The 6 capabilities that drive future business value from Staggeringly Enormous Data

By

I recently participated in a panel interview on SkyNews of “some of the brightest minds in business technology”, including futurist Mark Pesce, commentator Brad Howarth, and myself. It’s just come out on the web and having now been able to watch it I think it turned out to be a very interesting discussion.

To see the video click on the image below.

SkyNews_211213

After covering some of the major trends of 2012 towards the end of the panel we turned out attention to what was coming in the year ahead. When asked what I thought needed to be on the business agenda, my response was Big Data, or as I more accurately described it, Staggeringly Enormous Data.
Read more →

The future of academic certification: universities, MOOCs, aggregators, and peer reputation

By

This morning I gave the opening keynote at the Virtual Universities: Impact on Accounting Education Thought Leadership forum in Adelaide, organized by the Centre of Accounting, Governance and Sustainability at University of South Australia and the Institute of Chartered Accountants Australia. The audience was an invitation-only group of the most senior accounting academics and industry practitioners in the country.

My keynote was on the broad global context for the current changes in education. After looking at major technological, social and structural changes, the future of work, and shifts in learning, I turned to the role of certification and credentials.

The rise of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has helped bring into focus that universities have to date always bundled together three things:
– Education;
– Certification; and
– Networking.

The rise of Open Courseware and more recently services such as Coursera, Udacity and edX has now broken out (part of) the education piece.
Read more →

Analysis: US, Australia social network usage flat, New Zealand now the world’s biggest user of social networks?

By

On February 13 I will speak at Air New Zealand’s Social Media Breakfast in Auckland, together with Teddy Goff, Obama’s Digital Director, with an expected audience of close to 1,000.

Air New Zealand ran its first Social Media Breakfast in July last year with Randi Zuckerberg as key speaker, with the exceptional success of the event leading the airline to continue the series with the second breakfast next week. While Air New Zealand is the 36th largest airline in the world, it ranks 6th in its social media presence.

In preparing for the event I have been looking at data on New Zealand’s usage of social media. I was surprised to find that there is a fair chance that New Zealand has the highest rate of social network usage in the world.

Globalsocialmedia_Dec12

The chart above shows a summary of data from Nielsen on the time spent per month on social networks in a variety of countries around the world.
Read more →

Judging the best visualizations of the future: Enter the BBC What If? competition

By

This year BBC is focusing on the future under the theme What If? and has just launched its What If? Visions of the Future competition.

BBBCWhatIF_GlennHatton
Image source: BBC News/ Glenn Hatton
Read more →

What is the future of Learning & Development department?

By

Recently I gave the keynote for the first breakfast seminar run by CADRE, a leading elearning design company, for senior executives of its clients. The topic of my presentation was The Future of Learning, giving a big picture view to kick off their series.

This is a brief description of my presentation:

Challenges for organizations are mounting from intense global competition, empowered consumers, and generational shifts. At the same time, building more effective learning is becoming central to achieving organizational success. This session will use a rich array of examples to look at:
• The driving forces shaping learning in organizations
• What the successful organizations of the future will look like
• Learning in a social network world: the new opportunities
• The context of learning: personalized, mobile, relevant
• Creating the future of learning: key action steps

At the conclusion of my presentation I got the audience to break into groups of 5-6 and assigned them discussion questions.

One of the questions I posed was ‘What is the future of the L&D department?’
Read more →

The future of information infrastructure

By

Recently I gave the opening keynote on The Future of Information Infrastructure at the Implementing Information Infrastructure Symposium.

CIO magazine did a nice article titled IIIS: Big Data driving new trends which reviews my keynote and the one immediately after from Steve Duplessie, one of the world’s top analysts on data and storage. It says:

Speaking at the event, co-hosted by Storage Networking Industry Association A/NZ and Computerworld Australia, strategy advisor, author and futurist, Ross Dawson, said “reality mining” — the gathering of data based on the activities of people in a given environment — was a major trend to emerge out of, and contributor to, Big Data.

“If you look at an office environment there is an extraordinary amount of data to look at. For example, what gestures people are making, where are they looking, what conversations are they having, how much are they smiling when they speak to each other?” he said.

“You can literally get terabytes of data out of just a few hours of this. That data is being collected to drive productivity; to design new ways to enhance collaboration and create value inside organisations.”

Read more →

Reputation measurement in professional services

By

Recently, I gave the opening keynote at the AMP Hillross annual convention, with the title of Embracing the Future.

Hillross, one of the most upmarket of the wealth management networks, is seeking to lead the rest of the market by shifting to a pure fee-for-advice model, and rapidly developing a true professional culture. My keynote was designed to bring home the necessity of individual and firm leadership at this key juncture in industry structure.

One of the central themes of my presentation was the increasing importance of reputation for professionals. I wrote about this critical idea on his blog:

Clearly reputation has always been critical for any professional, and there are some parts of professional services markets where reputation is already highly visible, such as prominent M&A lawyers, who are identified by numerous client surveys. While clients of other professional services (for example audit or management consulting) tend to be more focused on engaging firms rather than individuals, there is a fundamental shift from corporate to individual reputation under way.

What is changing is the extraordinary visibility of people’s actions and character and how others perceive them. One of the most valuable functions of the emerging ‘global brain’ that connects our insights is to make reputation more visible. For over a decade people have talked about how the internet is lowering transaction costs. Still today, the biggest single cost of business transactions is assessing the reputation of your potential business partner. Easier assessment of the reputation of suppliers will have a significant impact on the global economy.

Many professionals will be greatly impacted by these shifts. The search for professional advice is often still highly unstructured, based on anecdotal recommendations or simple searches. As importantly, clients of large professional firms may start to be more selective on who they wish to work with at the firm, creating a more streamlined meritocracy.

The mechanisms for measuring professional reputation are still very crude, yet over the coming decade we can expect to see substantial changes in how professionals are found. This will impact many facets of the industry.

Six radical visions for the future of health

By

[See more information on Ross Dawson’s keynote topic Shaping the Future of Healthcare]

Recently I gave the closing presentation at the National Medicine Symposium, rounding out deep discussion over several days on how to get better use of medicines. I developed six radical ideas that could be part of the future of health. The intention was to be provocative rather than rigorous, generating new ways of thinking about how healthcare may evolve.

Here are brief summaries of the six visions I presented:

1. Complete data.

future of health

Image source: Toto

The amount of information that we have about the health of an individual could become comprehensive, generating terabytes of data from just one person. Bathrooms that monitor not just what we excrete but also analyze our skin color and tone as we look in the mirror are just the beginning. Images and sensors could record everything we eat and all medicines we take, providing far better analysis on the effectiveness of drugs. Odor is a highly data-intensive yet effective way to identify maladies. We could build virtually complete data sets of our health on a second by second basis.

2. Personalized medicine

health futurist

In a world in which individual genomes can be sequenced, we can not only identify which drug will be most effective for the individual, but potentially also synthesize pharmaceuticals for one specific person. While the cost will be high, some will be prepared to pay and there will be pressure for insurers to bear the cost.

3. Radical life extension

health trends

The trend for over two centuries is that for every decade that passes, life expectancy in developed countries increases by two years. If this varies, it is most likely to the upside, severely aggravating the existing aging of the population. The implications for healthcare would include not just new treatments, but a massive increase in aged care support.

4. Robot help

Robots and artificial intelligence will have manifold roles in future healthcare, including avatar doctors, exoskeletons for nurses, and automated surgery. One of the most important tools will be emotional robots that can demonstrate empathy and help patients in their recovery.

5. Modular R&D

pharma R&D

The current pharmaceutical research and development chain is broken in many ways, driven by creating blockbuster drugs and rapidly running out of steam. There is an opportunity to break down R&D into discrete components from discovery through to clinical trials and regulatory approval, each of which is funded separately. If effective profit-share mechanisms can be created, risk will be distributed and there could be a flourishing of drugs developed for smaller markets. Innocentive, originally founded by Eli Lilly, is just the first step in distributed pharma innovation.

6. Self-serve pharma

Image credit: C-Ali

Patients now have massive medical information available, and they have the time and incentive to do research into what would be relevant to them. Why not throw out drug regulation, and leave people to make their own choices if they want? Most would rely on doctors, but others would self-medicate, usually extremely well. The world of self-serve pharma has already begun. How far will it go?

The power of social media and future organizations

By

This morning I am giving the external keynote at a closed conference for senior client executives run by a major professional services firm. They know the technical content they are presenting is rather dry so my role is to provide a highly engaging kick-off to the day (spouses are invited too) which is also practical and useful for attendees.

As is quite often the case these days, my client asked me to combine two of the topics from my general list of speaking topics, bringing together the ideas from The Power of Social Media and The Future of Work and Organizations. In fact every presentation I do is customized for the specific context and audience, including many topics not on the list, but it can be useful for clients to use the general speaking topic list to work out what they are looking for.

Here are the slides to my keynote. The usual disclaimer: the slides are designed to accompany my presentation and not to be viewed by themselves, but you still might find them interesting.

Keynote: The Power of Social Media and Future Organizations

View more presentations from rossdawson

Read more →

How much is the right amount to tweet?

By

Of the many issues when engaging on social media, one of the most central is how much to post.

If you don’t post enough, you’re barely visible. If you post too much, you annoy people who are likely to unfollow you, and you make any individual post far less likely to be seen or acted on.

Last week I was the host for #crowdchat, my first ever Twitter chat. I had avoided doing Twitter chats before, as it would deluge my followers with tweets. However I decided to do it, both to support Crowdsourcing Week, which I am on the advisory board for, and also as an experiment. No-one objected, but clearly only a small minority of my followers were engaged in the conversation.
Read more →