Thursday, May 18, 2017

Data Integration Still an Issue

Data is a major force in the new economy. Data is key to strategy formulation and is a competitive necessity.  The advent of mobile technologies in particular makes possible the accumulation of vast amounts of data that can be potentially used for business strategic purposes. BI systems and Data Analytics are often touted as vehicles for using this information.

There is, however a major problem. Businesses are finding it difficult to integrate the data from external sources with their internal data. (See, for example, this article) The main problem is that the external data comes in different formats from the internal data and there is a need for tools that can conform these data types through standardization.

Standardization of data can be achieved with such markup languages as XML (eXtensible Markup Language), which involve adding tags (metadata) to the data that explain its nature. The tags move with the data and therefore perpetuate its understandability to different audiences. They also enable the data to be read by other computer systems without human intervention, thus making the use of the data financially viable.

Such standardized data for financial purposes, and in some cases non-financial data, is already available in much of the world and is being used to analyze and compare financial data from diverse sources. It's called XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language), a derivative of XML that it specifically designed to standardize the tags so as to represent financial data in a way that it can be easily understood by diverse systems and users.

XBRL is a requirement in much of the developed world, except for Canada. Why it is not required in Canada is a bit of a mystery, other than to observe that the securities regulators and the government have not taken a leadership role as they have in other countries.

Data is much too important in the modern economy to be ignored. On that there is a consensus. Standardized data is a proven and viable way to enable data to be used in an efficient and useful manner. The movement to standardize data around the world is commendable in this regard and hopefully this will eventually spread to Canada.

Tuesday, May 09, 2017

Blockchain Hype Cycle Entering a New Phase

Blockchain, the much-hyped technology that formed the underpinning of the digital currency “Bitcoin” has been at the forefront of technology innovation discussions since 2011.

Technologically, Blockchain is a decentralized ledger, or list, of all transactions across a peer-to-peer network. Such transactions are visible to those on the network simultaneously and therefore transactions can be consummated more quickly. So Blockchain offers a great deal more efficiency, as well as security, because the visibility means that untoward manipulations will be spotted quickly.

At first it was touted as particularly revolutionizing the worlds of financial services and accounting, along with insurance, health care, and others.

The others include digital asset management, which could be one of the more promising applications, because it could provide disintermediation between digital asset issuers, application developers and consumers. This could be huge.

For the first few years, speculation and activity was frantic, with soothsayers promising a worldwide revolution.

In August, 2016, Gartner Group declared that blockchain had reached its peak of inflated expectations, which meant that if it followed the hype cycle, it was about to head into the trough of disillusionment.

There hasn’t been as much disillusionment with blockchain as there was with some other technologies that enjoyed flurries of high expectations, such as XBRL and cloud computing, but there are signs that it is indeed entering a new phase.

One of these signs shows up in a report by KPMG on developments during the past year in the fintech area. That report showed that investment in blockchain had declined during 2016, compared to the previous year. However, it stated that interest continues.

That interest is now zeroing in on finding economically viable applications for blockchain. This could indicate that we are already on the slope of enlightenment and searching for solid productive applications.

There are signs that the plateau of productivity will be reached quite quickly.



Wednesday, May 03, 2017

Innovation is Yielding to Constant Innovation


Innovation is important. There's no question about that in this world of data driven decision making, IoT and increased data mobility. But there are two major points to make about the extent to which businesses must innovate in order to survive and prosper.

First, any company that is not exploring how it can gather, analyze and use data for its core business activities is missing a boat that is leaving the dock and they will not be able to catch.

Second, the forces of change in technology are moving so fast that innovation must be a constant in the company, raising the question - is constant innovation a type of innovation or something else?

Certainly, constant innovation needs to be managed differently. While innovation can be managed through the use of task forces and project teams, constant innovation must be integrated into mainstream management. Management must be proficient in the implications of big data, how it is gathered, whether it be through IoT or customer mobile units, and how data analytics must be used to make the data actionable.

There are some that say this change is so profound that we need to stop talking about innovation and talk more about embracing these technologies and making sure that the people in the organization are conditioned to their ongoing use. For more on this line of thought, check out this article.