Event Report: The Future Of Jobs From #Davos16 #WEF

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

R “Ray” Wang is the CEO of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He co-hosts DisrupTV, a weekly enterprise tech and leadership webcast that averages 50,000 views per episode and blogs at www.raywang.org. His ground-breaking best-selling book on digital transformation, Disrupting Digital Business, was published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2015. Ray's new book about Digital Giants and the future of business, titled, Everybody Wants to Rule The World was released in July 2021. Wang is well-quoted and frequently interviewed by media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Cheddar, and Bloomberg. Short Bio R “Ray” Wang (pronounced WAHNG) is the Founder, Chairman, and Principal Analyst of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He…...

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Will We Move Beyond Man Vs Machine In The Fourth Industrial Revolution?

The World Economic Forum released it’s Future of Jobs report.  As expected, the business model disruption across technology, societal, and economic forces have created urgency to understand the jobs and skills required for the next decade.   The survey and research design relied on interviews with global CHROs and other senior talent and strategy executives that impacted over 13,549,000 employees.

20160118 Future of Jobs Report Analysis #WEFTalks from Constellation Research on Vimeo.

Inside The Drivers Of Change

The confluence of new technologies, demographics, and socioeconomic shifts have created an impact in how jobs will be created and what skill sets will be required.  Success in the future of jobs may require a recalcuation in

The top five drivers of demographic and socioeconomic drivers of change include

1. Changing work environments and flexible working arrangements (44%)
2. Rise of the middle class in emerging markets (23%)
3. Climate change, natural resource constraints and the transition to a greener economy (23%)
4. Rising geopolitical volatility (21%)
5. New consumer concerns about ethical and privacy issues (16%)

The top five technological drivers of change include:

1. Mobile internet and cloud technology (34%)
2. Advances in computing power and big data (26%)
3. New energy supplies and technology (22%)
4. The internet of things (14%)
5. Crowdsourcing, the sharing economy and P2P platforms (12%)

Figure 1. Time Frame to Impact Industries and Business Models

Source: World Economic Forum

The Bottom Line: Drivers Of Change Hint At Larger Systemic Forces Impacting The Labor Market

The confluence of new technologies, demographics, and socioeconomic shifts have created an impact in how jobs will be created and what skill sets will be required.  Success in the future of jobs may require a new perspective on how growth should be calculated.  What if growth was measured by per capita?  The result would show the benefits of a decreasing population abetted by automation, robotics, and AI with a better quality of life.

Your POV.

Where do you see the future of jobs?  Should we aim for decreasing populations to improve quality per capita? What are your questions from the report?

Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationR (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) org.

Resources

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Event Report: The @Wipro @FT Dinner, Man vs Machine, Does It Have To Be Either/Or? #Davos2016 #WEF #WEFTalks

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

R “Ray” Wang is the CEO of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He co-hosts DisrupTV, a weekly enterprise tech and leadership webcast that averages 50,000 views per episode and blogs at www.raywang.org. His ground-breaking best-selling book on digital transformation, Disrupting Digital Business, was published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2015. Ray's new book about Digital Giants and the future of business, titled, Everybody Wants to Rule The World was released in July 2021. Wang is well-quoted and frequently interviewed by media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Cheddar, and Bloomberg. Short Bio R “Ray” Wang (pronounced WAHNG) is the Founder, Chairman, and Principal Analyst of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He…...

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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

One of the big topics at Davos has been the role of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robots. Discussions focus less on the technological advancements but more on the role humans and robots will play. At the Financial Times – Wipro Dinner, that topic was put to debate with six prominent guests including:

• David Cheesewright, President and CEO of Walmart International
• Erik Brynjolfsoon, Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and co-author of best-selling book, The Second Machine Age
• TK Kurien, Executive Vice-Chairman and Member of the Board of Wipro Ltd
• Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, Chairman of Nestle Group
• Illah R. Nourbaksh, Professor of Robotics at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University
• Tim Brown, CEO and President of IDEO

Where Will Man vs Machine Take Us In This Era?

The discussion included answers to key topics such as:

• What are the effects of digital disintermediation, advanced robotics and the sharing economy on productivity growth, job creation and purchasing power?
• How are businesses harnessing AI and other technologies to lead the way in re-imagining the economics and dynamics of a machine age society
• Redundancy vs. creation

The Hype Is Ahead Of The Science

Key points from the discussion include:

• Jobs displacement by AI is not that simple a debate. If one job is taken, another is created.  The question is will that be a 1:1 pairing and what skill levels are required?
• TK Kurien made a good point as to whether or not Neocortal intelligence would come too soon?
• It doesn’t have to be either /or in the man v machine debate. We have to find how technology can help humans.
• AI is changing the food industry & the value chain becoming more transparent

The Bottom Line: The Era Of Cognitive Computing Will Change How We Augment Humanity

Cognitive computing is more than a new category.  Cognitive systems represent a convergence of artificial intelligence, natural language processing, dynamic learning, and hypothesis generation to render vast quantities of data intelligible to help humans make better decisions. The ability to self-learn enables continuously reprogramming.  These advancements represent a new class of technology to enable human and machine-guided decisions. Cognitive computing drives augmented humanity, where the sum of our collective insights and data can be served up at the right time in the right context. Technologies include facial recognition, human APIs, machine learning, natural language processing and self-learning algorithms.  Moreover, a set of global digital ethics must be developed in parallel if we are to put forth machines that mimic humanity.

Your POV.

Who will win man or machine or will we coexist?  Will we have a set of digital ethics in time?  What are your thoughts from this session?

Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationR (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) org.

Resources

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IOT-A for Architecture, a journey through the possibilities Arriving at a clear outcome with a recommendation

Enterprise Architecture is pretty well understood as to what it means in respect of IT application integration, and even has some industry wide methodologies like TOGAF. Talk about Architecture and the Web and there are more variations, but there are some strong underlying principles that are respected. Now reflect on IoT, supposedly a ‘any to any’ Internet environment of event driven connections and insightful outcomes. So where is the commonly stood architecture to support this? 

The IoT problem is not a lack of standards, even for Architectural approaches, its too many ‘standards’, as the ubiquitous nature of IoT has led to all standards bodies believing that they must extend their existing work to include IoT.

The result is the proverbial story of the person asking directions to a specific destination. Each successive person states that they don’t know the way from where they are both currently standing, and can only provide directions from another starting point. Currently with IoT standards generally and Architecture in particular each standards body is defining their new standard from the direction of their non-IoT existing focus. There is little, if anything that connects these efforts, currently.

The IEEE started well with an excellent definition of the requirement for an industry wide Architecture rather than the fragmentation of industry sector focus activities. The resulting working group contains many important players such as the Industrial Internet Consortium, security experts Kaspersky, as well as significant Enterprises such as Schneider Electric. Undoubtedly in time this will prove an important contribution, but reading the report from the last Working Parties meeting suggests there will be little to help those planning deployments in the next year.

Fortunately there are some more practical short-term reference definitions of the technology stacks being suggested, and that includes two presentations on Slideshare. A November 2014 presentation by the API solution director of the MuleSoft Open Source API project has some excellent technology stack diagrams that help to grasp conceptual level principles. The proposal there should be a ‘hub of hubs’ connecting everything makes sense to MuleSoft as an API hub provider. For immediate deployments API centric integration is necessary, but it will introduce longer term scaling questions.

As a side comment; It’s necessary to check dates on any paper, blog, or presentation, as the rapid development of IoT technology and products is quickly making anything over a year old potentially out of date.

An alternative, and frankly a thought provoking approach, as it focuses on an IoT architecture for services and distribution by invoking the BSS model popular in the telecoms industry comes from Charles Gibbon in December 2014. However the question that this presentation raises is should IoT be a Server side driven architecture? Certainly in the context of Mobility and Mobile phones this makes sense, but that assume all IoT devices are firmly ‘owned’ and ‘managed’ centrally.

Public service IoT devices as an example may need to be both promiscuous and allow ‘operational management’ by the event process. This suggests that the Event Service will be more important as the focal point in the architectural model.

There are plenty of initiatives working on Industry sector architectures that could be included in a general list of architectural developments. Oddly the focus always seems to be either the Network, or the Protocol, but not on the overall architecture. Any mention of integration architecture is always referred to as needing a Gateway or an API Hub.

Reading through the various Working Groups leaves the impression that every current approach to IoT architecture starts with a proposed technology answer and works backwards to define the necessary architecture. Strangely absence is any reference to the business requirement definition. What has happened to Enterprise Architecture methods such as TOGAF that start with a conceptual architecture related to the business requirements?

The basic challenge for IoT Architecture arises from its loose coupled, stateless and decentralized nature as befits an Internet based technology. Enterprise Architecture as used in the client-server IT environment reverses these statements being; close coupled, state-full and centralized. The two environments simply don’t resemble each other enough for any easy transfer of methods as the last few years of arguments about REST alone testify.

If you are currently contemplating a significant IoT deployment then none of the above offers very much help so just adopting a good basic architectural approach to work methodically seems best. The Bredemeyer ‘Visual Architecting Process’ for Software Architecting defines the stages of Architecting a solution with no dogma about technology or products. Populating the stage one Bredemeyer Meta Architecture with the technology stacks mentioned above from the SlideShare is a useful start.

Now comes the question of the Business Requirement and that’s the difficult part! Does the conceptual architecture work from an event or from the resulting insight service outcome? This hits the real question of IOT – defining what is a beneficial outcome!

The notion that future Enterprise architects will focus on outcomes was current this last summer, but unfortunately its not so easy to take this statement into reality.

The nearest approach to this was Service Oriented Architecture not new, but those who were most involved in SOA seem to be least involved in IoT. Back in 2007 Stefan Tilkov wrote a much-applauded article entitled ‘The Ten Principles of SOA’ in which he stressed the principles of Loose Coupled Services. Some eight years later and facing the challenges of a loose-coupled IoT architecture there are some strong similarities.

There is also one big difference that hits almost anything that was said before 2010 and lies right at the heart of the IoT architecture problem. IoT is about ‘Interactions’ more than Transactions, and most Architectural principles concentrate on Transactional data.

That’s a challenging statement and really should provoke some comment!  Yes, the value from IoT comes from a Business valuable outcome, but no that’s doesn’t make it a Transaction. But what changed around 2010 that makes this a turning point? The answer was arrival of Social Customer Relationship Management as the new Internet based Social Tools arrived supporting interactions with customers. Before this Customer Relationship Management was/is a traditional IT Enterprise Application focused on Transactional Data. The difference is hugely important and in 2010 the rise of Social CRM was causing similar challenges to those of IOT today.

Read the following from an article published in August 2010 entitled Interactions with Transactions; Understanding Social CRM and try substituting Enterprise IT for CRM and IoT for Social CRM.

CRM was focused on transactions; social CRM is focused on interactions with transactions oftentimes being a byproduct. Social CRM didn't come about because of technology, but as a result of cultural and behavioral shifts, technology simply allowed customers to have a much louder voice

Social CRM was as radical a change five years ago as IoT is today in it’s competitive impact on business models and of course technology. The result was the rise of Salesforce based on completely different principles and products. As Internet/Cloud based capabilities have become well established for a wider range of ‘new’ business valuable activities Salesforce has become a well recognized Enterprise enabler.

There are very strong similarities between deploying and operating Social CRM for Business Value, and at this stage of the development, deploying IoT for its Business Value.

Social CRM provided enterprises with an external visibility into their markets via actual and perspective customers using the ubiquitous connectivity and technologies of the Internet. IoT is in effect completing the external visibility of an enterprise by adding machine and event inputs to complete the view.

At this point the conclusion of this article must be obvious, if you use Salesforce for your Social CRM and other Internet/cloud based initiatives then use Salesforce for your IoT initiatives too. That’s a pretty major statement to make so the importance of this blog was to highlight exactly why this is the conclusion. In time standards will undoubtedly arrive, but it’s going to take a long time, and a large market presence of a defacto approach usually results in a role in the resulting standard.

Right now in some sectors there isn’t time to wait, a decision needs to be made as to the deployment approach in more than a few enterprises. Understanding the similarities as well as the ‘smart’ integration possibilities between Social CRM and IoT clarifies the options. Quietly, and effectively, Salesforce have been building a strong set of IoT capabilities complete with integration with their ‘action’ suites. It’s a good time to take advantage and quick business value from IoT.

A further article in this series on understanding and using IOT will introduce the topic of Business Requirement capture and definition for IoT Business value.

#OracleCloud Summit 2016 Trends, Updates & News

Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

Role: Vice President and Principal Analyst focusing on the IOT of Customer Experience and how the cloud is driving more flexible, agile, and robust customer service and customer experiences. In-app or in device customer service is the future. Coverage Areas: Next Generation Customer, Digital Marketing Transformation Bio: As a Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, Inc, Petouhoff works with Fortune 100 and 500’s Senior Leadership teams to create strategic customer experience (marketing, sales and service) solutions which engage customers, build brands and grow businesses. Combining her experience as a former Forrester software analyst, PWC systems integrator and change management consultant, Petouhoff leads executive workshops to discuss to not only…...

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I’m here with my colleagues, Holger Mueller @holgermu and Doug Henschen @DHenschen, covering the #OracleCloud Summit 2016 in NYC at the Waldorf Astoria @WaldorfNYC. (BTW the Waldorf Astoria has great customer service!!!)

MY POV: My overall take away is that Oracle has built / are building the most comprehensive cloud offering – Data as a Service (DaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas).

B2B Customer Experience: How does an application consume all this data – from service, sales, marketing, mobile… to result in a business outcome? That’s my focus- not as much on all the data or infrastructure – but rather what is the customer / business outcome that all this provides? Here’s an example…

The person is coming close to the company and gets a notification to look to see more about how well the account is doing (Account Health.) I (as this sales person) sign-in and I find out that from service cloud, that this is not a “healthy” customer, so I can’t talk to them about adding services or products. I’m walking into a situation where there is an issue that has not been resolved. If I did log on and see there weren’t any issues, I might be able to start the conversation about what they might buy. Instead, I’d start by solving the unresolved issue. I can also see the opportunity for what they might buy if I can solve their issue.

Customer Service Is Mission Critical: This makes so much sense and why customer service needs to be a mission critical part of the overall business strategy. It is the canary in the coal mine. Everything you need to know about what your customers think and feel about your products and services can be found in customer service. It always has been. It’s only recently, by connecting marketing, sales, service, that we can actually use that information to make better business decisions. I like this a lot. It’s something I’ve been on a soapbox for years. I thank the cloud for bringing all these applications together so that we can have this integrated view of our companies.

Customer Success Management: What some of the conversation today reminds me of customer success management. I have written about this in separate reports for vendors that specialize in looking at how well an application has been deployed, used, by whom and for what. It seems this idea has been translated into the Platform as a Service by Oracle, to be able to know more about my customers and determine if they are happy and if not, and what I, as for example a salesperson, can do. It only makes sense. If you have the data, why not use it to know if your customer is happy? No customers, no business. It’s really that simple. This capability may not be as developed as the customer success management vendors, but it’s definitely in the right direction.

Customer Experience: Certainly it’s gotten more difficult to manage devices and channels and predict customer behavior. One of the TRENDS at #oraclecloud is to have all data in one place, analyzed to help brands to deliver the right message, at the right & real time, which results in much better customer experiences #cx for the customer and better business results for the brand.

The message is that Oracle ID Graph can be used to connect customer behavior to get right message, to the right channel via modeling the data to discover the best decisions.

From analyzing all this data, Oracle has found the best predictor of future purchases is past purchases. This shows that one of the real values of data is customer’s behavior. If businesses can understand “Say, Do, Buy” they will be able to target, personalize and measure the success of the customer experience across devices and channels via this Identity Graph.

Future of B2C and B2B: If #oraclecloud could measure TV ads, it could put end to guessing how much money and where to spend money on TV ads. This is a huge challenge that needs to be solved. That would be a service that would put an end to the huge amounts of money that lead to the famous quote – “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” by John Wannamaker.

Mark Hurd @MarkVHurd: He’s speaking to us about their need to shift to persona selling, which they are and have done. It used to be that the buyer was the CIO. But the cloud has brought new buyers to the table – CMO’s, Customer Experience Professionals, Customer Service… Smart. The line of business doesn’t have to wait in line for IT’s list of to do’s. Maybe IT still needs to stay focused on their list. Certainly much of what they do is needed. And maybe it was never realistic to think they could do all that is required in IT and to service the lines of business. Perhaps that is part of the beauty of the cloud. It puts the line of business in charge of their needs in software / hardware.

Mark is also talking to us about the idea that the focus of software as a service is interested in the business outcome, rather than what software companies used to focus on, which was the product. This is something that is so important. Software / Hardware for the sake of software / hardware is not enough, at least in my opinion. Until the cloud, the multiple customer personas didn’t have as much buying power and they didn’t have the weight they do now. Yes, hardware / software all needs to work, be secure, be fast, etc.. but at the end of the day, it has to provide a business owner capabilities that make their business run better. Period.

Great information. Great Summit.

@Dr Natalie Petouhoff, Constellation Research, VP and Principal Analyst, Covering Customer-facing Applications

Weak links in the Blockchain

Steve Wilson

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Steve Wilson is former VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, leading the business theme Digital Safety and Privacy. His coverage includes digital identity, data protection, data privacy, cryptography, and trust. His advisory services to CIOs, CISOs, CPOs and IT architects include identity product strategy, security practice benchmarking, Privacy by Design (PbD), privacy engineering and Privacy [or Data Protection] Impact Assessments (PIA, DPIA). Coverage Areas: -  Identity management, frameworks & governance-  Digital identity technologies-  Privacy by Design -  Big Data; “Big Privacy”-  Identity & privacy innovation Previous experience: Wilson has worked in ICT innovation, research, development and analysis for over 25 years. With double…...

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One of the silliest things I've read yet about blockchain came out in Business Insider Australia recently. They said that the blockchain “in effect” lets the crowd police the monetary system.

In the rush to make bigger and grander claims for the disruptive potential of blockchain, too many commentators are neglecting the foundations. If they think blockchain is important, then it’s all the more important they understand what it does well, and what it just doesn’t do at all.

Blockchain has one very clever, very innovative trick: it polices the order of special events (namely Bitcoin spends) without needing a central authority. The main security aspect that blockchain provides is not tamper resistance or inviolability per se; you can get those any number of ways using standard cryptography. Rather it’s the process for a big network of nodes to reach agreement on the state of a distributed ledger, especially the order of updates to the ledger.

To say blockchain is “more secure” is a non sequitur. Security claims need context.

• If what matters is agreeing ‘democratically’ on the order of events in a decentralised public ledger, without any central authority, then blockchain makes sense.
• But if you don't care about the order of events, then blockchain is probably irrelevant or, at best, heavily over-engineered.
• And if you do care about the order of events (like stock transactions) but you have some central authority in your system (like a stock exchange), then blockchain is not only over-engineered, but its much-admired maths is compromised by efforts to scale it down, into private chains and the like. You see, the the power of the original blockchain consensus algorithm lies in its vast network, and the Bitcoin rewards for the miners that power it. Scale it down and you sacrifice inviolability. 

A great thing about blockchain is the innovation it has inspired. But let’s remember that THE blockchain (the one underpinning Bitcoin) has been around for just seven years, and its spinoffs are barely out of the lab. Analysts and journalists are bound to be burnt if they over-reach at this early stage. 

The initiatives to build smaller, private or special purpose distributed ledgers, to get away from Bitcoin and payments, detract from the original innovation, in two important ways. Firstly, even if they replace the Bitcoin incentive for running the network (i.e. mining or “proof of work”) with some other economic model (like “proof of stake”), they compromise the tamper resistance of blockchain by shrinking the pool. And secondly, as soon as you fold some command and control (like permissioning) back into the original utopia, blockchain’s raison d'etre is no longer clear, and it starts to look very costly for the marginal security increment. 

Business journalists are supposed to be sceptical about technology, but many have apparently taken leave of their critical faculties, even talking up blockchain as a "trust machine". You don’t need to be a cryptographer to understand the essence of blockchain, you just have to be cautious with magic words like “open” and “decentralised”, and that old saw, "trust". What do they really mean? Blockchain does things that not all applications really need, and it doesn't do what many apps do need, like access control and confidentiality.

Didn't we learn from PKI that technology doesn't confer trust? It's been claimed that putting land titles on the blockchain will prevent government corruption. To which I say, please heed Bruce Schneier, who said only amateurs hack computers; professional criminals hack people.

Retail is the breeding ground for NextGen Apps

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Holger Mueller is VP and Principal Analyst for Constellation Research for the fundamental enablers of the cloud, IaaS, PaaS and next generation Applications, with forays up the tech stack into BigData and Analytics, HR Tech, and sometimes SaaS. Holger provides strategy and counsel to key clients, including Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Product Officers, Chief HR Officers, investment analysts, venture capitalists, sell-side firms, and technology buyers.  Coverage Areas: Future of Work Tech Optimization & Innovation  Background: Before joining Constellation Research, Mueller was VP of Products for NorthgateArinso, a KKR company. There, he led the transformation of products to the cloud and laid the foundation for new Business Process as a…...

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The yearly circus called NRF is upon us, and frankly I am glad to be watching from the fences (that is, not attending the hoopla, but watching from abroad, social, hear from colleagues on the ground etc.).

 

Retailers have always been challenged, from whenever the first sortiment decision had to be made – maybe by the Phoenician traders, who had to decide what to load on their ships. As such retailers always had to anticipate what their customers would buy and at what price point.

Fast forward to today and the industry is in turmoil. Even brick and mortar leader Walmart is closing stores. The whole retail business has gone to become more of an online business – starting with the display ad served to a consumer. But then consumers still flock to malls, my ground check this weekend at the Fashion Island mall in Las Vegas showed a well populated mall. And then the consumer of 201x is different than any consumer before – well armed with smartphones, tablets, comparison shopping sites, coupon clubs etc. Finally it looks like the battle for the consumer is seeing a new dimension when they are out and about. While it was only the airwaves that with a radio commercial may have directed a consumer to retailer A vs B while the consumer was already in the car – the self-driving car will give consumers even more time – to prioritize shopping. The good news is that today – the way how to dominate the ‘drive to the mall’ is well known. Display ads and apps.

In summary – retailers have been very good at dealing with uncertainty, but there is likely more uncertainty facing retailers than ever before. So what is a retailer supposed to do?

Far from having a complete answer – there are a few technology strategies that are certain:

 

• BigData strategy – It is clear that retailers need to process and exploit more data than ever. Likely across multiple ‘data lakes’. It is probable that the days of the ‘single’ source of truth are gone and done. Being able to exploit BigData across multiple sources, without a central single repository and still action on the transactional side is key (for those missing Social - the digital exhaust is kept here - in my view social 'sprinkles' across all the below trends).
• Analytics strategy – It is likewise clear that ‘true’ analytics (more here) need to be used to make sense of the data volumes. Retailers can no longer rely on humans to find trends and action, but need software to find and predict buying interests and patterns. That requires the ‘trashing’ of models, i.e. running all predictive models one can get hold off and apply them to a problem. The only place where this can be done is in the (public) cloud. 
• Cloud strategy – As a third ‘clear’ strategy pillar it is clear that retailers need to operate in the public cloud. Retail is one of the most seasonal industries and seasonality means elasticity of IT resources, and that means public cloud. Nice to see that best practices from the ‘old world’ apply here – don’t have a single supplier like in the real world. 
• Apps strategy – It is clear that the current providers of enterprise software are in the midst of moving to the cloud, so they are understanding the move to ‘unlimited’ computing resources themselves. Retailers that want to be leaders in the next years cannot afford to wait for them to move to the cloud, understand the best practices of the 21st century and codify them. That means in consequence that strategic applications for retailers need to be built in-house, so retailers need to look for a PaaS strategy and developers. 
• Mobile strategy – More and more retail business will be attracted and done on smartphones. Smartphone presence and apps are going to be more important to retailers than stores. It’s time for retailers to spend the same amount of time to build their mobile applications as they did for their storefronts. Similar to the Apps strategy it means in-house building of these mobile apps. 

MyPOV

All industries are facing disruption these days, but retailers may be more exposed. Operating already on thin margins, the risks only go up, the industry sees new lateral entries into their market. Even more important to have an overall and IT strategy that takes advantage of the new capabilities technology offers.

Germany rules Facebook’s “Find Friends” function unlawful

Steve Wilson

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Steve Wilson is former VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, leading the business theme Digital Safety and Privacy. His coverage includes digital identity, data protection, data privacy, cryptography, and trust. His advisory services to CIOs, CISOs, CPOs and IT architects include identity product strategy, security practice benchmarking, Privacy by Design (PbD), privacy engineering and Privacy [or Data Protection] Impact Assessments (PIA, DPIA). Coverage Areas: -  Identity management, frameworks & governance-  Digital identity technologies-  Privacy by Design -  Big Data; “Big Privacy”-  Identity & privacy innovation Previous experience: Wilson has worked in ICT innovation, research, development and analysis for over 25 years. With double…...

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The highest court in Germany has ruled that Facebook’s “Find Friends” function is unlawful there. The decision is the culmination of legal action started in 2010 by German consumer groups, and confirms the rulings of other lower courts in 2012 and 2014. The gist of the privacy breach is that Facebook is illegitimately using details of third parties obtained from members, to market to those third parties without their consent. Further, the “Find Friends” feature was found to not be clearly explained to members when they are invited to use it.

My Australian privacy colleague Anna Johnston and I published a paper in 2011 examining these very issues; see "Privacy Compliance Problems for Facebook", IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, V31.2, December 1, 2011, at the Social Science Research Network, SSRN.

Here’s a recap of our analysis.

One of the most significant collections of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) by online social networks is the email address books of members who elect to enable “Find Friends” and similar functions. This is typically the very first thing that a new user is invited to do when they register for an OSN. And why wouldn’t it be? Finding friends is core to social networking.

New Facebook members are advised, immediately after they first register, that “Searching your email account is the fastest way to find your friends”. There is a link to some minimal explanatory information:

Import contacts from your account and store them on Facebook's servers where they may be used to help others search for or connect with people or to generate suggestions for you or others. Contact info from your contact list and message folders may be imported. Professional contacts may be imported but you should send invites to personal contacts only. Please send invites only to friends who will be glad to get them.

This is pretty subtle. New users may not fully comprehend what is happening when they elect to “Find Friends”.

A key point under international privacy regulations is that this importing of contacts represents an indirect collection of PII of others (people who happen to be in a member’s email address book), without their, knowledge let alone authorisation.

By the way, it’s interesting that Facebook mentions “professional contacts” because there is a particular vulnerability for professionals which I reported in The Journal of Medical Ethics in 2010. If a professional, especially one in sole practice, happens to have used her web mail to communicate with clients, then those clients’ details may be inadvertently uploaded by “Find Friends”, along with crucial metadata like the association with the professional concerned. Subsequently, the network may try to introduce strangers to each other on the basis they are mutual “friends” of that certain professional. In the event she happens to be a mental health counsellor, a divorce attorney or a private detective for instance, the consequences could be grave.

It’s not known how Facebook and other OSNs will respond to the German decision. As Anna Johnston and I wrote in 2011, the quiet collection of people’s details in address books conflicts with basic privacy principles in a great many jurisdictions, not just Germany. The problem has been known for years, so various solutions might be ready to roll out quite quickly. The fix might be as simple in principle as giving proper notice to the people who’s details have been uploaded, before their PII is used by the network. It seems to me that telling people what’s going on like this would, fittingly, be the “social” thing to do.

But the problem from the operators’ commercial points of view is that notices and the like introduce friction, and that’s the enemy of infomopolies. So once again, a major privacy ruling from Europe may see a re-calibration of digital business practices, and some limits placed on the hitherto unrestrained information rush.

The Weekend Before Davos And The Dawn Of The Fourth Industrial Revolution

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

R “Ray” Wang is the CEO of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He co-hosts DisrupTV, a weekly enterprise tech and leadership webcast that averages 50,000 views per episode and blogs at www.raywang.org. His ground-breaking best-selling book on digital transformation, Disrupting Digital Business, was published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2015. Ray's new book about Digital Giants and the future of business, titled, Everybody Wants to Rule The World was released in July 2021. Wang is well-quoted and frequently interviewed by media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Cheddar, and Bloomberg. Short Bio R “Ray” Wang (pronounced WAHNG) is the Founder, Chairman, and Principal Analyst of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He…...

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 It's time to pack your bags ( at least virtually). The weather outside is 20F/ -7C and folks are starting roll into Zurich and the train ride into Davos. For those lucky ones, the private jets are starting to pile up as guests come in to mingle. It's the weekend before Davos. Everyone's starting to digest the theme around the 4th Industrial Revolution.

Now, many of us have not even succeeded in the digitization of business, let alone surpassed the 3rd Industrial Revolution. However in true Davos fashion, the theme on the 4th Industrial Revolution is set with a pace and fury unsurpassed in time. The theme takes a futuristic look on the impact on society, business, technology, and the economy. According to the manifesto:

"The First Industrial Revolution used 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. Now a Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third, the digital revolution that has been occurring since the middle of the last century. It is characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres."

We are at the dawn of the convergence of biological and digital. Not at the point to impact business, commerce, and the economy. Yet, the signs are clear as a civilization where we will most likely head. This gives us the ability to plan our journey in the third industrial revolution as we encounter digital transformation. Over the next few days, get ready for some insight and discussion around these topics:

• The Transformation of Finance
• The Transformation of EnergyThe Transformation of Healthcare
• The Transformation of Business and Society
• Around the World without Fuel or Fear
• Going Digital
• The Fintech Revolution
• The Growth Illusion
• The Promise of Precision Medicine
• The State of Artificial Intelligence
• Stop to Think: Big Data vs Human Touch
• The Future Drives and Flies Itself
• The Future of Energy

We'll talk more later. I want to hear your points of view!

Your POV.

Are you ready for the 4th Industrial Revolution? What are your questions from Davos? Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationR (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) org.

Resources

Salesforce AppExchange Celebrates 10 Years of Platform Success

Alan Lepofsky

Vice President & Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Alan Lepofsky - VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research. With almost two decades of experience in the collaboration software industry, Lepofsky helps organizations improve the way their employees work together to get their jobs done. Lepofsky’s primary research area The Future of Work, focuses on: integrating collaboration and business processes (Purposeful Collaboration), structuring work via Social Task Management, leveraging analytics and digital assistants to work more productively, the strategic impact of mobile computing on business transformation, and measuring workforce culture based on Digital Proficiency instead of age. Twitter: @alanlepoLinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/alanlepo     , Title: Big IdeasIntelligent Collaboration: The Intersection of…...

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On January 14, 2016 the Salesforce AppExchange turned 10 years old.  That makes it more than 2 years older than the iPhone App Store, which opened on July 10, 2008!  For those of you unfamiliar with the AppExchange, it's a catalog of applications built by Salesforce partners that enables customers to add functionality to their use of Salesforce. Do you want to add Human Resources (HR), Supply Chain (ERP), or financial features? There's an app (well dozens) for that. On the collaboration side, do you want to add web-conferencing or task management? There's an app for that.

When choosing a vendor, one of the most important things to consider is how vibrant the company's business partner ecosystem is. The more partners a company has, the more features and functionality will be available. A flourishing partner ecosystem shows that developers have faith that the platform is a leader, and someone they want to invest their time and money on. With close to 3000 apps now available for Salesforce, it's quite clear that 3rd party developers feel confident Salesforce is a company they need to build products for.

To get started building applications for Salesforce, visit their developer site named Trailhead for documentation and tutorials.

The Salesforce AppExchange created the model that several other software companies have strived to emulate. Collaboration vendors such as Box, Clarizen, Google Apps, Microsoft Office, Podio and Slack now offer integrated catalogs of their own.

Here is an infographic that Salesforce created to highlight some key milestones.

NRF16 Retail’s Big Show – what I expect to hear this year.

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Guy Courtin was formerly Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research covering Matrix Commerce and how the Internet of Things drives the evolution of commerce.  Guy has over 15 years experience in the technology space and specifically in the supply chain space. Most recently he was the Vice President of Research at SCM World. Where he focused on the service providers that empowered supply chains. Prior to SCM World, Guy held numerous senior positions. He was responsible for product marketing at RSi, a retail supply chain solution provider. There managed RSi’s go to market strategy around their leading cloud based supply chain solutions. He also spear headed Progress Software’s supply chain group. Where he was responsible for driving revenue and market share as well…...

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Every January for the past few years I have made the trek to the Big Apple and spent the better part of the week at the cavernous Javits Center for the National Retail Federations Big Show. The event feels like the official kick off for the year. While I know many who grudgingly make their way to NRF, I have always enjoyed my time at the event. So what about this year? What will I be looking for from the show?

• The continued evolution towards the endless aisle – Matrix Commerce, is all about the merging of physical retail with eCommerce in all its forms. Where commerce is thought of without the distinction between what happens in a store or in cyberspace – it is just commerce. Obviously this is not a new concept, more an evolution of omni channel retail. One key need for Matrix Commerce is to be able to meet customer demands anywhere those demands emerge from – understanding inventory availability is the key. However, this remains a major challenge for retailers and holds back Matrix Commerce to take full flight. Too often retailers are still struggling to merge multiple systems, those that serve physical stores and those that may serve eCommerce, catalog driven sales and other channels. Often times these issues stem from past decisions made to treat eCommerce as separate from their traditional business – brick and mortar. Today more retailers are struggling to find ways to consolidate these systems and begin to gain greater visibility into their overall inventory positions. I will be interested to see what are the solutions and processes being offered for retailers. Without the ability to gain this visibility, the ability to achieve the endless aisle retailers are looking for will remain a major hurdle. Retailers cannot expect to be flexible and capable of meeting customer demands, regardless of which channel generates that demand, if they do not have true view into their inventory positions. This is not simply where inventory is, but what inventory has been promised and how to match order priority with accessible inventories. I am curious to see how the likes of Infor, Software AG, IBM, Aptos, Oracle and others are tackling this challenge.
• Workforce empowerment picks up momentum – An area that has picked up in intensity over the past year is the ability to bring smarter solutions, information and insights down to the store associate and even distribution center employee. How to bring more insights and tools to the store associates runs in parallel with the redefinition of the store itself. Stores are being asked to do more – become destinations through hosted contextual experiences within the stores, leveraging store inventory to fulfill orders, act as return depots and embrace show rooming. A key aspect of these new store uses will also change the store associate role within this infrastructure. In order to maximize both the store as well as the associate, retailers are looking for solution providers to offer ways in which technology and other solutions can be integrated with the store associate daily activities. Think mobile tools, wearables, greater system integration and better business processes all being put on the floor of retail brick and mortar locations – right in the hands of store associates and managers. This is also true for distribution center labor. With continued rise of eCommerce, fulfillment takes on a new dimension where distribution center labor is asked to not only package inventory to be delivered to stores but to provide direct to consumer fulfillment as retail supply chains are more flexible with regards to where they service demand. Look for more discussion, from such players as Salesforce, Netsuite, Kronos, and others, around new solutions and efforts made by those attending NRF on how they can empower retailers’ workforces with enhanced tools and insights.
• Tackling last mile logistics – All one has to do is look back a few weeks and realize that the crush on logistics, especially the last mile portion, continues to be a strain on the retail supply chain. Stories such as the one from the University of Connecticut’s mail room that is overwhelmed by package delivery, that Jet.com had to apologize to some of their customers for not being able to meet holiday order deadlines and real estate management firms such as Camden Property putting in policies that restrict and even prohibit package delivery to their properties, are all examples of the last mile retail crush. As we see more retailers offering free shipping and returns or the likes of Amazon and Jet.com incentivizing customers to look to receiving a wider array of products delivered to home – this issue will not go away. I am looking to NRF to learning of new and innovate manners vendors are looking to address this issue with their customers. How are traditional logistic solution providers such as JDA, Manhattan Associates, Oracle to name few are tackling this issue and what innovate strategies are they helping their customers implement?
• The revolution in customer relationships, beyond CRM – I hesitate to call this CRM…reason is that I believe that the connotation associated with CRM is limiting to what is really being offered to retailers. What is key in today’s retail world is getting a rich view of the customer, and not only at those customers’ interactions with the brand. Retailers, just like they do with their inventory, must approach customers across all channels that they touch the brand through. Similar to understanding your inventory position, knowing all the touch points and the context of those interactions are not easy to achieve. As retailers must pull from multiple and often time isolated systems, it is a daunting task to create a clear picture of consumers. Understanding goes beyond creating the 360 view of the customer but also how to apply this within the context of the store and even beyond. What are the technologies that can be leveraged within the store to build on this customer knowledge and help convert and build deeper relationships between the customer and the brand. Looking at NRF16, I am interested in seeing how the likes of Salesforce, Oracle, Engage.cx, SAP Hybris, Zebra Technologies to name a few are taking on this challenge.

I am bracing myself for busy and hectic 4 days in New York, but I am also looking forward to absorbing a lot of great information, seeing old friends and meeting new ones. Will I see you there? I hope so! What are you hoping to see at NRF this year?