40 cities, across 6 continents.  The purpose is the rapid development of solutions to improve the legal industry using innovative ideas and emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, or the Internet of Things.  The GLH will engage law schools, law firms and in-house departments, legal technology companies, governments, and service providers to the legal industry across the globe.

What is a Hackathon?
A hackathon is a competition where multi-disciplinary teams come together to collaborate, build and launch mobile or web apps aimed at solving a particular problem. They usually work in small groups over a couple of days.  People can come individually or as a team, with an existing idea to pitch, or to listen and join one of the teams that will be formed at the start of the event.  The goal is to come up with a prototype or proposal at the end of the hackathon to present in front of a panel of judges.

In our case teams will be a minimum of 3 and a suggested maximum of 6.  Anyone has the chance to pitch an idea at the start of the event on Friday evening, teams will be formed, they’ll work over the weekend, and then present to the judges at the end of the weekend.  A winner will be declared for London and that team will go through to a global competition, culminating with a winner announced at a banquet in New York on April 21.

It is a competition, but we aim to be inclusive.  All teams must be willing to accept individual participants on the first day of the event.

What is the goal of a team entering the GLH?
The goal is to apply innovative ideas and emerging technologies to progress the business of law or facilitate access to justice for the public.

Who is organising the London GLH?
The London event is being organised by Cambridge Strategy Group, Agile Elephant, and Pinsent Masons who are kindly providing the venue at 30 Crown Place, Earl Street, London EC2A 4ES.

Who is behind the GLH?
The GLH is being organised globally by Integra, IBM Watson Legal, the Global Legal Blockchain Consortium, Cadence and ONE400.

Who are the judges for the London GLH?
We are assembling a balanced team of 5 judges, which we hope to announce soon.

How do I get involved in the GLH?
It’s free to get involved – go to GlobalLegalHackathon.com and register.  Then download the Cadence event app to your phone and complete your profile.  To find the app on the app store, it is best to search for Cadence and events.  We will use a mix of email, the Cadence app, social media and our various websites to make announcements and keep you posted on our progress.

In what ways can I get involved in the GLH?
We need:

  • Hacker teams and team members – Anyone involved in the law, interested in the law, involved in technology for the law, or coders and technologists who want to join the fun.  We know some firms will submit teams, and other teams will form around a great idea at the GLH.
  • Helpers – We need volunteers over the weekend of February 23-25 to make it happen and keep everyone happy.
  • Mentors – We need subject matter experts and technologists who can mentor the teams over the weekend to help crystallise their ideas, challenge them, or keep them on track.
  • Judges – We are assembling a balanced team of 5 (don’t call us, we’ll call you).
  • Sponsors – As well as the venue we will be providing food and drinks, name tags and supplies.  We may even add a main prize and additional prizes.  We need sponsors interested in helping us fund all of this.  This is a ‘not for profit’ exercise for the hosts, but we need to cover our costs.

Who do I contact if I want to participate or help?
Get in touch with Rob Millard or David Terrar, but please register, download Cadence to your phone and then you will be able to message us directly through the app.

How do I make a noise about this?
We will be broadcasting on social media channels using the hashtags #GlobalLegalHack & #GLH2018.  Follow the GLH on Twitter at @WorldHackathon and follow the London organisers at @robmillard & @DT.  GLH have also partnered with legal media sources  ArtificialLawyer.com and Legal Talk Network.

Where do I find out more?
All of the detail about the event including the judging rubric, event schedule, the other cities and companies involved and more can be found at GlobalLegalHackathon.com, where you will find guidance for attendees, guidance for hosts, or just ask.

We’re really looking forward to it!

UPDATE:

The London stream of the GLH now has its own website at LegalHackathon.London

5 reasons why 2007 was a Tipping Point (and a Turning Point) in our Digital Journey

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5 reasons why 2007 was a Tipping Point (and a Turning Point) in our Digital Journey

Both really.  2007 was pivotal.  A big year in our digital history. It was also the year “An Inconvenient Truth” won the Oscar for best documentary, and Al Gore told us we only had 10 years to save the planet. It was the year my literary hero Kurt Vonnegut died. The Police and the Spice Girls both did reunion tours. J. K. Rowling published the 7th and final novel in the Harry Potter series (she’s on a reunion tour of sorts herself 10 years on), but these aren’t the reasons 2007 was so important.

I started thinking about this a few weeks back, on 14th February, when I celebrated 10 years on Twitter, but I’m getting ahead of myself. We’ve been talking digital since Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital book in 1995, with a steady build up of the technologies and associated behaviours that have changed marketing and insinuated themselves in to general business use, changing things completely in the intervening 22 years. Here are 5 reasons, though, why 2007 stands out during that seismic shift.

The iPhone was announced (but it was a slow burn)
Invitations to the Macworld event on 9th January 2007 suggested that the last 30 years had been just the beginning, and everything was about to change. Actually we only realised this was true and not Apple marketing hype several years later. At the now famous keynote, after more than half an hour of other announcements, Steve Jobs explained:

“Well today, we’re introducing THREE revolutionary new products. The first one is a widescreen ipod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary new mobile phone (the crowd went wild). And the third is a breakthrough internet communications device (they were less wild about that).”

And all 3 were the same device. But it was expensive. On top that we had to wait – it wasn’t going to be available until 29th June. It did, however, completely redefine the smart phone (and multi touch screen) user interface, but on initial announcement the iPhone was a closed device. It was only available on one US network, Cingular, and only available with a small collection of native apps. Steve told people that Apple and Cingular needed it to be that way because:

“You don’t want your phone to be an open platform. You don’t want it to not work because one of three apps you loaded that morning screwed it up” and “Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because of some app”.

Where would we be now if Steve had stuck with that position? Actually and thankfully, things had all changed before the end of 2007, but you also need to be reminded of the rest of the smart phone landscape of the time. The major smart phone players were Nokia, Motorola, Sony and BlackBerry (where are they all now?). The Nokia smart phone market share high point was in Q4 of 2007 at 50.9%! Personally, this was the year I upgraded from a Blackberry 8700 to a Blackberry Curve. At the time I considered the Nokia E61i, but not the iPhone. I tried the soft keyboard and just couldn’t get on with it. Actually, one of the coolest phones to own in 2007 was the Nokia n95 which, at the time, was the most powerful smart phone (with apps) you could buy as well as being a satnav, a camera, a player of music, and it was a phone too. If you look at the market share statistics going forward many of us continued to buy non Apple smart phones well in to 2009.

What made the iPhone a real game changer was Steve Jobs 180 degree turn around in June 2007, when he opened up the operating system to 3rd party developers. Then the SDK was announced in October, and once we had the associated app store and developer ecosystem, that really changed everything. In the discussion threads of the time Apple said “It will take until February (2008) to release an SDK because we’re trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once—provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task.” Collecting all of 2007’s iPhone announcements together, the smart phone market was recast and Android followed in its footsteps.

Twitter took flight (and became a company)
I mentioned above that I jumped on board the Twitter train on 14 February 2007, but at that stage it was only social media and “web 2.0 (remember that?)” type geeks who were using it. As you’ll know Twitter was started as a side project by Biz Stone, Evan Williams, and Jack Dorsey while they were working at Odeo during 2006. Most of the usage was in the US only, and at the start of 2007 it was creeping out to my UK and European friends by word of mouth. In March, at that year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) event, things began to take flight. The Twitter stream was set on two 60-inch plasma screens in the hallway between the sessions and it became the event’s back channel. Speakers at the event referenced it, and the bloggers got on board. All of the rest of the attendees told their friends. Twitter staff received the festival’s Web Award prize. As a result Twitter usage jumped from 20,000 tweets a day to 60,000. Suddenly Biz, Evan, Jack and their team realised they had something. Twitter was spun out in to a separate company the very next month – April 2007.

On 23rd August Chris Messina suggested using # for grouping tweets, inspired by old style IRC. Stowe Boyd dubbed that the hashtag a few days later. Twitter followed up by adding the functionality required. Hashtags were widely used that year in the tweet stream connected to the San Diego forest fires. Usage also took off in Japan as well as Europe. The year that Twitter became really mainstream was arguably 2009, but there is no doubt 2007 was the tipping point.

Zuckerberg had just turned down 1$Bn, but opened up Facebook instead
Remember where Facebook was back then. During 2006 their growth had tailed off approaching 8 million users. Yahoo came calling and offered (22 year old) Mark Zuckerberg $1Bn and he verbally agreed to sell in July 2006. To put things in context, Yahoo had hundreds of millions of users at that time. MySpace was at 100 million users by August 2006. Yahoo’s timing was poor, though. Just after the offer to Zuckerberg they reported slower sales and earnings growth, and delays launching their new advertising platform. Their share price dropped 22% overnight, and Terry Semel, the CEO, subsequently cut their offer for Facebook down to $800m. They put the offer back up a couple of months later, but the damage was done and Zuckerberg didn’t sell – how different would things be now if that set of circumstances hadn’t happened?

Zuckerberg convinced his board they could do better, and started to focus beyond students, opened up membership to everyone, created the news feed and started mapping everyone’s social graph, with an emphasis on real identity and putting more of your personal information online. By January 2007 they had jumped to 14 million users, but the key move happened on 24th May 2007. At a massive press and developer event in San Francisco, they officially launched Facebook Platform, opening up for developers to build apps to help make it even easier for friends to communicate and do more. By the end of August they were at 36 million users, signing up at the rate of 1 million new users a month! It was during 2007 that I first started overhearing “normal” people on the Tube in London talking about Facebook. The die was cast. Facebook became a phenomenon in its own right rather than being lost inside of Yahoo… and MySpace who?

We all started talking Cloud
Clouds had been used in network communications and IT diagrams right back to the 60s, but the first use in the context of distributed computing was by Andy Hertzfeld in a Wired article in 1994. Quite some while later in a Q&A on 9 August 2006, at the Search Engine Strategies Conference, Eric Schmidt of Google talked of an emergent new model. He said:

“It starts with the premise that the data services and architecture should be on servers. We call it cloud computing – they should be in a “cloud” somewhere.”

A couple of weeks later on 25th August 2006, Amazon announced a limited public beta test of something called Elastic Cloud Compute or EC2. Infrastructure as a Service was here alongside the Software as a Service consumer and business applications that we were getting used to. Before this people were talking about webware and web 2.0, but suddenly Cloud was a great catch all term to use. Although the trend’s origin was in 2006, it was 2007 when Cloud Computing took hold in the language of technology. I trace my own usage of it back to that year, and that’s when I remember Simon Wardley and many others in the IT space talking cloud and utility computing for the first time. It wasn’t until 2009 or 2010 that the hype around the concept really started, but 2007 was when we all started talking Cloud.

It’s the year that Social Media started to really mean Business
The visionaries who wrote the Cluetrain Manifesto could see what was beginning to happen as far back as 1999, but 2007 was the year the momentum really picked up. Although I’d been blogging since 2005, and meeting up with like minded people at various events talking social media, web based tools and enterprise 2.0 as well as web 2.0, something different began to happen coming in to 2007. Behaviours started to change. In October 2006 I attended Ishmael Ghalimi’s (brilliant) first Office 2.0 Conference, which connected me to so many great people and helped kick off my 2007 with fresh thinking. I picked up organising and running a monthly meetup on using wiki technology in business called London Wiki Wednesdays in February 2007. I started attending Saul Klein’s weekly London OpenCoffee meetings. Although they had been set up to facilitate start-ups meeting VCs and angel investors, more and more people interested in the new stuff happening at the edge began to turn up too. Elsewhere Chinwag Live was happening. There was a buzz as marketing, communications and PR people wanted to understand the new approaches and how things were changing. Developers with an idea came looking for help or to share what they’d prototyped. Creativity was flowing and connections were being made.

During 2007 those OpenCoffee sessions got busier and busier, moving from the Starbucks in the Esprit on Regent Street, to the 5th Floor of Waterstones on Piccadilly. More and more people started working in cafés plugged in to wifi – suddenly I wasn’t the only one hunting for a power point. Actually the social media geeks that turned up to OpenCoffee during 2007 needed their own home, and when Lloyd Davis started thinking about a London form of Social Media Café, we all gravitated there. You can read Lloyd’s musings from August 2007 – the beginning of what became The Tuttle Club (after the character Harry Tuttle in the movie Brazil – find out why he was our hero here). Lloyd ran the first few sessions in 2007 and the savvy amongst us moved over from OpenCoffee to his place. It really took off during 2008 – by then the venue was the Coach and Horses in Soho and it was happening weekly, but the momentum for all of this definitely started in 2007. The social media oriented crowd in London were meeting, making new alliances, forming new companies, developing products, trying things out, and connecting with people from all over the World. Suddenly we were talking about Social Media Marketing, Social Media in Business and influencers. I can only talk in detail about London, but from my connections I know similar things were happening in San Francisco, but also New York, LA, Boston, Paris, Munich, Milan, Vancouver, all over. I’m sure you will have your own stories, but I can trace a lot of my ideas and network of friends and collaborators back to that seminal year.

So, there’s my case for 2007. It’s only been 10 years, yet it seems longer. So much of what we talked about that year has moved from the edge to mainstream business thinking today. The rate of change is only accelerating and we have a raft of emerging technologies to consider with amazing potential. Every business is (or should be) planning for disruption and new business models, and figuring out how to harness more digital technology in to the products and services they provide. I wonder how much longer we’ll be using the digital term, and I wonder what what will replace it – what comes next?

By the way, I’ve been one of several volunteers proof reading Cecil Dijoux’s soon to be published book on Hyperlean and all things digital. In his prologue to the book he says (will say):

“If there is a year to be marked as a milestone, as the kick-off of the major innovations we have witnessed recently, 2007 is a great contender.”

Like minded – absolutely! I recommend you check out his book as soon as it is published – some great content and ideas in there.

And if you want some help making sense of digital please just ask or contact us.

10 years on, why I haven’t fallen out of love with Twitter (yet)

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10 years on, why I haven’t fallen out of love with Twitter (yet)

“If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day, so I never have to live without you.”

A very sweet thought from Winnie-the-Pooh. Disney by the way, not A.A. Milne. Well it is Valentine’s Day and it’s exactly 10 years to the day since I started my love affair with the one-to-many messaging service called Twitter. Am I still that passionate? Could I live without it? Actually, we had a fantastic honeymoon period and some amazing highs, but our relationship has hit rocky patches recently. We used to talk all the time, but we don’t communicate quite like we used to. Can we change together? I’m not giving up though. Like all relationships of any value you have to work at it. But what have I learned looking back from my 10th anniversary? What’s the context, both in terms of the backdrop of digital history, and in what happens next? Let’s see.

Do you have a Cluetrain?
When I meet marketing or media professionals at some point I ask them whether they’ve heard of the Cluetrain Manifesto. Their answer presents a digital divide. Those that know of, or have read the 95 theses have a better understanding of digital marketing (and the Internet) as a network of networks of conversations. Those that haven’t heard of it have old style marketing thinking – the Internet in terms of a broadcast and traffic. I’m in awe of the book. Published in 1999 Cluetrain is as relevant today as the day it was first published almost 18 years ago. Let’s pick out 3 of the 95 tenets.

  • #1 Markets are conversations. (The foundation of all ingredients of social media and user generated content that has changed marketing forever.)
  • #6 The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media. (Technology allows two way, person to person communication across the globe in real time. And then the conversations have to adapt again when AI and machine learning mean that sometimes it’s a human talking to a bot.)
  • #12 There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone. (Companies aren’t in control of their brands anymore, but they and we have huge opportunities from the vast amounts of data generated across the web for our analysis every second.)

Twitter has been at the leading edge of these changes over the last 10 years. Buying has changed, and so selling has had to change, and the key word is social. Now every sales person has to think social if they want to be effective, and Twitter is a channel you can’t ignore in the communications mix. Now every brand, event and TV show has a Twitter handle, alongside some other social channels. Twitter has become an essential route to get the message out and feedback from both B2B and B2C marketing. It’s part of the marketing fabric, in most geographic markets, now. Most billboard adverts you see will have the brand’s Twitter alongside their web address. For the fanbase of most TV shows it’s an essential component. Season 6 of The Walking Dead averaged 435,000 tweets per episode. Even that can be topped – the premier episode of season 7 generated 4.7 million tweets, when two of the beloved characters died. That’s buzz of a different colour!

The short message is the medium
Why 140 characters, and why is that so important? There is a magic to microblogging, and a magic to the economy required in a short message. But let’s have some history. Twitter (which started as Twittr, after the fashion of web 2.0 startups dropping their vowels) was envisioned back in 2006 by co-founder Jack Dorsey as an SMS based messaging service for friend groups to keep up to date with each other. Jack sent the first message on Twitter on March 21st 2006. It read, “just setting up my twttr”.

An SMS message is 160 characters long, so Twitter (as it was eventually renamed) grabbed 20 for control characters, and provided 140 for messages. But why 160? Actually not everyone remembers how big text messaging was before Cluetrain and the age of social media. It was created within the protocols and standards of voice messaging in 1985 as part of Global System for Mobile Communications or GSM here in Europe. SMS was to use the voice optimised bandwidth to transport data messages on the signalling paths needed to control the telephone traffic during periods when no signalling traffic existed. That meant unused resources in the system could be used to transport messages at minimal cost. It was Friedhelm Hillebrand of Deutsche Telekom, working on the GSM standard, who defined 160 as the message length – to use the spare bandwidth cheaply, there had to be a hard limit. Apparently he sat at his typewriter back in 1985 typing example short messages, and none of them took more that 160 characters. Then he looked at messages on postcards he’d received, and even did some research on example Telex messages. They all matched the 160 limit, and so his argument was accepted. Even so it was a while before text messaging became a commercial reality. Hillebrand hit upon the Dunbar number equivalent for short form communication. A length that allows for true meaning and emotion in no more than a dozen words. Great for a status update or a strapline, but leaves enough room for elegance, humour and even poetry. Ideal for today’s world where the signal is struggling against so much noise, and that’s exactly why SMS and now Twitter have taken hold.

The first SMS message wasn’t actually sent until December 3rd 1992, from engineer Neil Papworth to Richard Jarvis of Vodafone. The following year Nokia made SMS capable phones, and then the first commercial SMS service was offered by Radiolinja in Finland, followed by Vodaphone launching a service in the UK in 1994. Because of the low cost SMS took hold, particularly with the younger demographic, and was a very big deal in its own right. By January 2001 more than a billion texts a month were being sent in the UK alone. In 2004, prime minister Tony Blair joined the text and mobile revolution when he took part in a live text chat with thousands of callers.

Who’s in charge?
The community, that’s who! Twitter’s power is decentralised and has given a voice and influence to users in ways no other social network has. Right from the start it was the users who were creating the utility. It was users who started to use IRC (internet relay chat) conventions like @ for names and # for topics, with Chris Messina and Stowe Boyd naming the hashtag, and Twitter followed up with the functionality to make that work. Shortly after I joined in 2007, Twitter really took off at that year’s South by South West. It jumped from 20,000 messages a day to 60,000 because there were plasma screens in the halls displaying as the conference back channel. From that point on it spread to over 200 million active users in the first seven years, and the pace has slowed to around 320 million active users now. It has changed history, playing a role in the Arab Spring or in campaigns like #BlackLivesMatter. It has changed world news gathering at a turning point in 2009 when Janis Krums tweeted a photo of US Airways Flight 1549 after it touched down on the Hudson River that went viral, before anywhere else had the story. It’s achieved a new focus of attention as Donald Trump has continued to use it as the way to talk to directly to the American Public as he moves from the campaign, through his inauguration to his first 100 days in office. However, Twitter only grew by 2 million active users in the 4th quarter of 2016, whereas Facebook grew by 72 million users in the same period.

After a wild successful IPO in 2013, Twitter began to struggle dealing with shareholders and market expectations and the stock took a downturn. Jack Dorsey, co-founder and author of that first tweet, who had been ousted in 2008, was brought back in as CEO in 2015. They’ve made changes, there has been talk of extending the 140 character limit, they’ve acquired Persicope for live streaming, but they haven’t articulated their direction anywhere near clearly enough. There have been rumours of acquisition by Disney, Salesforce and Google. From my vantage point they need to shift their balance of listening from the market and shareholders to their community of core (and new) users. Oh, and by the way, in October 2016 Twitter’s Chinese competitor Weibo just went past it in terms of market capitalisation.

Is Twitter dying?
To paraphrase Frank Zappa, Twitter is not dead, but it smells funny. Back in the late 2000s Twitter was like a village or the town square. I had real conversations with people on a regular basis. I’ve met and interacted with new, likeminded people from all over the world. It brought me business. It brought me friendships. It showed me ideas, music, books. It brought me speaking opportunities that would never have happened any other way. It helped me have impromptu meetings with cool people who spotted me on Twitter at a particular cafe. To make it even more personal, my particular Twitter community helped me enormously with support when my father was dying (they know who they are, and I thank them from the bottom of my heart). That’s value!

Now by 2017, the village has grown to a noisy urban sprawl and then a country of major cities and communities, with all of the hustle and bustle and impersonality that comes with that kind of territory, made worse by the fact that there isn’t much of a government or police force to control things. Too big for the kind of community policing that happens in smaller groups. The Jakob Nielsen 90-9-1 rule still applies, where 90% are lurkers, with 9% creating a little and 1% creating most of the content, but now the numbers are at a different scale. The conversations I used to have are now  happening elsewhere, on Facebook and LinkedIn and Slack. Umair Haque wrote about this in 2015 but added the key problem of abuse we now face on Twitter and the web. He said:

“The problem of abuse is the greatest challenge the web faces today. It is greater than censorship, regulation, or (ugh) monetization. It is a problem of staggering magnitude and epic scale, and worse still, it is expensive: it is a problem that can’t be fixed with the cheap, simple fixes beloved by tech: patching up code, pushing out updates.”

Twitter has given everyone a megaphone, and there are plenty of people who misuse it. We have mob rule. We have shaming in ways I’ve never seen before. We have a realtime communications mechanism that is highlighting the divisions and flaws in our societies, and this has been brought in to sharp focus by recent political events like Brexit in the UK or Trump’s election in the USA. When politics and religion get in the mix, emotions can run high in ways that I have difficulty understanding. I’m all for more passion, by I want my arguments rational.

So we’ve definitely got a problem, and we’ve definitely lost something, but I don’t believe that means Twitter will die. It’s become too embedded in to the nerve system of business, marketing, government, politics and the World to go away. Even in its current form it provides a service and gives value. It stills provides me with news sources and discovery and connections that add value. But Darwin is calling and it needs to evolve.

What next for Twitter?
I don’t know Jack…. but what would I do if I was in his place? Like it or not, as a Public company they need to manage the finances quarter to quarter, along with market expectations, otherwise he and his executive team will be overtaken by events and it will become someone else’s problem. However, I believe the larger focus of attention should be addressing the needs of their community of core users and remembering the key ingredients that helped build Twitter in the first 5 years. Actually Jack should be looking to lessons from my current favourite business book Team of Teams. Twitter’s community of active users is the complete opposite of a business grappling with a command and control management structure. There is no structure. By definition it is self organising. The users are already formed in to loose teams and tribes, but those teams need tools to help them do a better job of defining, moderating, guiding and organising those teams so that they get more value from their connections and their live conversations. If the abuse problem is the single biggest issue, then they need much finer grain tools to help treat and manage it at source – viewed as an infection, they need antibodies and antibiotics to kill it as it springs up. Not so much a police force as helping community self moderation. Just like in Team of Teams, the Twitter leadership needs to think like a gardener, creating the right environment for the teams to thrive. They’ve got smart product people who can add the functions needed, but they need to narrow their focus to help individuals and groups rather than considering the user base as a whole.

Another key ingredient to make the team approach work is a shared vision, and so Twitter needs a much clearer direction from the top, a much clearer annunciation of what it’s for and why. In those early years, that came from the community itself. More than anything Jack needs to do some listening.

This is the first of a sequence of posts from us Elephants on what’s next for the digital landscape, the future of mobile, group messaging, conversational commerce, artificial intelligence and more. What do you think? Contact us with suggestions, questions – we’d love for you to join the conversation.

image courtesy bookofthefuture.co.uk and digitaltrends.com

Future of Work – a Blockchain primer

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Future of Work – a Blockchain primer

A few weeks back on 19 November I attended a Blockchain event – one of the Future of Work sequence of sessions sponsored and hosted by Truphone, organised by Lloyd Davis of the Tuttle Club and Helen Keegan of Heroes of Mobile.  These sessions explore different technologies and their potential impact on the business landscape, and the workplace. It was an interesting event, with singer Imogen Heap talking new approaches and business models oriented towards the working musician within the music industry, but it wasn’t quite the topic primer on Blockchain I was looking for.  A good event nevertheless, and the second part of this post covers my notes on Imogen’s session.  But first I want to relate the subsequent homework I did to figure out how to explain why Blockchain is so important.

Part of the problem with talking Blockchain is that commentary on it is often strongly tied to the digital currency that it supports – Bitcoin. That single implementation overwhelms most explanations of the underlying technology. I’ve looked at a lot of explanations generated over the last year and come away puzzled, but the best I’ve found is from Mike Gault on re/code on July 5. He starts by saying:

“Imagine that you’re walking down a crowded city street, and a piano falls from the sky. As dozens of people turn to watch, the piano crashes down right in the middle of the street.

Then, without a second to lose, every person who witnessed the event is strapped to a lie detector and recounts exactly what they saw. They all tell precisely the same story, down to the letter.

Is there any doubt that the piano fell from the sky?”

This is the innovative and disruptive concept behind blockchain technology – a distributed consensus model for recording digital events of any kind.  A way of simply and easily creating a digital ledger of events that is automatically duplicated across many nodes and could be recording anything from an exchange of currency, to a contract, to any step in a process that needs to be certified and verified.  Wikipedia tells me that blockchain is a permissionless distributed database, derived from the bitcoin protocol, that maintains a continuously growing list of transactional data records hardened against tampering and revision, even by operators of the data store’s nodes.  Each blockchain record is enforced cryptographically and hosted on machines working as data store nodes.  The cryptography combines with the fact that the records are duplicated across many nodes in the network so that tampering with a record would be so astronomically “expensive” as to be impossible in practical terms.

Think of what that could change in business.  At the moment so many processes rely on some trusted intermediary and a multi-stage process of exchange. Whether that’s a bank, or an accountant in practice, or a law firm, or some legislative body with a compliance procedure to follow or a combination of several of these things.  Suddenly, one or more layers of process complexity could be taken away and replaced by a single ultra secure transaction in a ledger.  If we are talking money, then we are used to a system of promisary notes, bank notes, bank cards, online banking systems and phone apps that access our money, controlled by the institutions which print the notes, record the amounts, exchange them with our customer and supplier bank accounts, trade them in to other currencies for exchange, or hold them in secure vaults.  These can be replaced by a digital ledger and much simpler processes without the need for all of that administration and physical infrastructure.  The same digital concept can be applied to simplify the processes around agreeing and verifying a contract, a person, ownership of a thing, or any sort of event, in the broadest sense, that needs to be trusted.  Take a look around the audience at the next Blockchain event you are at, and you will see that banks, law firms and accounting practices are taking note and getting educated.  New markets and new ways of working are going to be created alongside legacy infrastructure, similar to the way basic mobile phone message technology has been so disruptive in Third World markets in recent times (but on steroids).  A lot of what we now consider as normal business practice will change over the next 10 years because of the Blockchain.

Imogen HeapSo let’s head back to Imogen Heap the Grammy Award winning composer, performer, recording engineer, technologist, and inventor talking about the music business.  She explained her Mycelia project, taking it’s name from fungal colonies of mycelium forming the largest organism in the World, relating that idea to the music business.  The music content are the nutrients underground and above ground you access them with Spotify or iTunes or YouTube but using Blockchain technology.  The model would change from the current centralised model where the record companies are the intermediary gateway controlling everything, to a distributed network where the creator of the content, the musician, would have the power.  Imogen would know every time one of her pieces was downloaded or played, and she would control the cost and decide if and when it might be free.  Mycelia would have open and shared data so that fans could find out about the bands they were interested in.  There would be tools to help, curation provided, and choices available so you wouldn’t just have access to a small compressed music file, you could choose the high resolution version to get the full sound experience that was created in the studio.  The approach would make the revenue splits between the musician and other parties involved transparent.  There would be Blockchain based smart contracts as an integral part of this new solution.  Imogen has been interviewed by Forbes magazine around this topic.  She worries that the music industry has boxed itself in to a corner where their model is based on producing a few big hits a year and so the industry is too top heavy.  Actually, like any market, we need healthy competition but coming back to her mushroom analogy, we need to nourish the base layer of the industry.  Her belief is that the key to that is to make the whole process easy, in the way Napster was when it first started to subvert the industry.

At least part of the problem is the cost of production, and how the music companies manage the capital involved and act like banks towards new acts, funding an album with advances that then need to be paid back with interest. Some musicians are getting around that problem with technology like Kickstarter.  For example, I’m a fan of the American-Irish band Solas.  I’m one of 726 backers who have pledged $46,199 to fund the studio recording of their next album, celebrating their 20th anniversary, called All These Years.  That’s a good work-around, but Heap would like that concept to become part of the new structure and approach.

So Blockchain could definitely change the music business, but there are plenty of applications where it will be changing industry and the world of work before 2020 and 2025.

Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work

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Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work

How will Artificial Intelligence affect the future of work? That was the theme of a combined Tuttle Club and Heroes of Mobile event that I attended on Tuesday in one of the towers of Canary Wharf. It was the second in a series hosted and sponsored by Truphone, a mobile phone service provider that produces a SIM card that operates in many countries – a goodbye to roaming charges they say! I met their founder and now CTO James Tagg at the start of the event and we started talking Physics – my own Applied Physics degree is a distant memory, but we shifted on to the Artificial Intelligence topic and James said something really useful and a little profound. He said that Artificial Intelligence is to Human Intelligence like an artificial (actually he said plastic) flower is to a real flower. Viewed in a certain way it can be as beautiful and look very similar, but it’s actually different. It might perform the same core purpose, an acceptable alternative to the real thing, but it’s still different. But that difference might be very useful – it lasts for years not days and doesn’t need water for example. That put the whole Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning topic in to a new light for me… I was there at the event to learn more about an emergent technology which has the potential to be massively disruptive. Will it take away jobs? Will the robots take over the World? Is there a HAL 9000 or a Cyberyne in our real future?

Benjamin Ellis at #FOWAIThe session was introduced by James, and Lloyd Davies of Tuttle was master of ceremonies and moderator. The main speaker was our good friend Benjamin Ellis. He admitted he is an engineer at heart, but soon got on to a key date in history. 25th January 1970 and the name Robert Williams. What is the significance? It was the date and name of the first person killed by a robot at Ford. It meant that from that point on industrial robots were deployed in cages. He talked about how we relate to artificial intelligence and robotics, and how it changes our behaviour. He mentioned how Google has open sourced their AI engine this week. That’s interesting but he believes the smart stuff is how you apply and contextualise the technology (not the AI engine itself, which will just end up as commodity technology). He went on to highlight a basic paradox. More people are being employed with AI solutions rather than less. Going further, we have less leisure time as a generation, even though we are using more technology at work to help get the job done – all surveys around this topic have found productivity hasn’t gone up with newly deployed IT.

Benjamin used a great 1950s picture of an IBM 305 5Mb (first ever) hard drive being loaded on to a plane with a crane, highlighting how far we’ve come. Kryder’s law suggests we might see a 2.5 inch 40 TB drive by the end of the decade – that plus Moore’s Law is driving a hell of an increase in the potential processing power and storage available – will that help make AI more of a reality?

Then Benjamin shifted gears to talk about emulation and simulation and the distinction between the two. We know the brain is made up of neurones. We can emulate what the brain does with things like visual recognition, face recognition and the like. However, there is more to it than that. Benjamin got us to stand and strike a Superman pose. Then he got us to sit timidly, and we discussed how our physiology changes our decision making, and our thinking based on that body language – we are very complex systems. He talked about how 1.73 billion nerve cells connected by 10.4 trillion synapses actually equates to less than 1% of the brain. He quoted this particular set of figures from this piece of research where Japan’s K Computer — a massive array consisting of over 80,000 nodes and capable of 10 petaflops (about 1016 billion operations per second) was put to work to simulate that portion of the brain’s capacity. It took 40 minutes to complete the simulation of 1 second of brain operation. Neurones are phenomenally complicated and not just switches. Neural networks are more complicated than we think, so emulating those may be just too hard. Let’s do simulation instead. Well that works really well for systems that we can describe precisely, where they are well documented. Businesses are more complex than that, barely repeatable processes as my friend Sig calls them – informal processes that are a little different every time through. So much of business works that way day in day out. Then he quoted Gregory House from the TV program – everybody lies. Lots of our behaviour is built around responding in a socially desirable way, to do with social cohesion, instincts that come from the reptilian part of the brain that controls fight or flight – the part that helps us avoid getting killed. We can put together a model of how we think the other person works, but social interactions are phenomenally complicated and how do we factor those in? Try running a simulation of what’s happening in the other person. What do we think that they think when they are saying that. Actually there is a negotiation of meaning here – how long will it take until we can compute that kind of thing as well as the human brain? Well if you start to cost out computers versus people, you soon get to numbers where the annual cost of ownership of even a single well specified laptop is more than the salary of a third of the planet’s population. Compute power is surprisingly expensive, and we humans can be very cheap. Where does it make economic sense?

Benjamin talked about the Hedonometer for measuring happiness, and how we can track the sentiment of tweets. Maybe computers can do the raw pre processing, be used for predictive analytics, or they can run algorithms to analyse data in the medical space. Yes, there are certain things that the compute power available today can do really well, but is AI really going to take all our jobs?

Well we discussed the productivity paradox – some types of jobs are ripe for automation with AI, but there are others where we’re nowhere near, and humans are still very necessary. But Benjamin was asking how do we work with this AI. How do we get inside the cage with it (bringing it back to the robot, Robert Williams and 1970)? Being alongside robots and AI will change our behaviour in business and he cited the Cobra paradox. In the time of Empire in India, there was a cobra problem. The government’s solution was to put a price on their heads to eradicate the cobra. But the entrepreneurs arrived and started cobra farms to make money out of the bounty! If you set an objective, people will find a way of gaming it. Where do you delineate? Who makes the decisions? At what level do you maintain control? How does the use of AI and robotics change our behaviour?

All great food for thought. We then adopted an Open Space Technology approach – people suggested a collection of issues to be discussed, and we split in to groups for some very thought provoking discussion. The whole evening was summarised by each of the 30 or 40 or so attendees by speaking a sentence or two of the key things they’d learned or a highlight of the evening in to a digital recorder that got passed around.

The hashtag for the event had been #FOWAI but we’d all spent so much time listening and talking, that nobody in the group had tweeted. There was just one tweet in that stream that I shared with the group at the end to their amusement. A “bot” of some kind had generated a tweet that said:

You have to laugh at the irony of it!

Some very interesting thinking that has set me on the road to explore this topic some more in follow on posts.

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