The Database of Now is About Leveraging Business Moments

 Recently I have been writing about the Database of Now without really defining it. While the definition was somewhat implied in the context of the write-ups, it is time to make it an official thing by defining it. Keep in mind that the definition is ideal at the moment and will emerge over time as digital technology advances to enable it. I have invited a coauthor who has some real-world examples to help flesh out this definition in context. Please welcome Dominic Ravita, whose bio is included.

Database of Now Definition

The Database of Now is a set of structured or unstructured data representing the present time or a moment without any processing or location delays. The Database of Now represents the most accurate and up to date state from which to make observations, decisions and take appropriate actions within the context of desired outcomes and goals.

The Database of Now must be considered in context and time continuums as the data meaning will vary with these vectors. An accurate state of now is a must to interpret the past and potentially predict the picture in emergent situations. Maintaining an accurate database of now is exceptionally challenging today with the amount and speed of data currently.

Benefits of the Database of Now

The Database of Now delivers operational insights and advantages by providing the current state of the business. It is a modern, efficient approach to cloud data management which broadens, accelerates and simplifies access to all the relevant in-the-moment with historical data while unifying data access styles and patterns

Why Care About the Database of Now? 

Digital transformation projects have accelerated to meet the increased demand for digital products and services, providing answers or solutions with immediacy. With the onset of the "always-on" culture, the pervasive use of smartphones and ubiquitous devices has driven a global shift in customer experience and consumer expectations. Business is now won or lost in a moment.

The Database of Now delivers the operational insights and advantages by providing the current state of business to proactively identify, capture, and capitalize on the most crucial moments for their endeavors and their customers' success. It achieves this by simplifying the data infrastructure required to execute diverse workloads across various data styles, patterns, and types. Data professionals, application stakeholders, and end-users gain the advantages of speed, scale, and simplicity.

Characteristics of the Database of Now

Instant Integration & transformation

Self-Managed with Incremental Ingestion/Cleaning

Run Anywhere Dynamically

Pattern & Event Recognition

Ability to Learn from Analytics, Machine Learning, and AI

Ability to Suggest Alternatives 

Ability to Take Action within Allowed Freedom Levels

Real-World Needs/Examples

 Cash Burn & Flow Need the Database of Now

Managing cash flow and burn down in uncertain times requires a “hands-on” real-time look at the monies and where they are going. Having a pulse on money and how much is flowing out right now is vital when unpredictable revenues. Having a chokehold on expenses can be just as much of a mistake today, so watching the corporate performance in real-time is a fantastic advantage. Watching spending patterns in the market and your organization in a real-time fashion is a key to organizational success. All of this monetary care must be watched in the context of current business scenarios that could be subtly changing and appearing in new events and patterns.

The Digital Customer Experience Needs the Database of Now

Measuring what your customer is experiencing in real-time yields much better satisfaction and results than looking at slanted surveys and inconsistently timed customer forums. Real-time data mining leveraging the Database of Now will give insights into customer behavior. While customers generally have consistent goals in the way they behave, they are now experiencing new pressures. Many organizations are declaring victory because they could continue supporting customers with a remote workforce quickly, but few look at the customer experience impact of the recent moves. The long term future of many organizations hangs in the balance with the customer experience. Digital, along with instant adaptation, will go beyond remote workers to customers and other partners.

Saving Lives Needs the Database of Now:

Seconds can save lives too. True Digital of Thailand's mission is to protect children from sex trafficking, and they do that by continuously processing massive amounts of web data to identify children in danger. They were able to decrease law enforcement investigation time by as much as 63%. True Digital also seeks to proactively reduce the likelihood of new viral hotspots, including COVID 19, by monitoring mass population movement trends and rates of population density changes through anonymized cellphone data location data.

Industry 4.0 Needs the Database of Now

When organizations interact to create outcomes with each other, especially when hyper-automation is involved, having instant transparency and acting nearest to the emergent events or patterns is essential. The Database of Now operates well at the edge, leveraging cloud presence, and work shifting capabilities. Measuring results at the edge and adapting within a set of guidelines and goals set up by inter-organizational governance bodies is essential for success.

Each of these examples has make-or-break moments in time. “Now Scenarios” are time-critical, but the length of time available for effective action varies by situation, as does the variety, volume, and velocity of data required. What is essential for these “Now Scenarios” is to leverage all the relevant data to establish the most accurate, complete, and timely context to drive proactive responses. For business operations and management, real-time revenue is lost or gained in a split second with each passing moment. 

Net; Net:

The new world is much faster in terms of reactive, proactive, or predictive decisions or actions. The Database of Now is now or will be a critical fundamental contributor to many digital transformation efforts. Organizations that can sense shifts and intercept the outcomes in time will be those who flourish best.

Additional Case Studies Can Be Found Here:

https://www.memsql.com/

Domenic Ravita is MemSQL’s Field Chief Technology Officer and Head of Product Marketing. He brings 24 years of experience across consulting, software development, architecture, and solution engineering leadership. He brings product knowledge and a senior technical perspective to field teams and to customers, and represents the voice of the customer to the product & engineering organization. He is a trusted technical and business advisor to the Fortune 500 having served global customers through multi-year transformations enabled by event-driven architectures. He has experience in distributed, in-memory data grids, streaming analytics, databases, integration, and data science.

Additional Reading on Database of Now:

Better Corporate Performance

https://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2020/08/increasing-corporate-performance-with.html

Accelerated Decisions

https://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2020/08/acceleration-of-decisions-helped-by.html

Contextual Intelligence

https://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2020/07/context-connecting-clues-for-data.html

Better Customer Experiences

https://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2017/09/do-you-need-technology-to-assist.html

Smart Data

https://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2020/07/is-your-data-smart-enough.html

 

 

Books on Cybersecurity and Knowledge Blueprints

Every once in a while I get to review some great books. Here are two that should be on your bookshelf or in your digital library. I had the pleasure to read both and have a nice summary for you.

Click here for a link to this book

"The Geopolitics of Cybersecurity is a book that surrounds the multiple layers and dimensions of what holistic cybersecurity should look like. Not only are all the challenges laid out in detail in this book, but the possible shape of the potential journey to a balanced cybersecurity framework are explored fully. As a student of cybersecurity, I now know so much more than I imagined after reading this book. It should be in the library of all serious security professionals."  

Click here for a link to this book

"Ron Ross has captured the essence of the rules around conjugating knowledge and properly mapping it for precision. This allows for better business communications at a minimum and leveraged knowledge at a maximum. For any organization that wants to leverage knowledge now or in the future, this book is a must-read" 

GOOD READING TO YOU !!!!! 

The Power & Speed of Workflow, RPA & Integration

This is a case study that shows the power of Low-code Workflow, RPA, and Integration for a large healthcare insurance company.  It's great to see a case study that enables an organization to enter a market swiftly for a reasonable cost. The power of this combo is illustrated in this video

The Challenge:

When a large, American health insurance company wanted to service a new marketplace that became available after the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was enacted, it found itself tangled in a web of manual, cumbersome internal processes that needed to be digitized, automated and integrated. The company, which wanted to grow this market in less than three months’ time, desperately needed help selling and provisioning insurance since its multi-step customer onboarding process involved several systems, including older, mainframe technology. Penetrating the targeted market effectively was simply beyond reach without a digital overhaul. What this organization needed was to tackle this multi-pronged project: someone to provide improved customer experience and coordinate a long list of processes across disparate technologies. And fast – before missing out on open enrollment for 2019, which started Nov. 1, 2018.

Since the ACA went into effect in 2010, millions of new clients have flooded the insurance market, and many insurance companies have scrambled to revamp their systems to reach this steady stream of customers. Especially since newer, digitally native insurance companies continue popping up to try and snag their share of the business. “Our focus was to create an easy, smooth experience for our customers and sales partners,” said an executive of the large, multimillion-dollar insurance company. “Equally important, we needed to catch up with the rest of the marketplace. We were lagging behind our competition, so we needed to move the needle quickly.” Like many companies undergoing digital transformation, the U.S. insurance provider was trying to leverage both legacy and newer systems, including Robotics Process Automation (RPA), but having difficulties doing so. Therefore, it searched for a solution to help it collect, validate and clean incoming customer data – 75 percent of which was inaccurate or incomplete – to ensure systems’ interoperability with limited manual intervention.

The Solution:

This organization picked an integrated solution that combined a low code workflow capability, with industrial-strength integration and robotic process automation (RPA). The platform orchestrated the data flow processes after the collection and validation of data through the solution’s customer-facing portal. Specifically, the platform delivered workflow automation with five different web service integrations, including the creation of documents, the collection of electronic signatures, and the initiation and monitoring of RPA.  “The platform enabled us to streamline, automate and coordinate processes through multiple mechanisms – not just web services – while removing the manual processing required for everything other than exceptions,” the insurance company executive said. “This allowed us to be open for business 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

The Results: 

The insurance provider was able to cut the customer onboarding timeline from two to three weeks in half, which has improved relations with insurance brokers and customers and enhanced its overall net promoter score. The platforms orchestration allowed the company to offer a digital, self-service, customer onboarding experience, which was implemented in about 10 weeks – a significantly shorter time than the 5 months the original solution was going to take. Furthermore, the cost for the platform to orchestrate this new process was 10 times less than the initial quote. Constantly looking for ways to improve, automate, and compete, the insurance company hopes its new processes continue to improve so it can reach an even wider market during the next open enrollment.

Net: Net:

In this case,  necessity was the mother of invention. The challenge drove this organization to the powerful combination of Workflow, RPA, and integration. I expect to see more organizations moving to powerful digital platforms of all types that have this powerful combination. See a compelling Infographic by clicking here.  I had a small role in creating this short and sharp video.

This solution was enabled by PMG https://www.pmg.net/ 

No More AI Winters: Really !!

History teaches us that there were two large AI Winters in the past. One starting in the mid 1970s and another in the late 1980's There were very clear reasons for the last two AI Winters, but most of the technical and cost issues are gone. The wild card is how humans accept AI this time around. My bet is against another brutal winter. This does not mean there won't be cold snaps, but a 15-20 year freeze out doesn't seem likely now.

The First AI Winter:

It was caused by a couple of major factors. The first and foremost was the lack of computer power. The examples that were put forward were "toy" solutions that really did not appeal to the investors at all. This set off a period of infighting about Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the AI community which scared off the investors for a long time.

The Second AI Winter:

It was caused by the fact that the AI portion of an application had to run on a detached expensive LISP machine that really wasn't that much more powerful that newer computers. To compound the situation, the AI systems were brittle and expensive to create and maintain. The isolation and expense was too much for users and investor alike kicking off an even longer AI winter.

What's Different Now?

• AI now has a great NLP base to leverage and we will soon be seeing NLP services for front ending legacy transactions and systems.
• AI is data focused now; not as rule and algorithm focused. This means as the data changes, the AI can change right long with the data. This reduces costs of maintenance. 
• Computing capability is strong enough and getting stronger to take on even more ambitious uses. We see much parallelism coming on soon in Quantum Computing that is necessary for more ambitious uses of AI.
• AI is working hard to assist people instead of displacing them except for dangerous and low level boring work. 
• AI can consume large amounts of data from vastly different location and give advice to people 

Net: Net:

There is no sure thing with this generation of AI, but if we all make AI easy and helpful as it takes on more challenging tasks, I think we can avoid another AI winter. The economic and computing power issues seem to be under control. It is now our job to make AI interface well with people to make them feel secure. All that stuff about AI taking the world over and turning on people sounds good for a fiction book. Do no harm otherwise ethics and law will likely have to change.

Stepping Up to Real Digital

It's time that organizations step it up to digital in ways that help everybody win. What I see, out there, is a goodly number of organizations going mobile and declaring victory without looking at the real journey they put their customers, employees and partners through. What I see is the sharpening of internal organization efficiencies for the short term. While these things are all digital baby steps, I'm not seeing people racing to digital in a balanced way. Yes most organizations are increasing productivity and increasing revenues, but few are leveraging digital in a creative and balanced manner. Let's look at the three giant steps that organizations can take to step it up.

Most organizations are stuck in incremental mode leveraging low hanging digital capabilities, while increasing profitability to keep their CEOs and boards off their back. We know digital works, it's time to commit to digital as a business / IT team. Traditional processes and applications are aimed at inward productivity at the expense of customers and strategic advantage. Most organizations are looking at tactical "ME WIN; YOU LOSE" approaches. It is time for  for everybody to win something. If you doubt me, call up one of your favorite utility companies and ask for something other than making a payment online and to visit their web site to defer people costs. When you get to their web site, it's not optimized for real customer journeys. There is basic decision organizations have to make. "Do we shoot for a new business model or do we incrementally get to a more balanced approach?"

Competitive Advantage: (Committed Digital) 

This is a "shoot for the moon" approach that basically causes a significant shift in values, goals and competencies that considers change as a fact of life. There is a deep analysis on new business models and/or radical ways of supporting the existing business model. It is focused on value to the customer, employee and partners while value to the organization builds slowly over time. At the same time care is taken to plan for future change and scenarios that would cause changes in goals or behaviors of people, processes and machines. Most organizations don't start here, but end up here evenetually.

Try Balance First: (Balanced Digital)

This is more incremental, but not easy approach that interjects outward value and digital capability into processes. This delivers happier customers, employees and partners that considers each parties journey and optimizes on the intersections and touchpoints of all participants. There is no advantage to one party over the other. It causes the internal organizational model to change to serve the customers goals along with the organizations goals in a balanced fashion. This is a huge shift in mentality that can in turn add digital to enhnace the experience for real instead of paving over existing cowpaths. This approach sets the table for natural set of steps to competitive advantage and strategic advantage leveraging business and digital change. This is not a bandaide approach to digital; it is a planned approach.

Keep Optimizing: (Bandaid Digital)

Organizations that are run by "bean counters", old school CIOs and lawyers will try to stay put and outflank their customers and competition through savvy internal optimization. This is a bet that says incremental improvement of existing products and services leads to survival over the long term expecting to evolve to something better.  Digitial is used as a bandaide in this approach. This is a very inward facing approach that leads to exposure to competitors with new business models. The optimized and abused will revolt when given a chance.

Net; Net:

No organization can sit still. It's a matter of picking a proper target and making smart adjustments. Stepping up to digital is a reason to become more outwards focused and strategically agile. Digital Business Platforms (DBP) are ideal for supporting incremental digital apporaches that focus on agile adaptation to balanced internal and external goals.

Cognitive World's First E-Feature on AI

Cognitive World, an Aragon Research and Fortune partner, has issued their first eFeature on Crossing the Cognitive Chasm (click here). Peter Fingar explains why we are headed to a cognitive destruction of the way organizations and individuals manage work and interactions in the blurred man / machine relationships. You will find a list of great articles by some of my heros on this subject to augment and support Peter's assertions.  See Lisa Woods Introductory Email Below:

Aragon Research is committed to Cognitive AI and you will find our research, webinars and free blogs that relates to the use of AI, the maturity and types of AI technology and the competencies or skills needed to be successful in the evolving AI future.  Click here for our site.

Gain knowledge exploring CogWorld eFeatures by Peter Fingar, Editor-in-Chief, with original and recently published articles by Vint Cerf and 21 other CogWorld Luminaries & Thought Leaders:
Chuck Brooks, Calum Chace, Dan Conway, Sanjit Singh Dang, Tom Davenport, Ahmed El Adl, Kiran Garimella, Melvin Greer, Paul Harmon, Setrag Khoshafian, Doug Lenat, N.D. Ludlow, Mike Olson, Paul Roma, Jim Sinur, Jim Spohrer, Jim Stikeleather, Vivek Wadhwa, Richard Welke and Irving Wladawsky-Berger.

We've just released our 1st eFeature: Crossing the Cognitive Chasm, Circa 2017, and you're among the first to explore it! 

In embarking on this fascinating and timely journey (in our lifetime!) let's harness the present and make valuable contributions in many ways.  

Thanks in advance for participating with us at Cognitive World.

Lisa Wood, (email me)

Co-Founder | CEO
Cognitive World

Cognitive World aims to be the go-to resource for enterprise decision-makers involved in artificial intelligence.

As a vendor-neutral AI knowledge hub, we exist to optimize the flow of content, engagement and commerce.  Our growing community of member companies (AI solution providers and global enterprises) use the hub for content marketing through their Node (profile). Example Node: Deloitte

Corporate Launch Member Nodes: Deloitte, Cloudera, Cobalt Speech, Coseer,Cougaar Software, Cycorp, Datalog.ai,Intraspexion, Kimera Systems, Kogentix,Kyield and Treeline Interactive. View Partner NODES Aragon Research    FORTUNE    Popping the Bubbl    SSON

Register as a Member (free)

Learn More About Nodes (profiles) Subscribe (articles, research, etc.)

Increasing Your Speed in Governance

Why would you want to speed up Governance? Well above all because your organization’s complexity slows it down while the business decisions require to speeds it up: you don’t want to deprive your company from business opportunities that you could not catch just because you’re too slow, do you?

A great deal of governance is backward looking leveraging reporting after the fact. While this will never go away, there are great ways of speeding up governance that need to be considered. This is especially important with many over and under lapping governance efforts that are happening in organizations today. The major thrust in this post is about how to use process management to plan for, prevent and how to quickly catch violations. There is a continuum of process focused governance approaches that can be used independently or together. To read more about how process management can speed up your governance efforts, please click here

Selling Digital Process Efforts to Management

There are any number of ways to sell digitally based process (BPM) efforts to management, but I have found that linking BPM to something management has on its’ plate as a challenge is the best way. Search for the best benefit stream.

 If it’s a better user experience, show that BPM can help by surrounding old transactions. If it’s better revenue opportunities by attracting and new prospects, leverage BPM to show customer journeys that would attract. If it’s operational improvement, use BPM dashboards and process intelligence to show opportunities for improvement .If it is governance monitoring and enforcement, show management how BPM can be leveraged to watch and guide the right behavior. After the first success, incrementally use it in a larger context or for a more complex problem. I have seen this approach work where there is little executive vision and support to win to live another day until an executive gets how BPM is beneficial and reliable for fast changing conditions.

If you are lucky enough to have a high level visionary, then ask that visionary for a chance to educate the rest of the folks and start with a meatier and larger scoped effort. Back this visionary with education, usually from an outside source, and great results. If the rest of the executive team rejects the idea, then make the visionary a hero with a set of projects that has significant impact. This works as well, but the risk level is higher. A digital transformation program is an ideal umbrella cover for BPM.

Net; Net: 

There are many ways of winning management, despite swimming upstream with political debris floating your way. If you can find a visionary, leverage that situation otherwise, win each little battle until it delivers an overall victory. Keep in mind that there are many process and case types and apply the right process style to the right problem. BPM supports easy to use and change delivery that can be leveraged quickly to show the change resistant that BPM works. Sand-boxing and incremental delivery seems to help either a bottom up or a top down BPM effort. I have personally used both in each kind of BPM program with good success.  

Journey / Experience Mapping Isn't Just for Customers

We all know mapping the customer journey / experience is one of the linchpins of digital transformation. If you are a planning organization, you map the journey before designing the customer experience. If you are a measurement focused organization you mine the experience and map it for analysis. If you are an organization that pursues excellence, you map the journey before you design, test the new experience with focus groups and keep measuring the satisfaction with customer experience audits. The often lost idea is that you can also complete journey maps for employees, partners and managers.

Employee Experience Mapping:

How your employees feel can often affect how the customers feel about your organization, so creating a pleasing journey for your employees as they service their customers can be as important as the customer journey itself. If this is not motivation enough for organizations, consider how difficult it will be to attract the new and tech savvy generations to your organization, if the experience is not pleasing and effective. Organizations are not only competing for the hearts of customers, but also for the hearts of employees and recruits.

Manager Experience Mapping:

While employee journeys lead to happier employees and increase the effectiveness of your organizations operations through employee workbenches or personas, managers are often left to fend for themselves. As the speed of business increases in velocity and the emergence of new signals and patterns happen more frequently, managers will struggle without some journey mapping for recognizing opportunities / threats, making effective decisions and taking appropriate actions. Organizations will be dependent on managers doing the appropriate thing in any number of business scenarios, so the managers journey will become more important over time.

Partner Experience Mapping:

Like it or not the end to end process or journey to deliver a product or service will become important over time as well. Even if you are outsourcing parts of the experience, you will want to consider the overall effectiveness of the journey for the partner and your customers affected. If you have intimate partners that really add significant value to your product or service, making them happy is just smart business practice. The days of "big dogs" dictate to partners is evaporating, so partner experiences are growing in importance.

Net; Net: 

While the case for customer journey mapping is pretty obvious today, there are other opportunities to create a better digital organization. I think that journey mapping will become a staple for organizations in many ways in our new digitally focused world that is constantly changing and improving. How can you compete over time without journey / experience mapping?

To Model or Not to Model?; That is the Question

Today there are many options to develop processes and applications. There is great debate in and around modeling representation and even the need to model. Before we get into the representation issues, let's think about the reasons to model in the first place. We know there is great pressure to get to code quickly to show results. There are better ways to compose code, APIs and leverage low code approaches that might lead one away from models. After all models generally don't execute directly or do they? Though models might not seem to get to code as quickly, they certainly help to code the right solution to meet the needs. There are three great reasons to create a visual model, in my mind, and five kinds of helpful models for developing processes and application components. Image of a sample goal model below:

Top Reasons to Model:

Visualize the Connections Between Resources:

Often management, customers, partners and employees think they understand the operational efforts needed to complete work, but in reality, they don't. Certainly there is not a common understanding of operational processes and applications in the all of the contexts and views held by the collective participants. Creating an agreed upon visual representation gives a solid construct for explanation to all managers and participants. By combining the different views and perspectives into a whole model, common understanding is the likely outcome. The model identifies all the participants roles, decisions, actions and results.

Gain a Common Understanding of the Current Situation:

Quite often there are dark events, processes, data, events and patterns to each of the participants in an application or process that may have been created by their organizational position, role or specialty. By better understanding the moving parts and how they contribute to business outcomes can make existing processes and applications work better even without making any change in the base process or application. If changes are being considered the current state models can either enable better approaches or reminding developers or participants of crucial constraints.

Create a Consensus on a Future Solution:

Gaining consensus on a set of target processes and applications is essential in all transformations, but especially in digital transformations. Creating a group of participants to define a new way forward and enabling them with models allows for faster progress. Models can be used to verify if the new solution is correct from a number of perspectives outside the core design group. Also it allows management to understand the sticking points in big change and engage participants early in the change process.

Top Development Models:

Customer Journey Models:

Often organizations are blinded by the strengths and limits of their products, services and organizations and imagine what customers want. Customer journey models, if used with customer interaction, will create better processes and applications that actually deliver outcomes desirable by customers.

Process Models:

Process models represent the sequences of decisions, actions towards goal fulfillment and dashboard results and are helpful creating processes, application components and tasks . While great for happy path processes with limited exceptions, they can be constructed for limited emerging conditions. A plus of a process model is that it also identify resources involved with business outcomes.

Decision Models:

Decision models represent the logic behind a decision and all the logical paths of complex decision combinations. For simple decisions models can be skipped, but often complex logic is needed to get to results. This means that decision models are quite helpful in describing processes and applications.

Goal Models: 

Specifying goals and their relationships to contributing sub-goals are essential to processes and applications that are either emergent or agile in nature. In this case the sequence is less important than the actual outcomes. In volatile contexts, goal driven processes and applications dominate.

Data Models:

Data that is operational and static in nature can benefit from having models that show described entities and relationships. Even in emerging data environments there are helpful models that represent a growing ontology or other data patterns.


Net; Net:

Modeling can be helpful for creating target process and application specifications as long as "analysis paralysis" is avoided. Models can be created at various level of detail and linked to more detail for complete specifications for development. Keep in mind there are many more business models that are equally helpful as those needed to develop processes and applications for broader contexts. These include business, value, revenue, market channels, customer segments, organizational, knowledge, architectural models etc.

What is Industry 4.0?

I received a question this morning on what was the difference between the IoT, the Industrial Internet and Industry 4.0. At first glance it seems that the differences are subtle, but it goes much deeper than one would believe. Besides the emphasis on manufacturing and production, Industry 4.0 has significant additions to the way it interacts and behaves that can spread out of pure engineering and manufacturing arenas. Let's dive into the differences 

The Internet of Things:

The (IoT) is the network of physical objects—devices, vehicles, buildings and other items embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and network connectivity—that enables these objects to collect and exchange data. Notice the emphasis on data and not on the processing or context. While certainly processing can be added inside the devices through embedded chips, the contexts are more about but not exclusively machine to machine (M2M). We see this played out in our cars with machine advisory or auto actions. There is more collaboration to leverage here, so enter the industrial internet.  

The Industrial Internet:

The Industrial Internet is a term coined by GE and refers to the integration of complex physical machinery with networked sensors and software. While complexity is one of the keys, the addition of software, particularly process software, adds tremendous leverage for desirable outcomes. The control points are now distributed and machines, software and humans can control their own contexts and can swarm to a solution.

Industry 4.0:

WIKI Definition: Industry 4.0 facilitates the vision and execution of a "Smart Factory". Within the modular structured Smart Factories of Industry 4.0, cyber-physical systems monitor physical processes, create a virtual copy of the physical world and make decentralized decisions. Over the Internet of Things, cyber-physical systems communicate and cooperate with each other and with humans in real time, and via the Internet of Services, both internal and cross-organizational services are offered and utilized by participants of the value chain.

Industry 4.0 is even a broader approach as it considers man-machine interaction in a value or supply chain context. It is ideal for a Digital Business Platform that supports better customer service  leveraging independent agents, cognitive knowledge agents (Cogs) or swarming agents. In industry 4.0 the contexts are larger, coordinated and goal/constraint directed which allows for more efficiency without sub-optimization. 

Net; Net:

There is a big difference with Industry 4.0 and the simple internet of things, but the combination of the IoT and decentralized control (swarming agents) plus new collaborations among machines, software, Cogs and humans will deliver new digital businesses that benefit many. 

Art Projects for 4Q Quarter 2015

I concentrated on digital art this quarter and have some pieces to share with you. I managed to be shown in Art Scope Miami this month, so that was exciting. One of these days, I'll make a featured artist and head out to one of these big events. I hope you enjoy these and let me know if any appeal to you :) You can check out my web sites for older pieces.

Web Presence: http://www.james-sinur.com/  & http://www.jamessinur.com/

Digital Art: 

The Blues:

Cool Ripples:

Marble Explosion:

Color on Fire:

Paintings: 

Lava Flow:

Mystical Mesa:

Transforming Signals into Business Opportunities

There are many signals and events that emerge in and around organizations. Now add to that the signals that are merging in a real-time fashion in the geopolitical world and markets that are changing daily. In addition, there will be many signals coming from the billions of things in the Internet of Things (IoT). If you don’t have a headache thinking about this right now, let me add some more complication for you. Like the “Transformers” in the highly successful movie series from Paramount Pictures, signals can disguise themselves, so they look normal. Now, not only do organizations have to capture many more signals to process, but they also have to figure out which ones really matter as they can transform into an opportunity or a threat. While individual signals could mean something to organizations as they could be leading indicators, it is generally true that business patterns emerge from a number of signals sensed over time. Once recognized, these business patterns will require proper analysis, critical decisions, and appropriate actions. 

See the following for more details: 
http://www.tibco.com/blog/2015/12/09/signals-business-patterns-in-disguise/