Have you had any recent security incidents that you are aware of?

According to the 2019 Data Breach Investigation Report, 43% of breaches involved the small and medium business segment. Gone are the days an internet firewall, PC antivirus, and backup is adequate. Agree? Today, in the face of emerging threats, security is complex.

Ransomware and phishing attacks can be let through by even the best anti-virus and anti-spam software. The risk is heightened if users have the same passwords across all accounts – successful attackers can then easy take your money and your files hostage. It is also very common for users to send confidential information unintentionally.

Governments and regulators are hard at work to create policy frameworks to guide business – yet staying up to date and onside with the patchwork of rules has its own challenges. PCI (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard), GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection and Electronics Documents Act), HIPA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), FCRA (Fair Credit Reporting Act) all have some overlapping areas but varying objectives and severity of penalties.

The challenge for CEO/Presidents is that the type of risk and the preventive actions required are rapidly changing. Accountability for a cybersecurity breach sits at the top of the house and so should awareness of the threats and prioritisation of the defences. Here are four topics to be addressed:

1. What defences do we have in place against cyber threats?
2. How is our business data being protected from leaks?
3. Who has access to our information?
4. How are we compliant with the various regulatory frameworks?

If you have trouble answering one of these topics or if you have had an incident in the recent past, please reach out so that I can help point you in the correct direction.

Stephen Wise

Integration Professionals

Dramatically Improve Traction

Disruption: Connected Healthcare

Rapidly converging technology advancements are disrupting all industries. Admittedly, my eyes glaze over from time to time when learning about BlockChain or Cyber-Security. I didn’t need these technologies before – why do I need them now? However, disruptive interventions in Health very real.

When I was in middle school, I had a friend living with Diabetes. This was a smart, careful, and aware kid. He was watchful with his diet and measured his glucose and administered his insulin faithfully. Yet, it was frequent that his blood sugar levels would get out of whack; it was very dangerous life-threatening condition. It has been about 100 years since Banting and Best discovered Insulin at University of Toronto, but we are still living in the dark ages managing the condition.

Consider the future: Aiden is a grade ten student diagnosed with Juvenile Diabetes about two years ago. He wears a patch that has a sensor and transmitter that continuously monitors his glucose levels. His phone receives the data, sends immediate alerts when the rate of change exceeds a trigger level, all data is sent to the cloud for storage and analysis. Also, his parents and care-givers have access to the data and alerts.

Aiden is part of a virtual support tele-medicine group. The facilitator is a trained professional and regular video calls on Aiden’s phone include education, coaching, treatment adjustment, and monitoring. The group is designed to help Aiden successfully manage his condition and avoid complications. The facilitator maintains helpful information online so that Aiden can access it in between calls.

As part of the long-term play, Medical researchers collect and combine the data from all Diabetes patients. They use Artificial Intelligence predictions to continually look for opportunities to improve treatment and consequently make unexpected gains helping patients to reduce their symptoms.

Consider a second example. Patients with Atrial Fibrillation wear a device on their chest and go about their daily activities. Leveraging machine leaning and artificial intelligence and huge amounts of data collected from all patients, the system has predictive capabilities and accurately detects the beginning and end of arrhythmias. The benefit is improved clinical data for researchers and doctors to determine an appropriate treatment approach.

High-quality and affordable healthcare has been in crisis for several decades. I believe this is a problem that can be solved over the next twenty years. The two examples above are in the field now. Applying Real-time IoT monitoring and cloud storage, Machine Language, Artificial Intelligence to treatment of Cancer, Mental Health, elderly care will force out inefficiencies in the system driving the overall cost of healthcare to manageable levels.

Stephen Wise

Integration Professionals

Dramatically Improve Traction

What value are you creating with your IoT?

The increasing capability to digitize the physical world presents enormous dollar opportunities. IoT and its technology provides the ability to sense the world or take an action or both. For example, manufacturing applications include operations optimization, predictive maintenance, inventory optimization, and health and safety. McKinsey has suggested that the economic impact of IoT in factories will be valued at 1.2 to 7.7 trillion US dollars in 2025.

Most companies can explore the following over arching models: Transform business process; Enable new business models; or Combine with other advanced technologies like AI and blockchain. Developing a business model to reduce your costs or enhance the customer experience is the first transformation step.

Here are my top 5 tips for developing your IoT business strategy.

1. Ensure the business case has clarity for how the company will capture value from the IoT solution internally or from customers.
2. Executive sponsorship of the IoT portfolio of activities requires business led cross-functional support from all areas of the enterprise; IT enables IoT for the enterprise, not the other way around.
3. Involve manufacturing and the frontline in up-front planning as monetizing IoT benefits depends on business process change and change to customer experience. For example, most implementations will require/suggest for things to be done differently as part of the future state – buy-in from those impacted is critical.
4. Engage partners and internal resources to augment the new skill sets that will be required to maintain and use functionality. Networking and connectivity, Data science, and security will all be learning curves.
5. Manage all your IoT initiatives as a portfolio to initiate/cancel, prioritize, and balance projects according to revenue, cost, resource availability, and risks.

The pervasive embedding of IoT hardware is a given. IoT is reshaping the way enterprises manage processes. Albeit, the usefulness and timing for when it is helpful that your fridge knows it will soon be out of milk is not clear. Nevertheless, the great value to be gleaned in Health, Transportation, Retail, Manufacturing, and so on is logical.
 

Monetizing the power of sensor-enabled data and knowing how to deploy is a disruptive change that should be on everyone’s business radar. 

Stephen Wise

www.IntegrationProfessionals.com

Dramatically Improve Traction

Artificial Intelligence ABC

According to Google's CEO, “AI is one of the most important things humanity is working on. It is more profound than, I dunno, electricity or fire”. The head of Tesla said AI was probably humanities “biggest existential threat”.

Artificial Intelligence isn’t a new concept. Check out the beautifully filmed movie, Metropolis, from 1927. There are other older references in literature. There are also many more recent research and practical applications of "Artificial Intelligence" over the last thirty years.

Today, it is a field of computer science dedicated to solving certain problems which otherwise require human intelligence – specifically, pattern recognition, learning, and generalization. The leap forward in the last few years is that we are gaining the ability to collect, store and analyze ever ginormous amounts of data.

Yesterday, we could write a computer program to predict when it is a good time to cross-sell or up-sell a specific product to a consumer. For example, based on some demographic data and purchase history. The explosion of travel/points programs in the 90's are good examples of this. You agreed to provide your purchase history and demographic data in return for points and the sponsor of the program received data useful for targeted marketing. In these programs, all the rules were hard-coded.

Tomorrow, we can start with the original algorithm to predict the cross-sell opportunity. Then merge it with ever ginormous data collected and the ability to analyze for new patterns. Instead of relying on the initial algorithm to predict the sales opportunity, the system will rely on additional characteristics that it detects and validates within the very data to alter the business rules it relies on. 

Cool.

But how will it impact the industries around us?

According to the first futurist I followed, Roy Amara, "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run," coined by Roy Amara, past president of The Institute for the Future.

Here are sample industries and applications. Wherever we have complex systems – people can get overwhelmed by the amount of data and selecting the best course of action. AI is being applied in research setting today in many fields to use what we already know in better and faster ways.

Keep in mind Roy Amara.

1. Medical
   1. Diagnosis, Drug design/mfr, ICU monitoring
2. Education
   1. Guided learning, Automated testing and marking
3. Manufacturing
   1. Quality checking, Supply-chain communication, Maintenance detection
4. Energy
   1. Demand prediction, Supply distribution

I ask that you take a few minutes right now. Take a sheet of paper, write down the industry you are in at the top. Along the side, list of major business processes you have along the left. Then, along the right, write down some notes about cost savings you could reap if you were able to improve your ability to predict the issues during the process or the outcome.

It may be that one day, the implementation of AI to that process will lead to exponential benefits in your business.

P.S. Feel free to share your analysis via email – I’m interested your findings.

Stephen D Wise

Stephen Wise Integration Professionals

Dramatically Improve Traction