Releasing Software Developer Superpowers

Article is aimed at anyone looking to gain the edge in their software development team creation or advancement in the digital age. Concepts can be applied outside of sw dev at some level. Open to discussion – views are my own.

UX is not just for Customers

User Experience is an ever growing component of product development, with creating user centric design paradigms to ensure that personalisation and consumer/market fit is achieved. From a development team view, leveraging some of the user experience concepts in how they work can achieve operational efficiency, to accelerate product development. For example, how is the experience for each of the developer personnas in your team? How do their days translate to user stories? Can interviewing the development community lead to creating better features for your development culture?

Build Products not Technology

Super important. Sometimes with developers, there is an over emphasis on the importance of building features, a lot of the time for features sake. By keeping the lens on the value or “job to be done” for the customer in the delivery of a product at all times can ensure you are building what is truly needed by your customer. To do this, select and leverage a series of metrics to measure value for that product, along with keeping your product developent in series, and tightly coupled to your customer experience development.

Leverage PaaS to deliver SaaS

This sounds catching but its becoming the norm. 5 years ago, it took a developer a week of development time to do what you can do in Amazon Web Services or Azure now in minutes. This has led to a paradigm shift, where you being to look at the various platforms and tools that are available to enable the developers to deliver great products to customers. Of course, there will always be custom development apps, but you can help your developers by getting them the right toolkit. There is no point reinventing the wheel when OTS open source components are sitting there, right? Products like Docker and Spring and concepts like DevOps are bringing huge value to organisations, enabling the delivery of software or microservices at enhanced speed. Also, the balance between buying OTS and building custom is a careful decision at product and strategic levels.

“The role of a developer is evolving to one like a top chef, where all the ingredients and tools are available, its just getting the recipe right to deliver beautiful products to your customer.”

Create Lean Ninjas!

Evolving the cultural mindset of developers and the organisation toward agile development is super important. Having critical mass of development resources, plus defined agile processes to deliver business success can really reshape how your organisation into one where value creation in a rapid manner can take place. However, its important to perform ethnographical studies on the organisation to assess the culture. This can help decide on which agile frameworks and practices (kanban, scrum, xp etc) can work best to evolve the development life cycle.

Implement the 10% rule

Could be slightly controversial, and can be hard to do. Developers should aim to spend 10% of their time looking at the new. The new technologies, development practices, company direction, conferences, training. Otherwise you will have a siloed mis-skilled pool of superheros with their powers bottled.

However, with lean ninjas and effective agile company wide processes, resources and time can be closely aligned to exact projects and avoid injecting randomness into the development lifecycle. Developers need time to immerse and focus. If you cant do that for them, or continously distract them with mistimed requests – they will leave. If you can enable them 10% is achievable.

Risk Awareness

We are seeing an evolution in threats to enterprise all over the world, and in a software driven and defined world, getting developers to have security inherent design practices prior to products hitting the market can help protect companies. Moons ago, everything sat on prem. The demands of consumers mean a myriad of cloud deployed services are adding to a complex technology footprint globally. If they know the risk landscape metrics from where they deploy, they can act accordingly. Naturally, lining them up with business leaders on compliance and security can also help on the educational pathway.

Business and Technology Convergence

We are beginning to see not only evolution in development practices – we are also seeing a new type of convergance (brought about by lean agile and other methods) where business roles and technology roles are converging. We are beginning to see business analysts and UX people directly positioned into development teams to represent the customer and change the mindset. We are seeing technology roles being positioned directly into business services teams like HR and finance. This is impacting culture, wherby the saviness in both directions needs to be embraced and developed.

Growth Mindset

We mentioned mindset a lot in the article. That because its hugely important. Having the right culture and mindset can make all the difference in team success. As Carol Dweck talks about in her book “Mindset”, you can broadly categorise them into two – growth and fixed. This can be applied in all walks of life, but for team building it can be critical.

In a fixed mindset students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that’s that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb. In a growth mindset students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They don’t necessarily think everyone’s the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it.

Creating a team where being on a growth curve and failures are seen as learning can really enable a brilliant culture. As Michaelangelo said “I am still learning”. Especially as we evolve to six generations of developers. How do we ensure we are creating and mentoring the next set of leaders from interns through to experienced people?

Check a Ted talk from Carol here – link.

And most importantly … HAVE FUN!

Augmented and Virtual Reality: Now more about improving User Experience

We cannot eat popcorn wearing a virtual reality (VR) headset – Zaid Mahomedy : ImmersiveAuthority.com

IIn 1995, the cringe worthy Johnny Mnemonic was released where he used a VR headset and gesture monitoring gloves to control the “future internet”. Even though this movie was over 20 years ago, it is only in the past few years we are seeing commercially ready Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) technologies hit the market.

If you watch this clip, you will hopefully notice two aspects. The first is that the technology is clunky. The second is that the predicted user experience (UX) he has is rich (for the decade of movie production): information is available at speed, the gloves are accurate, and the path and usability is seamless. When he moves his hands, the VR3 responds instantaneous. It assists him at every turn. Yet twenty years later, we have not reached this quite yet. Why? Because the focus needs to shift from technology to other aspects to enable this industry to flourish.

1: Technology Moves Aside for User Experience.

A large amount of technology companies efforts in this space in the past two years has been mostly focused at determining can they squeeze enough compute power onto a pair of glasses. Other questions to be answered were around if the battery will last a decent amount of time and will the heat emissions be low enough not to inconvenience the user. Whilst there are still optimizations to be performed, the core of the technology has at least been proven, along with some clever innovations around leveraging smart phones to save on hardware investments.

In the coming years we will see a larger amount of these companies focusing on user experience we have with these technologies – ensuring the interfaces,gesture and motion recognition are close to perfect are high on companies to-do lists. The hardware road-map will ensure they are lighter, more robust and frankly – sexier to wear. Before we discuss other aspects of how improved UX will be the focus of the coming years, its not to stay that technology wont help on this. For example, the evolution of flexible compute paradigms specifically in the nano technology area will assist in building compute into glasses, instead of adding compute retrospectively.

2: Difference in Psychologies

Apart from the technology of VR and AR being quite different under the hood, the psychology of how they are used is also. With AR, we are injecting a digital layer between us and the physical world. With VR, we are immersing ourselves into a digital world. These are very different experiences and the user experience design must have this difference at its core. We must ensure that the layer we design for AR takes characteristics from both our physical environment and our own personas. With VR, its much more emphatic to ensure the person feels comfortable and safe in that world.

3: Interfaces to VR/AR UX

The UX Design of AR and VR technologies and applications will require careful management of multiple input styles. Using wearables, voice recognition, AR and AI, we will start to see seamless blending and integration with how technology interacts with us across various senses. Touch devices are still being used, but they will move aside for voice recognition, movement tracking and even brain waves to be used to control these smart devices. The communication will be much faster and intimate, and will force designers to completely rethink how we interact with these devices.

4: The Role of AI in UX

The UX of these devices will also require more human like interactions, to built trust between the devices and the users in an organic manner. We are seeing this with voice control technology like Siri and Google Home, but they are understanding our voice, with some sample responses. Soon they will learn to evolve their speech.

Artificial intelligence will take hold of the user experience to analyze the reaction to different experiences and then make changes in real time to those assessments. UX will become a much more intuitive and personalized experience in the coming years.

5: Convergence of VR and AR Standards

Already we are seeing a myriad of startups evolving in the space, some focusing on content development in software, some on the actual hardware itself. Some are brave enough to have both on offer. We also have the larger companies creating divisions to provide offerings in this space. Choice is great, but when it becomes painful trying on your fourteenth pair of glasses at your average conference, it is not. When one takes time to observe how companies are beginning to partner up to offer solutions ( a trend extremely common in the IoT industry) it is a small step towards some form of standardization. Excessive choice can be bad from a UX perspective, as with such segregation in initial design makes it harder for app designers to get it right on the hardware.

6: Realistic Market Sensing

At some point, we have to get away from the “Toys” feel for these devices. We put them on for ten minutes in an airport or at an event to get a wow from it. Whilst the applications in the gaming industries are there to be seen, companies are beginning to focus on where else the market will be. Certain devices have flopped in the past two years, and you would wonder why with such strong brands. The first reason was awful UX. The second was the market just was not ready, with a distinct lack of content to make them anyway useful. Just because a few of these devices fail, doesn’t mean the movement stops. (Below info-graphic source is washington.edu)

Consumer and Industrial applications have very different requirements from a market perspective, with content choice and look and feel very important for consumer markets, system performance and governance sitting higher in industrial use cases. With the costs associated with adding these technologies to industrial environments under the microscope, companies must focus strongly on measuring and building the return on investment (ROI) models.

7: Protecting the User and the Experience

With these technologies predicted to get even closer than headsets (smart contact lenses for example -link here), its quite important the UX designers can intrinsically build in comfort and safety into any application. Too many times we have seen people fall through something whilst wearing a headset (more so with VR technologies). And that’s just the physical safety. When the threshold between physical and augmented worlds gets closer and closer (mixed reality), we want to avoid a scenario of interface overkill.

Whilst the past few years may indicate that these technologies are fads, the reality is far from it. They will become part of our social fabric as a new form of mobile technology. Ensuring the users experience with these technologies will be the critical enabler in their success and adoption rate.

Designing for AR and VR entails there be better understanding of a user’s need when it comes to context of use. It’s about building connections between the physical and digital world, requiring an interdisciplinary effort of service design, interaction design and industrial design.

Man vs Machine: Why the competition?

With the continued evolution of industries such as Data Science and the Internet of Things, there is a mix of excitement and fear amongst the populous. Excitement for what they can do for our lives or businesses, but fear of what it will mean for humanity.

The fears are normally sourced from the media or some childhood movies we watched where pretty large robots take over planet earth. Quotes of “Will the robots take our jobs?” “There will be nothing left for us to do with the evolution of the computer”.

In reality a synergy between humans and technology can lead to better all round solutions, rather than in isolation. This is something that is rarely considered in current engineering circles. With so much technology choice, why would we need to stupid humans?

A brief story to set the tone

As far back as 2007, I hosted questions like this as part of the day job. Increased automation in manufacturing is a natural spore for questions of this nature. An example of this was an computer vision application that I built for a Masters dissertation whilst working for Alps Electric (one of the coolest companies in the world). It was inspecting graphics on buttons for correctness, both in finish and symbol. Naturally this was a task done by humans historically. We were using classification techniques to perform the task on the images, and the receiver operator characteristic curves (ROC Curves) showed that the classifier was right 93% of the time, which was a pretty good first pass result. Please note that this was a time that data science was called “doing your job”.

We wanted to achieve 100%, so in order to improve the algorithm, we decided to use the main source of intelligence in the room, the humans! By presenting the failures to the operator on the production line, and asking them a particularly simple binary yes/no “Is this a genuine failure?”, saving their response and the original image, we were able to get the classifier to close to 99% accuracy.

This proved something that I felt was always the case. Humans and machines can work in tandem as opposed to viewing it as a competition. With the rapid advancement of technology, along with the obsession with using technology to optimize our lives, I pose a question: Have we forgotten how these can compliment each-other? If any data science/machine learning application can get an accuracy level of 70% for example, we try to squeeze extra accuracy out of it through “fine tuning” the algorithm. Perhaps we could present the results in some way to a human for final classification?

Bring it all together

Last April, I tried to draw out how I saw Data Science, IoT and Intelligence (both computing and human) fit together, which is shown below. It is an evolutionary map of sort, where we have always had the verticals and data modalities (data type), and we began on our data journey by building some simple data processing/mining applications (either by us manually or by using algorithms). And lots of the current challenges in data science can be solved by this tier. However, we are seeing an increase in the requirement to bring in machine learning applications to solve more advanced challenges. This is a natural evolution towards artificial intelligence,or deep learning. If we look right down the map in a holistic sense, this is where the top class really comes to the fore.

Humans are by our very nature, true intelligent, which evolves are we do, and also NOT very good at mass processing. Computing on the other hand are not so intelligent to begin with, but are incredibly good at mass processing. A natural hybrid would be true intelligence and mass processing, and that should be the aim for modern Artificial Intelligence companies/ enthusiasts.

Now I am not saying that all applications in IoT and Data Science can be solved like this. Of course there will be exceptions. But there are some real tangible benefits to this approach. Consider the area of street crime. Imagine every camera in a city feeding video into a central location, and asking a human to monitor it. In reality, this is actually happening individually per building, park, mall, where security guards are monitoring areas in real time. With advancements in video analytics, it was feared that technology would replace humans. But it is not the case. What has happened as more devices/cameras hit our streets, it becomes impossible to monitor everything. By using advanced video analytics/machine learning capability to flag the anomalies to security, it means they can monitor a bigger space.

Thankfully, one of the high growth areas in technology is in Human Machine Interfaces (HMI’s), and there are some really good examples on how humans and computers can work together. Daqri‘s smart helmet is one such product, which is the worlds first wearable HMI. Their mandate is to use technology to improve and optimize how we work. by integrating compute, sensors and computer vision technology into a well designed helmet. Work, in the Future.

As we enter the next phase of digital transformation, ask yourself: How can humans improve/compliment the work of technology in your application?

Closing off Web Summit 2015 – Day 2/3

And so it ends. The Web Summit on Irish shores finished on Thursday (for now), and I must admit there was an athmosphere of “what if” and that of sombreness. But we cannot allow this to affect our perspective and thinking of the impact this conference has had on Ireland tech landscape.. Paddy Cosgrave has built a conference which he began with 400 attendees to now 35,000. Let’s put that into context in regards to people’s perspective of Ireland as a Tech Hub. With over 100 countries represented, and technology itself ensuring their own tech landscape is quite small, the voices of the 35,000 will translate into millions. And I am certain the conversation will be about Web Summit, the friendliness of the services and the vibrant Night Summit, and not the number/cost of hotels, government and traffic.

Wednesday was a great day and one of the best I have had at a web summit event. It’s started on the Machine Stage, where a panel including Nell Watson from Singularity spoke on how machines and humans will coexist and complement each other in our smart future. I liked how Nell spoke about how the seamless integration of machines, and the governance of same will be a key piece of the puzzle.

**Nell Watson from Singularity speaks on Machine Stage**

Next up on Machine was another panel, which included Dr. Joe Salvo from GE and Dr. Said Tabet from EMC. The panel was expertly hosted by Ed Walsh who is the director of technology vision for EMC. Whilst interviewing the guys, Ed brought out not only the technology vision required for IoT, but also the collaboration that can be enabled by consortiums like the IIC, of which Dr Salvo and Dr Tabet have been so instrumental in building.

**Ed Walsh hosting a panel session on the industrial internet**

As already mentioned, the proliferation of Virtual reality was evident, and I got a demo of Amazons audible technology! It was quite neat!

Friday was a more relaxed day, with numbers down a little but this allowed for a different kind of networking experience. It was a day to chat with as many startups as possible, and to catch some great talks. One that stood out was on centre stage, where a panel (including Christine Herron from Intel Capital, Albert Wenger from Union Square Ventures, Mood Rowghani from KPCB ) was hosted by Charlie Wells of the Wall Street Journal. Topic discussed – tomorrow’s tech landscape. A growth or just a bubble?

Well it looks like what Nell mentioned above is already happening from who I bumped into!

And so, we are off to Lisbon. Whilst I believe that there will be challenges there also, it is Cosgraves personality that will shine through. An excellent CI labs data science company spawned out of the web summit, and whist there is that data science feel to a lot of the web summit, it’s this personality of Cosgrave and his team that still makes this event stand above many.

5 Technology trends to consider right now

As we are a month inside the second half of 2015, I thought it would be a good time to look at some of the technology trends that are in motion, and will have more of an influence as we enter 2016.

1: SMAC becomes SMACT

Social Mobile, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC) has existed for a number of years in enterprise applications. Internet of Things (IoT) has accelerated as an enabler in technology, and hence will begin to be added to SMAC to create SMACT. I introduced this concept in one of my first posts here. And they need each other to succeed and/or progress. As more and more devices in IoT come online, SMAC demand will increase. And IoT will add value to SMAC, as it will spurn new technology directions that can utilize SMAC. The A in SMAC will be affect more than others, as with new data sets being generated, open data sets available for data multi tenancy will drive new requirements for on demand insights in real time.

2: Co-Creation:

A key tenant of open innovation (which was mentioned in a previous blog here) is co-creation. As companies take a more outside in approach to discovering next business direction, co-creation will be a huge part of this. Whilst its slowly increasing in chatter, co-creation will be key enabler in the coming years. Industry partners, vendors and consumers will create ecosystems that will drive new business models by utilizing analytics, and understanding customers at heightened levels. We have seen how disruptive NetFlix, Uber and Bitcoin have been in the past few years, and it is expected co-creation will also drive further disruption, but in different directions at increased velocity. Ikea’s home tour is a good example of them listening to their consumers to understand the requirements for why they were doing up their homes.

3: Technology and Business Strategy Leadership positions collide

It is expected that there will be a blurring of the lines between technology and classical business positions in companies, and this will result in a series of new positions to drive next generation technology direction. We are seeing that technology and business executives need to be proficient in both areas, and understand the dependencies of the decisions made in either will be crucial. The rise in roles such as Chief Data Architect (CDA), Chief Digital Officer (CDO) and Chief Governance Officer (CGO) has meant that board rooms have increased percentage of technology executives. It is predicted that an organisations Chief Technology Officer (CTO) will create a series of direct reports in the areas of data intelligence, data monetisation, futurism and collaboration strategy. These roles will be necessary to assist the CTO in managing digital disruption.

4: Data Monetization

This is a hot topic right now, and one of the pioneers that is driving a lot of new research in this area is Steve Todd from EMC, along with Dr. Jim Short of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Whilst you can read extensively on this topic at Steve’s blog, Ill outline some of the considerations that are prominent for your business. The first is the idea of monetisation of your current and future data assets. Data is the new oil, a form of currency that can be used to drive business metamorphosis, but also can be something that is of use to others. So then it becomes a sale-able asset. We have seen first hand where major companies are looking to acquire companies not only for their technology, but their data also (example). Imagine if your store had a considerable data set, I expect major retailers such as amazon would be interested in buying that data-set from you, to understand street shopper trends. Another aspect to consider is valuing data at all stages of your companies cycle from inception, through beta to its growth cycle. An accurate snapshot of your data assets can increase the valuation of your organisation, and is especially useful in acquisition. From an internal company data perspective, a key pillar of your data monetization strategy is the architecture on which your data resides, as numerous data silos across your organisation are generally very difficult to even analyse for valuation. The concept of a business data lake can bring huge advantage here.

5: Search will involve more than Google

Currently, a large proportion of search involves online search for information that resides on servers. However, with the increased influence of IoT and the connected world, it is expected that more that the cloud will indeed be searchable. The billions of edge devices should enter the fray, if the data and security policies continue to be challenged into being more open. Connected cars, homes and mobile devices could widen the net for any search queries. We are seeing the emergence of alpha startups indicating this trend, such as thingful and shodan, which act as search engines for the internet of things.

Distributed Analytics in IoT – Why Positioning is Key

The current global focus on the “Internet of Things (IoT)” have highlighted extreme importance of sensor-based intelligent and ubiquitous systems contributing to improving and introducing increased efficiency into our lives. There is a natural challenge in this, as the load on our networks and cloud infrastructures from a data perspective continues to increase. Velocity, variety and volume are attributes to consider when designed your IoT solution, and then it is necessary to design where and where the execution of analytical algorithms on the data sets should be placed.

Apart from classical data centers, there is a huge potential in looking at the various compute sources across the IoT landscape. We live in a world where compute is at every juncture, from us to our mobile phones, our sensor devices and gateways to our cars. Leveraging this normally idle compute is important in meeting the data analytics requirements in IoT. Future research will attempt to consider these challenges. There are three main classical architecture principles that can be applied to analytics. 1: Centralized 2: Decentralized and 3: Distributed.

The first, centralized is the most known and understood today. Pretty simple concept. Centralized compute across clusters of physical nodes is the landing zone (ingestion) for data coming from multiple locations. Data is thus in one place for analytics. By contrast, a decentralized architecture utilizes multiple big distributed clusters are hierarchically located in a tree like architecture. Consider the analogy where the leaves are close to the sources, can compute the data earlier or distribute the data more efficiently to perform the analysis. This can have some form of grouping applied to it, for example – per geographical location or some form of hierarchy setup to distribute the jobs.

Lastly, in a distributed architecture, which is the most suitable for devices in IoT, the compute is everywhere. Generally speaking, the further from centralized, the size of the compute decreases, right down to the silicon on the devices themselves. Therefore, it should be possible to push analytics tasks closer to the device. In that way, these analytics jobs can act as a sort of data filter and decision maker, to determine whether quick insight can be got from smaller data-sets at the edge or beyond, and whether or not to push the data to the cloud or discard. Naturally with this type of architecture, there are more constraints and requirements for effective network management, security and monitoring of not only the devices, but the traffic itself. It makes more sense to bring the computation power to the data, rather than the data to a centralized processing location.

There is a direct relationship between the smartness of the devices and the selection and effectiveness of these three outlined architectures. As our silicon gets smarter and more powerful and efficient, this will mean that more and more compute will become available, which should result in the less strain on the cloud. As we distribute the compute, it should mean more resilience in our solutions, as there is no single point of failure.

In summary, the “Intelligent Infrastructures” now form the crux of the IoT paradigm. This means that there will be more choice for IoT practitioners to determine where they place their analytics jobs to ensure they are best utilizing the compute that is available, and ensuring they control the latency for faster response, to meet the real time requirements for the business metamorphosis that is ongoing.

Nell, Google and a Half Pipe! EnterConf Belfast – Day 2

Quote of the day. “Counterfeiting is an insidious problem in life sciences, our network tenant cloud can help stop it” – Shabbir Dahod – TraceLink, Inc

As EnterConf entered its second day, I continually saw the benefit of having more detailed discussions with people in the Enterprise sector. Even during the night events (the speaker dinner in the Harbour Commissioners Office, great venue, followed by a few sociables in the Dirty Onion Bar), I kept monitored the dynamics taking place. The networking normally began with two people, but the circles were growing, joining to form what I like to call “RoundStandUps”. These were normally not short conversations, and collaboration was inherent in the voices and chatter. There also was a deep and satisfying undertone, which was an energy to keep “building great” in Ireland.

Check out the Half Pipe! Hope its at Web Summit! 🙂

Kicking us off on Centre Stage was none other than the inspirational futurist Nell Watson from Singularity University, who is also the CEO of Poikos, the smartphone 3D body measurement company. She talked about virtual employees, how we will replicate the human mind through AI in 20 years (and run business through AI). I liked how Nell bridged the machine and human inter-dependencies. It was an insightful talk, and having spent the past year looking at machine intelligence (from both a hardware and software implementation perspective), I am seeing more and more futurists thinking like this.

Nell Watson, CEO of Poikos on Centre Stage

A few talks focused on our evolving workplace. David Hale, from Gigwalk spoke on the Insight stage on “Deploying Technology to Power Mobile Field Teams and Maximise Work Efficiency”. David spoke on how mobile tools for consumer brands and retailers are being used to more effectively manage field teams, gather in-store data and direct resources to improve retail execution ROI. David also spoke about how our employees are changing, and how companies have to empower the “Millennial Employee”, whose requirements include flexibility, and having a social and online mindset.

David Hale, from Gigwalk on the Insight Stage

Shabbir Dahod – TraceLink, Inc, spoke on the Centre stage, his topic – “Delivering the Internet of Things (IoT) to the Enterprise”, and it was one of the highlight talks of the summit I found. Shabbir spoke about how Tracelink were the world’s largest track and trace network for connecting the Life Sciences supply chain and eliminating counterfeit drugs from the global marketplace, by using their Life Sciences Cloud, configured in a network tenant architecture.

Thomas Davies, Head of Enterprise for Google drew a huge level of engagement from the crowd with his talk on the next stage of collaboration. Thomas mentioned the evolution of how we collaborate, but even since the early 1980’s the structures were quite rigid and have not changed that much up to a few years ago. But now, customer and employee expectations have changed. They are fast, 24/7, global and personalised. He discussed how employees and organisations are more efficient when they collaborate. “We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us” – Marshall McLuan.

Thomas Davies (Google) in exhuberant form on Center Stage

One last talk Ill cover is a topic that is somewhat under the covers of Enterprise IT, and I am glad that Engin Akyol of Distil Networks talked on “Dark Cloud: Cloud Providers as a Platform for Bot Attacks”. Engin first spoke about good bots, which do serve a purpose for major cloud providers. But this talk was focusing on bad bots, which slow down application performance and skew analytics. As the volume of cloud platforms continues to scale, this leads to ease in setting up bot networks which can pilfer content from websites, or launch other malicious attacks.

So, ill sign off from EnterConf 2015, and onto Web Summit in November, with many events, collaborations and new experiences in between. As a two day conference, perhaps I built less contacts than I expected to. But the ones I did are more meaningful contacts, and EnterConf allows their attendees an environment to do that. I also sat in on round-tables on big data and security, which gave yet another dynamic. It really is a conference experience I will be returning to. Special mention to all the organisers, volunteers and the inspiring venue. Goodbye Belfast, hello Dublin!

Oh, I almost forgot, I really hope Krem Coffee are at Web Summit, awesome coffee!

Why IoT practitioners need to “Wide Lens” the concept of a Data Lake

As we transition towards the vast quantity of devices that will be internet enabled by 2020, (anything from 50-200 billion experts estimate), it seems that the current cloud architectures that are being proposed are somewhat short on the features required to enable the customers data requirements on 2020.

I wont dive hugely into describing the technology stack of a Data Lake in this post (Ben Greene from Analytics Engines in Belfast, who I visit on Wednesday en route to Enter Conf, does a nice job here of that in his blog here). A quick side step, if you look at the Analytics Engines website, I saw that customer choice and ease of use were some of their architecture pillars, when providing their AE Big Data Analytics Software Stack. Quick to deploy, modular, configurable with lots of optional high performance appliances. Its neat to say the least, and I am looking forward to seeing more.

The concept of a Data Lake has a large reputation in current tech chatter, and rightly so. Its got huge advantages in enterprise architecture scenarios. Consider the use case of a multinational company, with 30,000+ employees, countless geographically spread locations, multiple business functions. So where is all the data? Its normally a challenging question, with multiple databases, repositories and more recently, hadoop enabled technologies storing the companies data. This is the very reason why a business data lake (BDL) is a huge advantage to the corporation. If a company has a Data Architect at its disposal, then it can develop a BDL architecture (such as shown below, ref – Pivotal) that can be used to act as a landing zone for all their enterprise data. This makes a huge amount of sense. Imagine being the CEO of that company, and as we see changes in the Data Protection Act(s) over the next decade, a company can take the right step towards managing, scaling and most importantly protecting their data sets. All of this leads to a more effective data governance strategy.

Now shift focus to 2020 (or even before?). And lets take a look at the customer landscape. The customers that will require what the concept of a BDL now provides will need far more choice. And wont necessarily be willing to pay huge sums for that service. Now whilst there is some customer choice of today, such as Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Windows Azure, it is predicted that even these services are targeted at a consumer base of a startup and upwards in the business maturity life cycle. The vast majority of cloud services customers in the future will be everyone around us, the homes we live in and beyond. And the requirement to store data in a far distance data center might not be as critical for them. It is expect they will need far more choice.

I expect in the case of building monitoring data, which could be useful to the wider audience in a secure linked open data sets (LOD’s) topology. For example, smart grid provider might be interested in energy data from all the buildings and trying to suggest optimal profiles for them to reduce impact on the grid. Perhaps the provider might even be willing to pay for that data? This is where data valuation discussions come into play, and is outside the scope of the blog. But the building itself, or its tenants might not need to store all their humidity and temperature data for example. They might some quick insight up front, and then might choose bin that data (based on some simple protocol describing the data usage) in their home for example).

Whilst a BDL is built on the premise of “Store Everything”, it is expected that whilst that will bring value for these organisations monitoring consumers of their resources, individual consumers might not be willing to pay for this.

To close, the key enablers to these concepts are the ensure that real time edge analytics and increased data architecture choice. And this is beginning to happen. Cisco have introduced edge analytics services into their routers, and this is a valid approach to ensuring that the consumer has choice. And they are taking the right approach, as there is even different services for different verticals (Retail, IT, Mobility).

In my next blog, Edge Analytics will be the focus area, where we will dive deeper into the question. “where do we put our compute?”

Why Ireland needs to use Technology and IoT more to help their Homeless

21% rise in homeless sleeping rough in Dublin

15% rise in homeless in Cork

Rise also in Limerick, Galway and Waterford

Over 1,000 children are now homeless in Ireland.

Startling figures. Especially the last one. I cannot try to comprehend what it is like to be a parent, who must tell their children that they don’t have a place to go at night.

I, like many others have been in other countries cities to see that this is not simply an Irish challenge. So I will start by giving those examples, to address the global scenarios, and how our physiology must change locally. I remember vividly two occasions whilst abroad that a homeless person made a big impact on my life.

The first time was in 2005, I was in Auckland, New Zealand. We were staying in a hostel whilst backpacking. We weren’t having a particularly good day. The weather wasn’t great, and one or two things went badly. But as we strolled back to the hostel, we noticed a homeless elderly guy in a doorway right beside us. The “bad” weather had turned into a storm, with an incredible amount of flash flooding. I felt awful. And everyone has been there, where a reality check ensures that we come back to earth. I asked the hostel could the guy get a room. They said no, as he must have an address. I offered to pay for his room, still no. Yikes. So I decided all I could do was give him some money. But then I thought, why not do that, and have a conversation. I think we automatically think only money is what they need. I went out, and sat close to him. Whilst chatting, I learned part of his story, and one of the first things he said was that there were worse off people than him, and he didn’t drink, or smoke. And that he hated the rain! He thanked me for the $20, and also the conversation. We helped each other.

The next story is when I received incredible kindness from a homeless guy on my very first night in New York. Woohoo im in America, let go for beers! Oooops. Ended up feeling a little worse for wear outside a club. On my own. Minus my phone. In a lane way in a bad part of town. A big guy stopped. Uh-oh. But this guy asked me was I ok. I told him I was from Ireland, and that I lost my phone. He told me “man I don’t even have a phone”. He then walked me out of the lane way, and hailed me a cab. I gave him a nice tip, and the cynic out there will say he was looking for that. But he didn’t know me. Humanity exists.

And now to Ireland. I really want to stress that I am not some Saint. This is more to raise awareness and how potentially technology can help. I have contributed to Cork Simon Community at length at various points in my life, and if I have some change, I do give it to the needy. But herein lies the first challenge. A lot of people has less and less cash on them. And even if we do, people wonder, if I give this person money, what will they spend it on? Money doesn’t always help, as the upper class society of Ireland have also seen.

From a technology perspective, I want to talk about some potential ways for technology to help on this challenge.

The term Smart Cities has been branded about in relation to the Internet of Everything. Where we will use technology to improve people’s lives. Yet I have not seen much presented that will help the homeless. Imagine if we could use cost effective smart devices that would be worn by homeless volunteers to identify the paths they take, and where they sleep? So that soup runs can be more efficient, and beds can be found? I think it is one area that must at least be explored. There are doing this in Odense, Denmark. Check it out here.

I also believe that doorways could be fitted with load sensors to gauge how many are occupied in our cities. This data could be used to predict common places used, and even predict on particular nights where homeless people are. That coupled with temperature sensors could have saved Jonathan Corrie’s life last December.

The last idea I’ll propose here is to modify the many parking meters in our cities to allow them produce vouchers based on use in a particular day. The more the meters are used in the day session (which should correlate busier cities to more needy people), the meters in the evening print out food/supply vouchers when homeless people enter a code that is text to them. If they don’t have a phone, then their date of birth would be previously registered and entered.

I came across a startup on a recent trip to the United States. I was incredibly impressed. It is called HandUp. The whole premise is that homeless people can setup a online profile through the organisation, and can crowd fund to reach their goals. They never receive direct cash. Instead it is used to buy supplies, food, and sometimes tools to go back to work. So instead of writing their story on cardboard, they get help to set up a profile, and then hand out business cards to their site, so that people can logon and donate. It only based in San Francisco for now, but I have contacted the, to hear plans for global roll out. (And how)

Technology multinationals benefit greatly though our tax system, by positioning themselves in Ireland. And it’s great for our economy, through jobs. I have seen the kindness first hand by working in these companies. They create lots of great lives for people. I wonder if a 1% challenge in the tech sector, where people can volunteer (before tax) donate 1% of their annual wage (hence its 0.05% from us and 0.05% from government) to a particular social challenge. This could change annually. The homeless, the elderly. I think this sort of crowd funding which is spread thin could make a huge impact. I won’t do the exact maths, but 100,000 employees at average salary of €40,000 equates to €40,000,000.!!

A story of caution on the wrong ways to use technology. BBH labs tried a social experiment to use homeless people as wifi hotspots.!! You can read more here. Brain fry springs to mind.

The work done by organisations like Simon and Focus Ireland (and others) is incredible. I sometimes try to think if they weren’t so active, where would we be. I personally believe that the technology community can play a role in assisting and helping the fight. I also think the government gets bad press, and whilst not completely innocent, neither are we. Dublin Simon Community submitted an application for new accommodation last year. The result? 33 objections from the public. Not the government, but us.

“Part of the problem is we have a lack of activism.. We have a lack of people who are willing to step forward and be part of the solution” – Michael Esswein

it@Cork European Technology Summit 2015 – a WOW event!

I wanted to change direction slightly and give an update on an event I had the privilege of being involved with this week, the it@Cork European Technology Summit. The event was held at Cork City Hall, on Wednesday May 5th, with a full day technology summit, followed by a black tie dinner with 3d wearables fashion show.

An epic journey over the past few months, with way more ups than downs resulted in…

1 Day – 4 Sections – 20 speakers – 4 Chair Speakers – 400+ Day attendees – #1 Trending on Twitter – 9 Amazing artisan food stalls – Lots of Sponsors – 200+ Night Attendees – 2 Fashion Designers – 1 Model Agency – 10 Models – 2 Fire Dancers – 4 3D printed bow ties !

So how did I arrive there? Last year, Gillian Bergin from EMC asked me to get involved with it@Cork, as part of the Tech Talk committee. I’m delighted she did, as over the past few months, I got to partake in and help organise some excellent tech talks from a variety of people, including my fellow technologist, Mr Steve Todd of EMC. The tech talk series is just one of many successful strands of it@Cork, holding six high end, rockstars speakers/panels per year. The series is full up until 2016, but if you are a “rockstar” speaker interested in speaking, please contact us directly. From this, James O’Connell of VMWare who passed over the tech talk committee chair to Barry O’Connell, took on chair of the Summit Organising committee. James, coupled with myself and Paddy O’Connell of Berkley Group, (known collectively now as the Macroom or Muskerry Mafia 🙂 ) assisted Sarah Walsh of it@Cork in organising the day summit. The night summit was excellently organised by Marnie O’Leary Daly of VMWare.

The event was kicked off by James, and then Ronan Murphy, chairman of the board it@Cork, CEO Smarttech gave an address that spoke about how Cork needs a cluster manager to help drive more employment in the region. More from Ronan here by the Examiner. Donal Cahalane, from Teamwork.com, gave an insightful talk on how he saw the industry progressing, with some excellent advice for everyone from startups through to multinationals .

The four sections throughout the day offered a mix balance between raw technology (Cloud- challenge the fear, Internet of Everything) along with Digital Marketing and a Tech Talent/ Diversity panel. I found this to work quite well, as it ensured the audience got a variety of speakers.

The cloud session on “challenging the fear” was an excellent one to start with, as it had a mix of SME’s from companies such as Kingspan (John Shaw), Trend Micro (Simon Walsh) and Barricade (David Coallier), but also had representation from the legal profession, in the form of Michael Valley, Barrister and Noel Doherty – Solicitor who spoke at length on cloud governance. This session was chaired by Anton Savage of The Communications Clinic, who hosted a panel discussion with all five presenters at the end.

All of the sections were split by networking opportunities in the exhibition halls, where companies from the region presented their organisations, and some even demonstrated their wares. The athmosphere was great to see with lots of chatter, tweeting and drinking of coffee! 😀

The second section was a panel session on Tech Talent, the chair being Paddy O’Connell from Berkely, and the facilitators were Meghan M Biro, founder and CEO of TalentCulture, and Kevin Grossman, who co founded and co hosts the the TalentCulture #TChat show with Meghan. They later presented their TChat show live from the Clarion hotel Cork. It was awesome!

Such variety (no pun intended!) in the panel, with David Parry Jones, VP UKI VMWare and Noelle Burke Head of HR Microsoft Ireland representing industry, Michael Loftus – Head of Faculty of Engineering and Science CIT representing academia, and the hugely impressive student Ciara Judge, one of the Kinsale winners of the 2013 Google Science Award. Everyone inspired in their own way, and the dynamic at lunchtime was one of motivation, hope and leadership.

Having started my own personal digital marketing brand last year, and learning by making mistakes, I was exceptionally excited by our third section – Digital Marketing. Again, Anton did an incredible job of asking the right questions, and effortless listenership followed. To listen to experts such as Meghan, Antonio Santos, Niall Harbison and Raluca Saceanu was a privilege, and I also got the opportunity to speak with the directly (as did many others). This was true of all the speakers throughout the day. I believe a huge number of people got lots of what I call “advice snippets” that they can take away and grow their own brand.

The last session was on an area close to my heart, the Internet of everything (IoE), and I had the privilege of chairing the session. We had speakers from Climote (Derek Roddy), my future employer Tyco (Craig Trivelpiece), Salesforce (Carl Dempsey), Dell (Marc Flanagan) and Xanadu (David Mills). All these companies are in different stages on their IoE journey, but the message was consistent: IoE is going to make a huge impact on our smart futures. I really like how Craig spoke of “if you want to improve something, measure it” and how Tyco are looking at predictive maintenance and pushing intelligence/insight back out to the devices. Derek showed how Climote is changing how we live, David did the same in relation to sport. Marc gave an excellent account of Dells practical approach to IOT, showing the capabilities needed for IoE projects. Carl got me really excited about Salesforce’ plans in the IoE space. The session really closed out the event well, and the numbers in attendance stayed consistent.

Having attended a huge number of tech events over the years, it was great to see again, year on year growth of Munsters premier Technology Summit. The athmosphere was electric all day, both locally and on Twitter. The tweet wall was a big success, and we expect that next years event will be bigger and better again.

The black tie dinner was also a huge success, with the Millenium Hall in City Hall packed to capacity. Marnie O’Leary Daly, along with Emer from Lockdown model agency, put on an amazing dinner (superb catering by Brooks) and fashion show, with 3D wearables fashion provided by Aoibheann Daly from LoveandRobots and Rachael Garrett from Limerick School of Art and Design (@LSAD). Special mention to FabLab also for helping Rachael get her garments ready. It really was a spectacular evening. The Clarion hotel was also hugely supportive of the night element. (Photos to follow!) Emer will also blog on the night event fashion soon and do a much better job than me!

It@Cork European Technology Summit 2016. Watch this space.

If you are interested in getting involved in 2016, please contact Sarah Walsh at it@Cork.