Enterprise hits and misses - readers critique algorithms and everyone critiques Facebook
- Summary:
- This week - readers sound off on algorithms-gone-wrong. Plus: GDPR as marketing differentiator. Facebook gets a searing critique and digital gets a career survival guide. Plus: your weekly whiffs.
My rant with a purpose on algos-gone-wild provoked vigorous reader comments. The blow-by-blows of customer indignities were not intended to trivialize serious social/cultural issues that algorithms raise. But given we hear so much pablum excitement about how algorithms can personalize us into consumer nirvana, I felt it was time to vent some petulant indignant spleen.
Readers didn't hold back. Gordon Hogg's missive included:
We’re thrilled to be the new “data scientists” and ignore the lessons of algos-gone-wild in favor of the hustlers case studies, anecdotes and unconfirmed expectations.
“The first step is admitting we have a problem” said Jon. We haven’t acknowledged the unexpected consequences of algos-run-amuck and refuse to correct the resulting errors. The problem is us!
Tom Smith points to algorithmic immaturity (or, our inexperience building them).
I think a lot of people see marketing automation and AI/ML solutions as “silver bullets” – and we all know there is no such thing. Both require a lot of knowledge, practice, planning, and work to execute. And even more to execute well. The adage – start small and iterate applies to both.
I see a bigger problem: brute force algorithms are cheap - and they appear efficient. I tried to dismantle that in the piece - or was I howling into the wind? For the record, I'm not algo-hostile. But I'm all set with "poorly-designed algorithms that lack sophistication and proper human intervention" - and the hassles of being flagged and targeted for spam dumb "personalization." You?
- How GDPR is changing the way we market to customers - Barb gets an optimistic take on this upcoming May 25 marketing doomsday, which is actually a competitive differentiator if you play your cards right. Mark Samuels pulls in more customer examples of facing GDPR the right way in GDPR best practice use cases highlight burden and opportunity. "A lot of people focus on the fines, but from a marketing perspective, there’s a great opportunity to re-gain the trust of your customers." Bingo.
- Hortilux cultivates an illuminating IoT approach with Mendix - I'm not much of a "jeepers Wally, IoT is cool!" guy, but even I couldn't resist this nifty field view from Jess: "Hortilux has developed a digital platform where IoT-sourced insights, harvested from commercial greenhouses, are shared with customers."
Vendor analysis, diginomica style. Here's my three top choices from our vendor coverage:
- AI advances up Oracle cloud stack with launch of autonomous PaaS - Phil on Oracle's advance up the cloud stack. Also see Denis' Oracle pushes onward with the information utility.
- Starling Bank cashes in on open source Kubernetes for flexibility and agility - Angelica's use case on a "cross-cloud" approach includes this zinger: "We weren’t held back by having to do capacity planning, sizing on datacenters or anything like that. While our competitors based on white-labeled existing banking back-ends had difficulties with release cycles, getting bugs fixed and so on, we were building new and innovative things."
A few more vendor picks, without the quips:
- EnterpriseDB’s Concierge Service – beginning of the end or end of the beginning? - Martin
- Tackling AI, IoT, Voice UIs and more - Acumatica fleshes out its next gen tech plans - Jon
Jon's grab bag - rivals News.com and the New York Times are not exactly "Fox and friends," but as Stuart explains, they are linked in an interesting way: both are hitting landmarks in their digital revenue transformation. ('Fake News', Trump and digital transformation - the challenge for news media).
Stuart also checks in on the slow lobster boil that is Disney v Netflix - business as usual as the ‘phony war' plays out. Finally, in our all-Stuart grab bag, we've got Stuart on the tech fashion smart device scene in Fossil's digital push to avoid fossilisation in the time of the smartwatch. Bonus points for a satisfying-but-expected pun (Fossil/fossil).
Best of the rest
Lead story - Inside Facebook's Hellish Two Years—and Mark Zuckerberg's Struggle to Fix it AllmyPOV: This long form epic from Wired is one of the more ambitious tech journalism efforts we'll see this year. Whatever your take on Facebook, the tensions between humans and algorithms are instructive for enterprise types like you and me:
Eventually, everyone assumed, Facebook’s algorithms would be good enough to run the whole project, and the people on Fearnow’s team—who served partly to train those algorithms—would be expendable.
Facebook hasn't found the answer, but the struggle/demise of Trending Topics is worth a hard look. In another troubling/interesting twist, Early Facebook and Google Employees Form Coalition to Fight What They Built. So long, tech utopia - for a few paragraphs anyhow.
Other standouts (from one of the strongest blogging weeks I've seen on the web in years)
The digital worker survival guide: it's much more about attitude than skills - Phil Fersht unveils a definitive butt-kicking for the rest of us. I like: "Being smart about data is no longer geeky, its career-critical," and "Tune up your cross-cultural intelligence."
Questions Consulting - 2017 ERP news overview - a fine/transparent research project from Gabriel Gheorghiu. Anyone with a toe tipped in the ERP market should consider this mandatory viewing. Give me this over an expensive and non-transparent geometric shape from an analyst firm anytime.
Honorable mention
- You Shouldn't Buy Enterprise Software Applications Ever Again - Esteban Kolsky figured out how to give entire vendor marketing teams an irregular heartbeat at the same time. Hint: it's about platforms
- 6 Challenges of Agile at Scale for ERP - UpperEdge begins a promising new series. Glad they included vendor accountability/performance.
- Are the Most Innovative Companies Just the Ones With the Most Data? No, but it's a good premise to riff on.
- Five Strategies for Slaying the Data Puking Dragon - Post title of the week? Also includes "your inner analysis ninja feels more like a reporting squirrel."
- Rootstock Asserts Manufacturing Cloud ERP Leadership in the Salesforce Ecosystem - TEC's PJ Jakovljevic has context on an intriguing cloud ERP market move.
- Intel’s latest chip is designed for computing at the edge - Don't forget - cloud computing is out; edge computing is in.
Whiffs
I could care less ifWhat you think is tasteless is not necessarily what someone else would see as tasteless.
So tasering a dead cat is considered tasteful in some circles then? It's amazing how page views create open-minded moral flexibility... A former Aetna director in California had the opposite problem: more truth than the courts can handle.
"A former medical director said under oath that he didn't look at patient records when deciding whether to approve or deny care." https://t.co/7q9VyQ4dfi -> No big deal, it's not like actual data is important to health care. #aetna #losers
— Jon Reed (@jonerp) February 14, 2018
Money well spent: Seattle just dropped $150,000 to dismantle a state of the art drone surveillance network. Whiffing closer to the enterprise, AI Will Give Rise to "Superhuman Workers," Says Google X Co-Founder. Getting rid of some repetitive work while freeing humans up for creative work? Sounds good. But Sebastian Thurn stirs a thicker PR sauce:
Having AI look over your shoulder and learn those skills from you will make you a superhuman, a more powerful person.
Yeah, well, Thurn can go pump intellectual iron with his superhuman pals. Give me people who embrace their own frailty over this tech testerone anyday. I know this: smart phones haven't made us more powerful. They've made us more insular and annoying. We'll see if AI can do better. If I sound a tad grouchy, it's just because no one bought me KFC's fried chicken scented Valentine's Day cards this year. I'll get over it by next week...
If you find an #ensw piece that qualifies for hits and misses - in a good or bad way - let me know in the comments as Clive (almost) always does.
Most Enterprise hits and misses articles are selected from my curated @jonerpnewsfeed. 'myPOV' is borrowed with reluctant permission from the ubiquitous Ray Wang.
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