Perry

Hewitt

Author: Perry Hewitt

  • 2013 prediction: the human-technology bologna sandwich

    The biggest trend in 2013 will be a business process shift to what I elegantly deem the “bologna sandwich model” of humans and machines. That means: this will be the year organizations figure out how to use employees not to replace technology (“Would someone please go find and count those Twitter mentions?”) but to envision and interpret it. In the bologna sandwich model, the people are the bread: on one end, they’re the strategy, envisioning the technology needed to move the business goals forward; on the other end, they are the interpreters of the technology – what patterns are emerging, what do the analytics tell us, and how do we refine our approach?

    A sexier answer would be “the cloud – everywhere” or “big data” or “the internet of things” – and those ideas are dead on. If those Black Friday numbers are any indication, in 2013 mobile in particular will continue its rapid acceleration into our everyday lives. But to me the seismic shift will be getting the human-machine interplay right so that we’re neither Luddites nor slaves to Utopian automation. We need to use humans and machines for what they’re best at: for the former, strategy and interpretation; for the latter: data mining and analytics. Nate Silver’s victory in the 2012 presidential election provides the anecdata that will be the tipping point for a thoughtful, data-driven approach.

    What’s the biggest industry challenge related to that prediction? The inherent skills gap between many high school and college graduates and the world of work. We still need critical thinkers, and we also need people with quantitative skills to be everything from entry-level data analysts to the blue-collar coders that all businesses – not just tech firms – will require. For the bologna sandwich, you’ll need tech-savvy leaders to drive the strategy, and data scientists to interpret the results. How will we solve for this? In 2013, I’m confident you will see both traditional and non-traditional educational models develop innovative responses to that challenge.

    Originally posted in the Predictions and Reflections series for Massachusetts Innovation Technology Exchange (MITX) .

     

  • The antithesis to 10,000 hours

    There’s a lot of reasonable thinking out there about how a skill is mastered, including the 10,000-hour rule popularized by Malcolm Gladwell.

    I’m the first to advocate for the value of persistence — in marketing analytics, software development, and countless other disciplines there’s tremendous value in chasing every issue to its core and in finishing the job, even down to the tedious, final 10%.

    Still, there are people whose skills — in strategy, writing, design, or coding –seem to transcend what’s possible for others. Leo Messi has likely put his 10,000 hours in, but I doubt there are many who could achieve what he has for the beautiful game.

    According to the New York Times, former FC Barcelona Manager Pep Guardiolo said of Messi, “Don’t try to write about him. Don’t try to describe him. Watch him.” Here are 86 of his 88 goals in 2012 — but it’s really worth watching a full match if you can.

  • Visualizing characters + action over time = magic

    Excellent visualization of Game of Thrones characters and their events trajectory (spoiler alert: lots of killing) over time by Jerome Cukier (h/t Nathan Yau).

    Love the proliferating use of data visualization to understand complex character structures and plot lines in novels; see also Infinite Atlas and this selection from brain pickings.

  • Creating a network for women entrepreneurs

    …women-owned firms employ just 6% of the U.S. workforce and contribute just 4% of all business revenues. Women might be making overall progress in the rate at which they are launching new ventures, but are failing to launch and build high-growth ventures.

    — Jennifer McFadden, who proposes radically transparent networks as one possible solution to the high-growth venture gap

  • The Tempest, digital humanities edition

    We didn’t want this to be the authoritative version of the play to be admired or read in solitude; we want it to be a generative version of the play, one which sparks innovation and creates new knowledge.

    – Prof Elliot Visconsi, talking about his new iPad app supporting a social reading and learning experience of The Tempest

  • Enabling IT for the digital consumer shift

    laptop collaborationLast week at a Boston-based CIO Summit, I spoke about the challenges facing traditional IT roles in a shifting enterprise technology landscape.

    Consumerization of IT is a foregone conclusion: employees are bringing not only their personal devices (BYOD-sanctioned or otherwise) but more significantly their habits and expectations born of living in a full-on digital world. The proliferation of well-designed, productivity-enhancing, cloud-based software means employees won’t wait. Nimble organizations will rely only on the flavors of enterprise software that, as VC Bijan Sabet said, don’t require sales or installation, rock on mobile, and enable strong network effects. The good news: many C-suite leaders are on board. The challenge is that many of the development processes and practices were created for a more clear-cut, waterfall world. How do we help development teams be successful given their existing legacy system realities, while adding on a very different mandate of creating digital experiences for ever more demanding business employees?

    One way is rethinking training. GE was the first corporation to partner with General Assembly, which offers a range of technical, business, and design courses led by experienced practitioners, not corporate trainers. From CodeAcademy to Skillshare, there are myriad learning options at varying pricepoints for enterprise to beta. Another way to support this shift is to put business employees and developers on co-funded projects, so that potentially competing concerns like mobility and security are shared. As a colleague likes to remark, “nothing drives project collaboration like an exchange of hostages.”

    As media report ever-growing CMO technology budgets, closer collaboration between business and IT is a requirement for advancing enterprise digital initiatives. Figuring it all out can’t be achieved solely through a strategy deck — the best way to chart the course is to get started on a near-term project, measure, and repeat.

  • How universality benefits the web profession

    We’ve spent two decades talking about a web that’s inclusive and flexible. We’ve devoted countless hours to creating spaces where conversations and relationships can thrive. The longer we tolerate a community that excludes others, the more we, as an industry, are defined by exclusion—and the further away we remain from the universality we’ve worked so hard to build.

    – Sara Wachter-Boettcher in A List Apart on cultivating diversity and respect in the web profession

     

  • 7 tips for digital and social event strategy

    eventThere’s a lot of apt criticism of social media snake oil salesmen — including this terrific Onion video (embedded in a good sendup of TED). But social media does deliver news, shape opinion, and forge connections in important ways.

    In the forging connections department, in-person events remain vital. As much as digital platforms enable you to listen to and share ideas, the value of face-to-face connections has not been eradicated. Facebook was supposed to kill reunions — in many cases, social networking has whetted appetites for the in-person kind.

    So, how do you set the stage for online social media to support a well-orchestrated offline event? A few thoughts:

    1. Clarify the ground rules. Is your event on the record, or off the record? If it’s not specifically stated to be the former, some would-be tweeters or instagrammers might think keyboarding or holding up a camera are out-of-bounds.
    2. Form your social strategy based on your event goals (and yes, that means clarifying your event goals). Is it networking? Then you’re going to make your attendee list public early, and shout out to as many people as possible. Thought leadership? Then you’ll select and link to as many relevant resources (in-house and third party) to put whatever content you’re serving up into context.
    3. Create a concise and relevant hashtag. Character counts are tight, so don’t insert your organizational brand if it doesn’t make sense.
    4. Define your non-attendee strategy. What can or should the experience be for those who are interested in the event, but who can’t attend?
    5. Before: communicate the hashtag to registered attendees and seed it with content. A week or so prior, thank registered attendees, remind people of speaker bios, and point to related news items as appropriate.
    6. During: provide additional value — and this requires a quick and content-savvy resource on the ground. Did your speaker just mention the marshmallow experiment? Make sure attendees get the reference. Where possible, get advance copies of prepared remarks, and pre-select supplemental content.
    7. After: follow up with any wrap-ups (generated by you or any prolific attendees), and any photos/video from the event. Find ways to aggregate and publish the content created by attendees (tweets, posts, photos, video – maybe a Storify?). Thank guests for attending.
    There’s nothing like hosting an in-person event that makes you appreciate the hard work that goes into one. The digital and social elements are now a core component — and an increasingly important competency for event planners and managers.

    Photo credit: Zach Hamed

  • Becoming better communicators

    We want people to care about design as much as we do, but how can they if we speak to them in a foreign language? It’s important that, as we do with any user, we find a shared vocabulary and empower everyone else to become evangelists for our cause.

    — Inayaili de Leon in A List Apart with a great reminder that even if we spend all day communicating across platforms, there’s a lot to be gained by building a narrative and a shared vocabulary.

  • Techonomy recap: digital reach and repercussions

    Am just beginning to digest last week’s Techonomy conference – three days packed with discussions of the impact of digital technology’s acceleration and reach. Sessions focused on technology’s transformative effects on our daily habits, our society, and even our brains themselves.

    There were plenty of truly remarkable examples of the improvements – from predicting elections to curing cancer to enabling worldwide education (the Forbes magazine with Salman Khan on the cover was omnipresent). But the strength of the conference was examining tech’s effects from divergent perspectives. Three sessions in particular made it easy to envision longer-term uncertain outcomes of a technology-driven future:

    • When Ray Kurzweil spoke about the Singularity (still on track for 2029) and his new book about the rewriting of our brains, then it was easy to go to a dystopian future where humans are ruled by machines. (Apparently in a hallway conversation, he did allow that John Connor was in with a chance.) As computers come closer to self-aware – and the examples of IBM’s Watson’s Jeopardy answers were astonishing – what is the risk to the humans we intended them to serve?
    • Andrew McAfee convened a thought-provoking panel called “Where’s my robot”. Here the dystopian future was less about artificial intelligence installing our new robot overlords, and more about a world of 75% unemployment when the robots have served us all too well. When robots have intelligence and dexterity, how many jobs will be left? As McAfee aptly remarked, “If you’re a mid-skilled, mid-educated, mid-ambitious knowledge worker, I think things look pretty chilly.”
    • Finally, a crash course in geoengineering with David Keith and Andrew Parker from Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center introduced an ethical and policy challenge. If sulfur can be manually added to the upper atmosphere to reduce the planet’s temperature, who gets to decide where the global thermostat is set – when as much as half a degree might have ruinous effect for one nation alongside benefits for another. (Lance Ulanoff remarked he and his wife couldn’t agree on the right room temperature for their home – how can India and China be expected to agree?). As technology decisions erode borders, and enable us to craft global solutions with vastly different regional effects, who gets to decide?

    If those were the longer-range future concerns, Techonomy also teed up immediate  examples of tech’s effects on policy and ethical considerations.

    • A panel on Transforming Social Enterprise covered the current use of microtasks distributed by systems like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Employment can be reduced, one presenter commented, in favor of a “flash workforce” available for piecework that could move beyond one-penny microtasks to more complex operations. There was little discussion of the potential societal costs – what happens to workforce stability? And what happens when the worker has no visibility into the overall job? Would you complete a small pattern recognition microtask for a nickel, knowing that the microtasks collectively might add up to a cure for cancer? How about if they add up to a capability for an authoritarian regime to better monitor its protesting citizens? (Watch Jonathan ZIttrain for a far more eloquent presentation of this argument.)
    • Finally, a discussion of Facebook product strategy saw David Kirkpatrick zeroing in on the newsfeed feature. If Facebook’s goal for the newsfeed is to become our newspaper of record, where is the transparency that helps us understand what the algorithm is filtering out on our behalf, and why? Kirkpatrick acknowledged the unprecedented global communications platform Facebook provides – but correctly pushed the question of the “invisible hand” of the algorithm and its effects.

    Technology is responsible for remarkable transformations – thanks to ever better, faster, cheaper computing power, we have previously unimaginable information dissemination and discovery opportunities created by big data. The positive implications in areas like global health are staggering. Unlike the breathless nature of most tech conferences, Techonomy forced some focus on all the consequences – explicit and unintended – that we often miss in the excitement of digital acceleration.