Infinite Shades of Grey

I am often asked what all the fuss is about Blockchain and then asked to explain it. Well the fuss is about a fundamental paradigm shift in how electronic transactions can be done. BitCoin is just one of millions of uses. So, for a quick example, let’s Blockchain enable Santa Claus. The chain starts with a letter from Jimmy requesting a Paw Patroller toy. This is in essence a contract, the payment (Jimmy’s joy) is only made when the contract is fulfilled (the aforementioned paw patroller vehicle is in pristine condition, under Jimmy’s family tree, specifically on the morning of December 25^th before 6 am local time) The chain involves:

• Delivery of the contract (postal service)
• Santa’s review
• Naughty or Nice Review (could result in other conditions being added to contract)
• Manufacturing
• Inventory
• Shipping
• Final Delivery
• Verification of Delivery.

One of the key points is that each link in the chain, has peer-to-peer visibility to the state at any point. Example: Shipping would know if the item was in manufacture or in inventory and be able to schedule the reindeer and sleigh accordingly. Although Jimmy is paying in smiles on the contract fulfilment, unlike a traditional retail purchase where you order and pay online and then the product ships (but they already have your money), blockchain enables verification. Specifically, in this example the contract requires item condition, place and on-time delivery of the item and payment is only made when that is complete. That’s basically how block chain works and how to block chain enable Santa. Merry Christmas!

Hate or love Mark Cuban, you have to agree that the man has an eye for trends, after all he made one of the biggest gains in tech history getting Yahoo! to pay him a few billion for his Broadcast.com startup. Here’s what he is saying about Artificial Intelligence.

“I am telling you, the world’s first trillionaires are going to come from somebody who masters AI and all its derivatives and applies it in ways we never thought of.”

By the way, the best way to conceptualize a trillion dollars is to think of the following question. If someone tasked you with spending $100,000 a day, how long would it take you to spend a trillion dollars? The answer: 27,397 years. We will have trillionaires in the next 25 years, they are very likely already born.

The obvious uses of AI are things like:

• Self-driving cars
• Pilotless aircraft
• Robotic soldiers

These are all obvious uses because they all exist today.

• You can take spin around town safely in an autonomous car in some cities from many manufacturers, thanks to AI.
• You can quite safely program a late model AirBus, Boeing or Bombardier aircraft to land itself without a pilot at most of the world’s airports, thanks to AI.
• You can see robotic technology in the battlefield today (no the machines don’t look like the Hollywood ones), thanks to AI.

AI is not new. I worked on AI projects in the early 90’s that figured out Gate handling at airports. I worked on AI systems in the late 90’s that did financial risk analysis and in the 2000’s that sorted out identity and eligibility determination but none of these are transformational solutions. What’s changed?

Over the last 30 years AI has been used in “point solutions” where you have a very specific business problem that needs an answer. It was complex and expensive to build solutions and thus it was only used in very specific cases. Today, AI is pervasive, cheap and democratized.

What does the democratization of AI mean? This is what Microsoft says:

• We’re going to harness artificial intelligence to fundamentally change how we interact with the ambient computing, the agents, in our lives.
• We’re going to infuse every application that we interact with, on any device, at any point in time, with intelligence.
• We’ll make these same intelligent capabilities that are infused in our own apps — the cognitive capabilities — available to every application developer in the world.
• We’re building the world’s most powerful AI supercomputer and making it available to anyone, via the cloud, to enable all to harness its power and tackle AI challenges, large and small.

In short we go from “point solutions” in AI, to “everything with AI”. Simple examples of this at work include the new Huawei smart phone that now has an on-board chip for real-time translation of spoken languages. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/translation/2017/10/19/microsoft-huawei-nmt-ondevice/

Mark Cuban is right. We are the edge of revolution that will be bigger than the personal computer. The entrepreneurs that figure out the way to build the things that will again transform the world are very likely our first trillionaires. What’s your idea on how to use AI?

When I first joined Microsoft in 2001 I met the indomitable Bob McDowell, the founder of Microsoft Consulting Services and the author of “Driving Digital” (yes in 2001). He relayed a story of his meeting with a CEO of a financial institution, where his secretary brought him his email printed out on paper for him to read. When the CEO asked Bob what recommendations could be made, Bob’s response was “you should resign”. The point being that by 2001 if you were not using email yourself, you were totally missing the power of technology to transform your business. We are at another such point.

Niagara Falls sends about 2.2 Million litres/second (600,000 gallons/second) over the edge. That’s a good analogy to the velocity and volume of cloud computing now. Some technology trends have been fads that start and then fizzle, some are persistent. This is one of the persistent ones with well over $200 Billion invested by the major cloud players today. There may be people in your organization that still want to paddle upstream and continue trying to serve your company with traditional technology, but it is only a matter of time before they physically exhaust themselves and get swept over the edge, perhaps unprepared to have your company make the journey safely. The key point being is all that time spent paddling against the current, just lets your competitors get further downstream and you may never catch them again.

The most important thing you need to realize about Cloud Computing is not the inherent cost savings. It is the velocity. Innovations and new competitive capabilities are delivered on the cloud daily, not in the 3, 5 or 10 year cycles of traditional on-premise computing. If you as CEO are not being told what machine learning or BOT technology or cognitive services can do for your business from your IT group, go ask them.

There are two philosophies of using cloud: moving workloads to the cloud and using cloud to move workloads. They are two very different approaches. When you move a workload to the cloud, you take what you are doing today and move it from your datacenter to a cloud datacenter. It’s the same service but now runs in the cloud. You get the benefit of cloud efficiencies and you retain your existing service more or less as is. It is an infrastructure change. Now using cloud to move a workload is a different approach. You can use cloud services to extend your existing capabilities, effectively harnessing the new services to the old or you can start with the solitary cloud approach, start new and build again; a second chance so to speak.

One of the most common myths of cloud computing is that you need to use your same directory approach and network for access. It can be a cumbersome process to ready your local directory services and network for the cloud, or… you can choose a solitary approach. The solitary cloud uses its own domain, establishes identities and then federates the identities back to the corporate directory for access validation. You still have full control but without the headache of maintaining identities. Why do you ask is this important? Here’s why.

The solitary cloud approach means that you can turn on new cloud services for your users TODAY, with no major migration projects, very minimal integration and most importantly virtually no impact on your already stretched internal IT Operations. Solitary clouds are self-sustaining.

Let’s pick an example to highlight the difference. Your corporate communications portal. On this site you have company vision, strategy, messages from the CEO, health and workplace safety, employee surveys and some discussion boards. Today it runs on servers in your datacenter and it’s a decade or so old. Functional but not up to date and certainly not driving engagement with your employees.

Options:

A. You can move it to a cloud service and reduce the IT operations costs of the service

B. You can reinvent the service on the cloud

Which one to you think will take longer? If you said “B”, you will be wrong 9 times of out 10. It is actually less work to restart on the cloud than to migrate to it.

To establish our new company communications portal on the cloud I

• create a new domain, cloud.mycompany.com
• create a new corporate site on the cloud for corporate communications and social networking (SharePoint On-line and Yammer from Microsoft)
• grab my HR file with employee email addresses personal or corporate
• I send them an email to self-provision an account with the email account of their choice (facebook, Microsoft ID, corporate, gmail etc.)
• They now have full (and secure access [could even be two factor]) to the corporate site and yammer from ANY device from the internet in a fully responsive design (PC, Android, iPhone, WindowsPhone, Blackberry etc.)
• If they leave the company for any reason, the federation of their ID is automatically removed by an HR feed and they no longer have access to the site.
• If they need a password reset, they call Facebook, Microsoft or Google, not your IT Department.

What did we NOT do.

• We did not migrate the current portal
• We did not reuse the internal ID’s from the directory service
• We did not do any integration with our local systems/datacenter except for federating the Identity and sending out 1 original on-boarding email.

We simply used the cloud to move a workload. When you are considering the cloud, consider moving to the cloud but also consider if you can use the cloud to move you.