The Lamisphere

For the last 30 years, software companies have made good money “automating” business processes.  SAP wired the back office.  Oracle took down finances.  Tivoli figured out IT operations.  Salesforce, Adobe, Remedy, and many many others:  they each carved out a piece of manual, time-consuming, inefficient business operations and made them more efficient.

Of course, these companies would have never been successful without an appropriate hardware platform (think desktop apps, client-server, n tier architectures, and http more recently).  They also couldn’t have done it without a willing audience:  namely large companies with legions of workers sitting behind desks pushing paper. This synergistic cycle has driven business value and wealth creation like few other industries over the last quarter century.

Fast forward to the emergence of the consumer web in the early part of this decade and we see similar synergies occurring outside of the enterprise.

Amazon automated shopping, Travelocity took on travel, Flickr became our photo gallery.    These services profited from the same model; consumers with personal computers and Internet access wanted more efficient processes to help them live their lives.

Now here is where it gets interesting.  New platforms are going to push the boundaries of human computer interaction like never before.  For example, let’s look at me.  The business of being Jonas does not stop when I leave work or turn off my home computer.  From the minute I wake up in the morning, until the minute I fall asleep at night, I am actively executing “business” processes; where the process is the business of being me.  There is the “turn off the alarm clock” process, and the “brush my teeth” process.  The “find a matched pair of socks” process and the “drive to work” process.  The “get flowers for mom” process and the “figure out what’s for dinner” process.  The “hang a new picture in my office” process and the “find out how the Longhorns did” process.  There is even a “think about a blog posting” process.

Each of the processes requires my time and attention (to a greater or lesser degree).  Some I enjoy doing, and others I could do without.  Regardless, I’d bet that each of these processes could be enhanced.  They could be automated.  They could be done quicker or more efficiently.  They could be more fun, or at least less painful.

And this is where the iPhone comes in.  The iPhone is an always-on, always-connected, always-with-me platform that fits the synergistic model of person (Jonas), process (hang a picture in my office), platform (iPhone running Clinometer app).  Here are some other examples:


Each of these applications represents a small, finite piece of process automation.  The iPhone platform makes each of them available – just at the exact moment – when I need them.  With a few finger swipes they manifest themselves, deliver their value, and then disappear back into the ether.  Today there are over 10,000 apps available for the iPhone platform and the rate of developer adoption and new application functionality is simply breathtaking.

Imagine what the next decade has in store for us with this paradigm:  Overlay the continued progress of Moore’s Law, the emergence of the 4G network spectrum, and the blossoming science of brain-machine interfaces.  I can imagine teams already scheming apps like: Never Forget a Face app, Locate my Stuff app, and Write my Blog Posting app (now with 30% more wit).

I imagine my iPhone as a virtual bubble that surrounds me – augmenting who I am with enhanced awareness, intelligence, and senses.   The ubiquitous personal process execution platform of the year 2020 will be nothing short of wondrous.  It will be every present, ever watchful, always trustworthy, and my wish may very well be its command.

1 Comment | In: Brain Machine Interface, Futurism, Intelligent Agents, iPhone | tags: applications, business process, Futurism, iPhone. | #

Michael Sean Wright of Nice Fish Films recorded a podcast with me today. Billed as “a discussion with really big thinkers”, we talked about The Singularity Summit and some of my favorite emerging technologies. You can hear the podcast below.

No Comments | In: Accelerating Technologies, Artificial Intelligence, Brain Machine Interface, Futurism, Intelligent Agents, Robotics, SciVestor, Semantic Web, Singularity Summit, Siri, Twine, Twitter | | #

Still considering attending the Singularity Summit this weekend?  We’ve got fewer than 50 seats remaining for the main event on Saturday, and the Friday emerging technology workshop is over subscribed.  Here is a teaser of what the day will be about. Hope you can join us!

No Comments | In: Accelerating Technologies, Artificial Intelligence, Disruption, Futurism, Nanotechnology, Robotics, Singularity Summit, Uncertainty | | #

Press release from Lamar University

Technology innovation in the coming decade will be unlike anything the world has seen, and corporations, small businesses and individuals will have to paddle hard to catch this wave — or they might just be ripped asunder. So says Jonas Lamis, executive director of SciVestor (www.scivestor.com ), a research and advisory firm focused on understanding how future technologies will disrupt the business, economic and social frameworks of society.

Lamis will speak as a part of the IES Entrepreneurship Lecture series at 11 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 2, in the Landes Auditorium of the Galloway Business Building.

At the lecture, Lamis will cover understanding the law of accelerating returns; how semantic technologies and Artificial Intelligence will change the future of the Web; Green autonomy – how robotics and AI are redesigning the automobile and changing the climate-crisis debate; the emerging science of longevity medicine and what it might mean to people; and a framework for thinking about the potential value of new concepts and companies.

Lamis is also the director of partnerships at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (www.singinst.org), a consortium focused on developing a framework for safe advanced artificial intelligence, primarily through research and software development. He manages partnerships between the business and investment communities, and SIAI.

Lamis is an active contributor on topics of futurism and business at several blogs, including Singularity University (www.singularityu.org), Robot Central (robotcentral.com) and SIAI Blog (www.singinst.org/blog/).

Lamis also is the founder and editor of Architecture & Governance magazine, a publication focused on helping large IT organizations plan and manage major transformation initiatives. The quarterly magazine is circulated to approximately 15,000 key IT decision-makers.

In the last decade, Lamis has held executive and managerial roles in several venture-backed software companies.  Prior to founding SciVestor, he was the vice president of alliances and vice president of corporate marketing at Troux Technologies. He holds a master of business administration from the University of Texas, a master of science from Georgia Institute of Technology and a bachelor of science in industrial engineering from Purdue University.

Lamar’s Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies, headed by Russ Waddill, entrepreneur-in-residence of the College for Business, stimulates economic development and diversification in Southeast Texas by addressing the needs of current entrepreneurs and small businesses while simultaneously enhancing the education of tomorrow’s entrepreneurs. Since its founding in 2001, the institute has engaged in research to benefit the region, working closely with local chambers of commerce, economic development agencies and city and county leaders.

Within the College of Business, students can major in entrepreneurship receiving a bachelor in business administration — general business entrepreneurship. New curriculum has also led to the creation of a minor in entrepreneurship for non-business majors, which is open to all disciplines on campus. Courses offered to the public to assist in developing business ideas, networking and finding venture capital help put wings to inspiration for students, entrepreneurs and small businesses alike.

The Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies presents lectures twice each year that adhere to the institution’s mission statement: “to stimulate economic development and diversification in Southeast Texas by addressing the needs of current entrepreneurs and small businesses, while simultaneously enhancing the education of tomorrow’s entrepreneurs.”

No Comments | In: Anti-Aging, Artificial Intelligence, Events, Futurism, Robotics, Semantic Web | | #

I was sitting a home watching TV the other evening when a commercial came on the screen that blew me way.  It was made to look like archival footage of an old gas station being built, circa early 20th century. Snow-capped mountains loom in the distance indicating the creation of an American outpost where the prairie meets the Rockies.  As the time-lapse images progressed over the next minute, I saw the station’s comings and goings.  Kids growing up and heading off by Greyhound.  Cars, pulling in and out of the station getting fancier and larger. A driving piano score creates a tension as the images flashing on the screen go from black and white to Technicolor. The station itself is demolished and rebuilt at least 4 times in those 60 seconds, each bringing us closer to a picture of the 21st century oil economy.

And then the most unexpected thing happens.  The station withers into oblivion, the fields reclaim the asphalt and only the mountains remain.   The punch line:  The new Chevy Volt appears.

In 2010, General Motors plans to launch the Chevy Volt, a “plug-in” electric / gas hybrid that will travel 40 miles without any gas at all.  If battery technology grows on an exponential path (like Moore’s Law is driving the semiconductor industry), by the middle of the next decade, we will see vehicles that can travel hundreds of miles on an overnight charge from your garage.  By the end of the decade ahead, we are legitimately looking at the end of the gas station, as we know it.

So what does this have to do with strategic IT planning?

For the last thirty years, IT strategists and enterprise architects have held the primary roles in the enterprise for understanding technology change.  Because of the nature of the digitization of “Information” and the progress of “Technology” it was frequently enough to be an expert on processes within the four walls of the data center.  But as advancing technologies spill beyond the traditional bounds of the IT department, a new set of skills and a more savvy approach to the politics of the enterprise are necessary for those who wish to continue to wear the strategy badge.  Based on the results of the Architecture & Governance Magazine 2008 readers survey (of which I am the editor), IT departments appear to acknowledge the need to be up to the task.

The most startling result from our reader survey was the increase in C-level involvement in supporting enterprise scale transformation initiatives.  In fact, 56% of those surveyed indicated their CEO, CFO, CIO or VP was responsible for driving large-scale change.  This is up over 500% from our 2007 survey.  Across the board in the survey, as well in side bar conversations, executives are taking a much stronger interest in the sponsorship, capabilities and performance of architects and IT strategists.

Changes like the Chevy Volt occur at the intersection of corporate strategy and technology advancement and this commercial is a harbinger of coming waves of technology progress that are going to turn business models, enterprises, perhaps even whole segments of the economy on their heads.   The energy sector is already headed over the precipice.  Just behind it is everything from medical to mining to manufacturing.

As a strategist of your enterprise, the time is here to look beyond the cubicle wall, past the blinking lights of the datacenter, and raise your eyes to the snow capped mountains beyond.  There’s a change coming.

You can view the Chevy Volt commercial here.

No Comments | In: Articles, Business, Futurism, Just Plain Cool, Video | | #

As part of my work with Architecture & Governance Magazine, I had the opportunity to review a new book: Blown to Bits.  The following conversation will appear in the October issue of A&G.

A&G sat down with the Ken Ledeen and Harry Lewis, the authors (along with IEEE Fellow Hal Abelson) to discuss their new book, Blown To Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness after the Digital Explosion.  (www.bitsbook.com)
The authors paint a profound picture of the risks and rewards of our techno-enhanced future.  In particular, we wanted to get their insight to the implications of every accelerating technological power on the legacy processes of the enterprise.

A&G:  Much debate has occurred around the future of IT in a distributed, open-sourced, service oriented world.  How do large IT organizations have to change in the decade ahead in order to adapt to the new structures of society, information and business.

BtB: We talk about how institutions move so much more slowly than technology.  This is clearly seen in the world of legislation, and how the legal system has a hard time keeping pace with technology change.  Global 2000 organizations, while smaller than governments, will likely continue to move the governance mechanisms forward quite slowly in the decade ahead.

Look inside traditional IT organizations.  How many COBOL and mainframe programmers do they still have?  Lots more than you might imagine.  Changes are slow to come about because the IT organization is typically focused on guarding corporate assets.

Organizations that have a lot to preserve become very conservative.  On the other hand, organizations without a legacy to manage can become extraordinarily innovative and have the opportunity to surpass the legacy institution.

On the other hand, one of the real opportunities for large IT organizations in the decade ahead is to create enormous value by mining the information that they collected as collateral aspects of their normal business. Leading organizations are finding ways to get at these vast storehouses in information and translate that information to insight and value.  This is a place where strategic IT and enterprise architecture can play a major role.

A&G: What do you see as the future of enterprise in the United States?

BtB: There is a tremendous amount of innovation taking place in entrepreneurial companies, and that is also spreading to other forums.  And it takes large organizations with their span of resources and influence to apply these innovations.   The risk among large corporations is that they miss out on embracing these new organizational paradigms.

As an example, we discuss about how Search is a new organizational paradigm in the book.  Enterprises were built with physical buildings that had rooms filled with file cabinets of information.  That metaphor carried forward into the digital age with file folders and windows and directory structures.  Search turns that paradigm on its head.  Search says you don’t categorize, you find.  While this concept came from small companies, it is now finding a foothold across the largest enterprises, which are the repositories of so much undiscovered value.

Even Google continues to morph itself.  It is no longer “just” a search company.  It is becoming a storage and retrieval company – understanding the value locked in the unstructured data of the world – for companies that don’t consider information as their main product.

A decade ago, the question was about outsourcing my hardware.  Do I want to outsource it.  Should I go to India to make that happen?  More recently, the question turned to outsourcing the application stack.  A critical question of the near future is: Do I outsource my data?  Not just the storage of it, but the management, care, feeding, and curation of it.

Are the employees at Google better in tune with the Enterprise Architecture approach of managing the inconnectivity of that data, the relationships that exist through it, and the associated value that can be captured from understanding those non obvious relationships – rather than your typical IT organization?
If I am an insurance company, I know the relationship between policy and policyholder, but I no doubt have tremendous insight buried in the related grid of information assets that I don’t have a clue about uncovering.  This offers both a tremendous challenge and opportunity for companies in the decade ahead.

A&G:  The workforce for corporate IT is aging, and it is not readily apparent that today’s “digital natives” are overly anxious to step into the shoes of their data center and application management forefathers.  What advice doyou have for corporate IT teams looking to recruit the best and the brightest?

BtB Rekindling the excitement about IT careers of any kind is a major task for the American education system.  Every computer science department is thinking about this.  The Bureau of Labor statistics point to a 50% growth in the need for IT professionals in the coming decade.  But the fact of the matter is that there is a labor shortage in every niche.

Much has been made about the cost benefits of outsourcing IT jobs - $200,000 per head in the US vs. $60,000 per head in India.  The reality is, that in the not-too-distant future, when a company has to choose from these too options, they will find that they will need to hire both –just to keep up with headcount demands.

Companies need to expand their vision of what an IT job entails and help young candidates understand that their skills related to the newest technologies can really make an impact within their organization.

A&G:  Stewardship of the bits becomes more and more an issue as value shifts from physical to digital ownership.  This shift is accelerating at many of the companies who read our magazine.  These companies used to make their money selling physical goods and running bricks and mortar establishments.  Now their primary value comes from the data they own and the insight it generates.  How should these companies protect their digital assets at the same time leverage them to generate increasing value?

These companies face two orthogonal issues:  How do I find value in the information I have collected, and how do I protect the information that I have?

Traditional digital protection is about protecting the medium – with access codes and firewalls and encryption.  But the growing issue now is about also protecting the “message”.  Who speaks for your brand?  How should you respond and nurture public commentary.  What insight should you give away, and what should you charge for?  How do you (and your customers) know that the message they are seeing is really legitimate?

A&G:  To further your point, look at the explosion of Twitter.  While there are hundreds of thousands of people “tweeting” away every day about life, products, issues etc., very few companies have embraced the medium.  Just recently, an imposter named “Janet” became the voice of ExxonMobile in the twitterverse just by registering and tweeting under the name @ExxonMobileCorp.  She answered questions on behalf of the company for several days before she was exposed.  And even after exposure, she continued to tweet under Exxon’s brand.

BtB: Right, the question becomes one of information security – not just security of the medium.  It is one of the key challenges facing IT today.

About the authors:

Ken Ledeen is Chairman and CEO of Nevo Technologies and has served on the boards of numerous technology companies.  Harry Lewis, former Dean of Harvard College, is Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard.  Together with Hal Abelson the teach Quantative Reasoning 48, an innovative Harvard course on information for non-technical, non-mathematically oriented students.

No Comments | In: Articles, Business, Futurism | | #

I’m blogging Gartner Symposium down in Orlando this week.  My favorite session so far is: Generation Virtual: How a 40th-Level Half-Elf From Secaucus, New Jersey Will Change Your Business, by Gartner Analyst Adam Sarner.

I’ve been attending Gartner Symposium for the last 5 years (as part of my day job at an enterprise software company), but have only recently seen any recognition from Gartner that there is a relationship between their heavily IT crowd and the emergence of transformative technologies like virtual worlds and AI.

Of course, they cast this presentation in the “mavericks” track so as not to scare the assembled techies too much, but the very fact that Gartner is investing research dollars into this space is a bell-weather in my opinion.

Adam’s predictions:

• All you need is love: By 2015, 2% of people in the U.S. will be married to people they will never meet in person.

• A convenient truth: By 2015, time spent online will compete with the real world becoming the most “green” activity, reducing the average person’s overall carbon footprint by more than 50%.

• The dot-com bomb: Sales and marketing of products and services to virtual personas will “explode,” overtaking B2C spending by 2020.

• The day the earth stood still: By 2020, more than 70% of R&D investment in personal robotics will shift to virtual personal assistants.

• Mayor McBlank: A city will elect a virtual anonymous persona for mayor by 2020.

One of Sarner’s more powerful memes was the relationship between Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and the emergence of Virtual worlds and AIs. Sarner believes that the virtual world is providing the “self-actualization” that Maslow forecast, but few have been able to achieve in Meatspace.

The latter half of his presentation focused on the emergence of personal AIs – what he called “persona bots”. His take:

In 2017, the persona bot will be mass adopted (more than 20 million active persona bot users in the U.S. alone; more than 10 million in the rest of the world). The drivers for this mass adoption are primarily the persona bot’s time shifting/time saving ability, and ability and authority to carry out tasks on the user’s behalf. The persona bot’s strength will be its ability to be at many virtual places at once, seeking vast amounts of territory, while filtering back and reporting on relevant information.

 

Just as the customer will have the persona bot as a “killer application,” companies will have their own automated bot for critical relationship handling, such as sales, customer service and marketing. By 2010, more than 15% of B2C Fortune 1000 companies with a Web site will use a chat bot for online customer service. Top drivers, such as 24/7 presence and the ability to communicate domain expertise, will help customers navigate their way toward a purchase. A practice already used is text-based hybrid bots with the ability to start an automated conversation with a customer, then alert a live representative to take over the avatar once a lead is qualified. Eventually, companies will need to develop an interaction process around a fully automated persona bot gathering information from a fully automated company bot.

Sarner’s recommendations to the assembled IT intelligentsia:

• Companies should organize and target products and services online based on mankind’s journey toward self-actualization.
• Sell to the persona, not the person. A persona will show you how it wants to be treated.
• Create virtual environments as a way to orchestrate customer exploration toward purchases.
• Shift from collecting demographic data to psychographic data for understanding online persona behavior and its interaction with others.
• Shift Investment from known customers to unknown ones. Focus on the influencers within the meritocracy.
• Develop and retain or outsource new skills to attract, connect, contribute and gain insight from personas and virtual environments.
• Begin to develop strategy, process and technology around relationships with persona bots as a tool for mutual exploration.

I’m glad to see that Gartner is getting on board. Their perspective will help drive attention and investment to the area.

1 Comment | In: Artificial Intelligence, Events, Futurism | | #

All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace
- by Richard Brautigan, 1967

(and read by Paul Saffo at the Singularity Summit)

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

All Watched Over…

1 Comment | In: Futurism | | #

Two teams of British researchers are seeking permission to create ‘cybrid’ embryos that would be around 99.9 per cent human and 0.1 per cent animal to produce embryonic stem cells - the body’s building blocks that grow into all other types of cells.

Scientists allowed to experiment on hybrid embryos | Uk News | News | Telegraph

No Comments | In: Ethics, Futurism, Stem Cell Research | | #

Wired magazine reports on another example of tapping into the prefrontal cortex to monitor subconscious recognition of potential threats that have not bubbled up to the conscious mind.

DARPA, as usual, has some very interesting projects ongoing with your tax dollars
Pentagon to Merge Next-Gen Binoculars With Soldiers’ Brains -

No Comments | In: Artificial Intelligence, Futurism | | #