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Salesforce promises artificial intelligence applications that ‘just work’ out of the box. It’s a contrast to public cloud AI offerings and a lesson learned from Salesforce Wave. There aren’t enough … Continue reading →
Analyst Blog
In a Huffington Post blog "Why the Blockchain Still Lacks Mass Understanding" William Mougayar describes the blockchain as "philosophically inclined technology". It's one of his rare instances of understatement. Like most blockchain visionaries, Mougayar massively exaggerates what this thing does, overlooking what it was designed for, and stretching it to irrelevance.
Analyst Blog
We had the opportunity to attend the analyst meeting of Salesforce, held January 3rd till 5th nicely located at the Four Seasons in San Francisco. Despite the early time, Salesforce got an impressive range of influencers to the event, even travelling as far as Europe. And it was well worth it, as it was the most comprehensive insight into Salesforce I have experienced in my 3.5+ years covering the vendor.
Analyst Blog
Storytelling, Brand Narrative & Marketing Innovation | DisrupTV Ep. 43
In DisrupTV Episode 43, hosts R “Ray” Wang and Vala Afshar welcome:
Video
Quarks
Why Digital Transformation Requires Constellation’s New Leadership Framework
With the variety of common products available, often customers want to learn how a product or service works before purchasing. With more and more buyers using mobile devices to shop, 4 out of 5 shoppers say a video showing how a product or service works is important in their decision to purchase or not purchase a product or service. In fact, shoppers report research on mobile devices with visual content helps inform their product selection. As a result, Marketers who use video grow revenue ~49% faster than non-video users.
Analyst Blog
IoT security—or the relative lack thereof—was a big story in 2016, with vulnerabilities in connected devices leading to major cyberattacks, such as the Mirai botnet that crippled some of the world's busiest websites.
Insight Blog
It appears that Google is coming closer to releasing a productized version of Spanner, the next-generation, distributed SQL database that underpins a number of its consumer services, judging from statements by Google cloud platforms vice president Brian Stevens in an interview with the Register:
Insight Blog
Gartner has agreed to buy consulting firm CEB for $2.6 billion in cash and stock in a deal that will broaden Gartner's departmental reach within enterprises. Gartner will also assume $700 million in CEB net debt, for a total enterprise value of $3.3 million.
Insight Blog
Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's famous exhortation that "developers, developers, developers" are key to a software company's long-term growth is something that's ever more resonant in today's market, with the "big four" cloud platform providers—Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and Google—locked in pitched battle for market share.
Insight Blog
When briefing Analysts Microsoft illustrate their potential IoT market with a slide showing four major Industry sectors with up to fifteen different Line of Business Management roles in each. Every role is regarded as an actual, or potential, buyer of IoT solutions. Whilst this is undoubtedly true, for reasons covered later, it does imply having to be able to position and sell fifteen different IoT business solutions in any single Enterprise.
Analyst Blog
Last year, Apple issued a mandate calling for all iOS apps to incorporate App Transport Security, which requires apps to use HTTPS rather than HTTP, by Dec. 31. HTTPS encrypts data in transit and provides an obvious security benefit for applications.
Insight Blog
I’m preparing for the 50th Hawai’i International Conference on Systems Sciences and have taken the title of my contribution in a workshop there as the title for this post. As individuals, we need to “race with the machines.” However, at the organizational level, we need to create human partnerships as scaffolds for our broader digital relationships.
Analyst Blog
While the Linux Foundation's Hyperledger Project is not the only blockchain implementation out there, enterprises interested in distributed ledger technology should pay attention to it in 2017. In less than a year, the effort gained 100 active members and now another eight have joined, the Foundation announced:
Insight Blog
Today's Leadership Models Fail To Address Responsive And Responsible Leadership
The World Economic Forum kicks off January 17th to 20th in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland. As the global theme for the annual meeting, responsive and responsible leadership begins a lofty conversation about the qualities required to bring generations together, create inclusiveness in growth opportunities, and to bridge cultural and economic divides.
Analyst Blog
Or Reorientating how engineers think about privacy.
From my chapter Blending the practices of Privacy and Information Security to navigate Contemporary Data Protection Challenges in "Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Relations as a Challenge for Democracy", Kloza & Svantesson (editors), in press.
One of the leading efforts to inculcate privacy into engineering practice has been the "Privacy by Design" movement. Commonly abbreviated "PbD" is a set of guidelines developed in the 1990s by the then privacy commissioner of Ontario, Ann Cavoukian. The movement seeks to embed privacy "into the design specifications of technologies, business practices, and physical infrastructures". PbD is basically the same good idea as build in security, or build in quality, because retrofitting these things too late in the design lifecycle leads to higher costs* and compromised, sub-optimal outcomes.
Privacy by Design attempts to orientate technologists to privacy with a set of simple callings:
1. Proactive not Reactive; Preventative not Remedial
2. Privacy as the Default Setting
3. Privacy Embedded into Design
4. Full Functionality - Positive-Sum, not Zero-Sum
5. End-to-End Security - Full Lifecycle Protection
6. Visibility and Transparency - Keep it Open
7. Respect for User Privacy - Keep it User-Centric.
PbD is a well-meaning effort, and yet its language comes from a culture quite different from engineering. PbD's maxims rework classic privacy principles without providing much that's tangible to working systems designers.
The most problematic aspect of Privacy by Design is its idealism. Politically, PbD is partly a response to the cynicism of national security zealots and the like who tend to see privacy as quaint or threatening. Infamously, NSA security consultant Ed Giorgio was quoted in "The New Yorker" of 21 January 2008 as saying "privacy and security are a zero-sum game". Of course most privacy advocates (including me) find that proposition truly chilling. And yet PbD's response is frankly just too cute with its slogan that privacy is a "positive sum game".
The truth is privacy is full of contradictions and competing interests, and we ought not sugar coat it. For starters, the Collection Limitation principle - which I take to be the cornerstone of privacy - can contradict the security or legal instinct to always retain as much data as possible, in case it proves useful one day. Disclosure Limitation can conflict with usability, because Personal Information may become siloed for privacy's sake and less freely available to other applications. And above all, Use Limitation can restrict the revenue opportunities that digital entrepreneurs might otherwise see in all the raw material they are privileged to have gathered.
Now, by highlighting these tensions, I do not for a moment suggest that arbitrary interests should override privacy. But I do say it is naive to flatly assert that privacy can be maximised along with any other system objective. It is better that IT designers be made aware of the many trade-offs that privacy can entail, and that they be equipped to deal with real world compromises implied by privacy just as they do with other design requirements. For this is what engineering is all about: resolving conflicting requirements in real world systems.
So a more sophisticated approach than "Privacy by Design" is privacy engineering in which privacy can take its place within information systems design alongside all the other practical considerations that IT professionals weigh up everyday, including usability, security, efficiency, profitability, and cost.
See also my "Getting Started Guide: Privacy Engineering" from Constellation Research.
*Footnote
Not unrelatedly, I wonder if we should re-examine the claim that retrofitting privacy, security and/or quality after a system has been designed and realised leads to greater cost! Cold hard experience might suggest otherwise. Clearly, a great many organisations persist with bolting on these sorts of features late in the day -- or else advocates wouldn't have to keep telling them not to. And the Minimum Viable Product movement is almost a license to defer quality and other non-essential considerations. All businesses are cost conscious, right? So averaged across a great many projects over the long term, could it be that businesses have in fact settled on the most cost effective timing of security engineering, and it's not as politically correct as we'd like?!
Analyst Blog
By now you know the idea... Check out the Q1 (here), Q2 (here) and Q3 (here) shootouts on Future of Work. These quarters were won by Ceridian, Microsoft (acquisition of LinkedIn) and SAP SuccessFactors SConnect event and related announcements.
Analyst Blog
By now you know the idea... Check out the Q1 (here), Q2 (here) and Q3 (here) shootouts on Next Generation Applications. These quarters were won by Microsoft with Conversation as a Platform, Pivotal / Cloud Foundry, and Oracle.
Analyst Blog
By now you know the idea... Check out the Q1 (here) and Q2 (here) shootouts on Next Generation Applications. These quarters were won by Ceridian and Microsoft (acquisition of LinkedIn).
Analyst Blog
By now you know the idea... Check out the Q1 (here) and Q2 (here) shootouts on Next Generation Applications. These quarters were won by Microsoft with Conversation as a Platform and Pivotal / Cloud Foundry.
Analyst Blog
2016 is the year of M&A not to mention disruptive technology developments and forays into this brave new world of AI, robotics, machine learning, virtual reality, blockchain technology, IoT, and significant digital transformation. You can explore our Constellation Insights to see the big stories that we covered in 2016 or to get set for 2017.
Analyst Blog
As 2016 winds down, the enterprise tech industry machine is about to rev up again with the New Year. January is traditionally a big year for tech conferences, topped by the Consumer Electronics Show, which despite the name has plenty of relevance for enterprises. Here's a look at the must-watch events in the month ahead.
Insight Blog
During the Fall of 2014 at Salesforce’s annual conference Dreamforce, I gave a presentation titled “From Clippy to JARVIS" where I explained how the next generation of software was going to assist people in getting their work done. Back then, terms like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning had not reached the massive level of hype that they are currently experiencing today. Instead, my presentation discussed topics like task automation, extracting insights, and providing recommendations.
Analyst Blog