Automation to Contextualization, Are You Ready For The Move?
By Preksha Samar / AppAloud
Days have gone when people expected any hardware/software system to (just) automate some task or a piece of work. Now, systems are expected to execute things in a contextual and intelligent manner without being explicitly said/trained to do so.
Automation to Contextualization, Are You Ready For The Move?
IT and consumer relationship is on its way towards “context” revolution. Earlier, I used to set an alarm on my cell phone a night before, to wake up at 5 AM in the morning so that I do not rush to the gym. Now, what I appreciate more is an intelligent calendar that “understands” that my Gym is off on Sundays and has different timings in summers and winters. I want it to know on its own. I want it to see things and learn.
E-shoppers here, ever wondered, earlier you had to land to your favorite e-store and browse through variety of products, select something and sometimes purchase it or just get that added to cart (and drop/postpone the idea of purchase for some X, Y, Z reason). Same thing happened to me when I was browsing through a favorite e-store of mine for bridal jewelry. What happens next is more interesting – whenever you login to your online social spaces like Facebook, the advertisements on the right start reminding you of the same product that you left in the cart and had almost forgotten about that. When I check my mailbox few days later, it says, “Hi Preksha! In this festive season, we have dropped the prices for bridal jewelry. We are offering 20% discount on the designer piece that you have in your cart. We have even more variety available after your last visit to the store”. Awesome! I just make my next visit to the store and make that purchase (must say, not the same piece but another one at lower price and was beautifully designed. This was appearing in “recommendation” list below the product that was chosen earlier). What happens a couple of years later is even more interesting – I started receiving promotional emails from a famous baby products store.
Another example—In year 2013, Amazon, one of the pioneer companies of intelligent recommendation algorithms based on machine-learning capabilities, launched a contest on Kaggle. The objective was to determine if it was possible to automate the process of granting and revoking access to company’s resources. The algorithm is expected to utilize the huge dataset of employee roles and employee access levels. The objective was to minimize the human involvement required to grant or revoke employee access. I do not know whether or not it turned out successful but what is more important to me is to infer that pioneers have taken their step ahead in this direction of making systems learn by themselves, from the past, by the present and do calculations to come up with intelligent recommendations and predictions.
Those of you, who have been any close to Enterprise Architecture will have already spotted the related workloads for these scenarios – Analytics, Machine Learning, Data processing, Social Collaboration, Big Data, and the hottest “Internet of Everything”.
I just happened to go through a post that detailed the top 10 technology trends for 2015 as examined by the analyst giant Gartner. Of the 10, six included Invisible analytics, Internet of Things, smart machines, and context-rich systems. Whenever, I get through these kinds of posts I feel happy seeing things turning from imaginations to existence. These innovations will bring together people, processes, data, and things thus making connections of more use and uncovering hidden patterns and transforming the same into actionable information, rather the action itself, sometimes. These innovations will create new capabilities and contextual experiences presenting huge opportunities for businesses, individuals, and the world.
The Key Takeaways:
- World will no more encourage passive inventions. Those of you, who are into product offerings; this is the high time to embed analytics and required intelligence to go beyond the basic offering
- Data is still the King! It is the true enabler of any future and unseen opportunities.
- If the data is the king; Context is the Queen. Make sure that you have plans and processes to add context to your data.
- Start putting in efforts towards delivering only “necessary” piece of actionable information/actions. Life is small, no one has time and energy to filter out the “of use” piece from the huge
- Avoid Information Overload. Deliver context. Make it do by itself.