Big Data is Dead, Long Live Big Data - Mark van Rijmenam

Thank you very much. Good morning everyone. Big Data is dead. Long live Big Data. This morning I'll share with you how Big Data has changed over the past years. And I will share with you some trends that I think are very important for you to remember and to take into account when you do business. Because I think and I believe that in this fast changing world, if you're not becoming a data driven business in the next decade, you won't be around in the next decade. So Big Data has been around for a long time. The Big Data week already exist for five years. Big Data, it was for the first time mentioned around 10 years ago, I think in 2005. And since then we have seen it has become a massive hype. Everyone has been talking about it, everyone said they were doing something with Big Data, while we all knew that they weren't doing anything with Big Data. It has become a buzzword. And slowly we see we've noticed that organizations around the globe are starting to pay attention to Big Data because it is something that we have to do, we have to take into account and have to work with. So Big Data has been a hype for almost 10 years until last year. Last year was the first time when Gartner, in their hype cycle for emerging technologies, took away Big Data from the hype cycle. It's no longer there. It's no more a hype, no more a buzz. It's gone, it's out, we're done with it. Not completely. If you look carefully at the hype cycle, you see that there are other trends, other technologies that have taken the place for big data. Machine learning is one of them and artificially intelligent as well. So Big Data is dead. But long live Big Data. Because now that Big Data finally is no longer a hype, no longer a buzzword, we can actually get started because we have to do a lot of it with this. Big Data is really going to change everything. We're collecting so much data nowadays in everything that we do that if we don't use it, if we don't analyze it, and if you don't pull insights out of it, we have a problem as an organization. So I will share with you three trends that I think are important to take care of, important to think of when you want to become a data driven business. Because these trends will help you eventually in the fast changing world that we live in, to stay ahead, to stay ahead of your competition and to gain that competitive advantage that is so important. Let's start with the first one. Power to your employees. It's time to give back the power to your employees, take it away from the decision makers in the boardroom and give it back to your employees. Because big data enables you to detect unknown unknowns. Is anyone familiar with the term unknown unknowns? Let me show hands of people who know it. It's quite a lot. That's good. That's good. Because the unknown unknowns are, well, they are called black swans. And black swans are what define the business. They're what define how you're going to stay competitive. A well known black swan was the global financial crisis in 2007 and 2008. Because the characteristics of a black swan is it has a massive impact on society, on business. Nobody saw it coming, but in hindsight it's very easy to explain. That's exactly what happened with the financial crisis. Of course, with the financial crisis, only a few people saw it coming and they made tremendous amount of money. Another black swan is the Internet. When it started to appear, nobody really thought what to do with it was not going to be anything important. But as we know now, it has changed the world drastically. And in hindsight, it's very easy to explain what happened. Well, as an organization, it's very important to be aware of what are these unknown unknowns for your business? What are the disruptive innovations that are going to change your business? And big data can help with that. Because the more data you have, the more data you analyze, the better you are able to understand what these unknown unknowns are. You're better able to detect them and if done correctly, better to anticipate them as well. And that's what brings in mixed data. I'm not a big fan of the terminology big data. Obviously it implies that you need tremendous amount of data. Well, a lot of you probably still don't use terabytes or petabytes of data. That's why I always say the term mixed data better explains what you need to do. Mixed data basically means combining structured and unstructured data, combining internal data, external data, and trying to get insights out of that from the data. And that's the whole idea with detecting black swans. Because if you are starting to combine all kinds of different data sources, you're becoming much more able to understand where these innovations, these disruptive innovations are coming from and how to anticipate them. And the objective of course then is, is for your organization to empower your decision makers. And I'm not talking about the decision makers in the boardroom, I'm not talking about the VPs. No, I'm talking about the decision makers that deal with the customers. I'm talking about the decision makers that sell the product, that are in the operations that create the product. Those are the ones who need to have the insights from the data. Those are the ones who should have access to, to good dashboards with good visualizations, good intelligence to help them make the decisions for them to detect the unknown unknowns. Because if you are able to detect the unknowns by your decision makers, your true decision makers, then you're a lot better able to anticipate and to remain competitive. So I foresee in the coming years that more and more organizations are starting to adapt to this. More and more organizations will finally understand that they have to empower their employees. They have to empower employees to give them the insights that they need to make the right decisions. Then the second trend I'd like to discuss, power to the community. And this is a trend that is absolutely going to revolutionize the world. I'm talking about blockchain. Let me see a show of hands. Who are familiar with blockchain? About 40% of the room, I would say. Blockchain is the technology behind bitcoin and it is basically a database technology. And there are people, among others, Mark Anderson, a famous venture capitalist from Silicon Valley, who it is as big an invention as the Internet or some others say it is as big invention as a steam engine. The blockchain technology will drive us into the fourth industrial revolution and it will completely change the way we do business, the way we run our societies and the way we interact with our customers. And that's very important for you to know if you want to remain in business in 10 years from now because this is going to take off in the next decade. You could say that the blockchain is somewhere around development of 1994 of the Internet. So we are really slowly starting to understand what it means for us. But it won't take 20 years, give or take five years from now, and the blockchain will have revolutionized our world. So what is the blockchain? Of course, that's an important question because it is a difficult technology. You could say it is a shared, single source of the truth of anything digital or of ownership. Basically how it works, it is, let's take the example of a bitcoin. A bitcoin is a transaction and that needs to be lodged onto the blockchain. And as soon as you've made a transfer from one bitcoin owner to another bitcoin owner, you have a transaction that needs to be entered into the blockchain. So the transaction is sent into the network, into the nodes of the community of all the computers that power the blockchain network. And they use cryptography to validate a transaction. Once the transaction is validated, it's entered into a block together with all the different other transactions which are then so called hashed, they run through an algorithm and the entire block is becoming a sort of a string of 64 letters and numbers. And this hash is very important. It also is receiving a timestamp that this block was entered in the blockchain at moment X. And the hash of the one block is. The hash is the starting hash of the next block, hence the blockchain. The advantage of this is that if you want to change anything that's on the blockchain, it is practically impossible because you need tremendous amount of computing power to change something, to change the data. Because once you change the data, only if you change one bit, it will change the hash of that block, subsequently the hash of the next blocks will be changed, etc, etc. So it is almost impossible to change data which is on the blockchain. And that is the massive advantage of the blockchain, because the data becomes irreversible. Once data is irreversible, you have a single version of the truth. And that's necessary if you want to deal with people who you don't know. And what we see with the blockchain is that it takes away the intermediary because there's no need anymore for me to trust the counterparty and I don't need a third party which is normally used to establish that trust. Normally, if you want to transfer money, if I want to transfer money to you, I have to use a bank because I don't trust you, I don't know you, so do I know if the money comes to you? I use a bank. The bank takes a transaction for that, that entire part is no longer necessary. And as a result we'll see that almost any industry that deals with transactions, and you could say that basically anything is a transaction, is going to be affected by the blockchain. Because if you don't have a trusted intermedia anymore, a whole bunch of services are no longer necessary. That of course will result in cost reductions and improved services for the customers, but it also will result in a tremendous amount of loss of jobs. And there's one more, I think, fascinating example of what the blockchain can do and that's very important for you to know in terms of how you can Change your organization to become more data driven. And that's the example of the dao. The DAO basically means a decentralized autonomous organization. What does that mean? An advantage, as I already said from the blockchain is that once data is on the blockchain, it becomes irreversible. So what you also can put on the blockchain, and you have different types of blockchains. So you have the Bitcoin Blockchain, which is 1, you have Ethereum blockchain, which is another, you have hyperledger, you have all kinds of different blockchains. But the advantage of the blockchain is that you can put so called smart contracts on the blockchain. Smart contracts are basically if this, then that statement, if thought something happens, then an outcome has to happen. And once these smart contracts are on the blockchain, they can't be changed. So as soon as a sort of input comes in the smart contract does it work and automatically an outcome appears. The thing is, these smart contracts can be linked together so you can create a decentralized autonomous organization. That is an organization without corporate governance, without managers, without employees, run completely by code. And this is nothing new. This already exists. So this is something to remember that how can you use blockchain, how can you use blockchain to create smart contracts to become as much as a DAO as possible? And in the coming years we will see that the blockchain is literally going to take off. Already the 50 biggest banks in the world are investigating how they can use the blockchain. But any industry, from consumer goods to retail, to travel, to transportation, they all will use the blockchain. But to become a true dao, to become a true decentralized autonomous organization, there's one other thing you need, and that is power to the algorithms. That's the third trend. Power to the algorithms basically means artificial intelligence changing our world. And that is going at a pace unseen before. Half a year ago it was the AlphaGo, an algorithm from DeepMind, a company owned by Google, who beat Lee Sedol with the game of Go. And you could say, whatever, we've won chess since 1989 with computers. But there's a major difference between the game of chess and the game of Go. Because with a game of chess, you have a limited amount of possibilities and you can use a so called brute force approach for the computer to calculate whatever needs to be done for the next move. With the game of Go, you have more possibilities every round than there are atoms in a known universe. So it's impossible to use a brute force approach. And that's what's so interesting about this algorithm is, is that they created a sort of intuitive artificial intelligence. They created an artificial intelligence that had to almost use gut feeling to know what to do. And it won 4 to 1. That's a major step forward in artificial intelligence. So what will happen? We will see that algorithms will become our boss. A few years from now, you will report to an algorithm or you will have an algorithm who tell you what to do. Don't be surprised about that. Our algorithms will be our copywriter, they will be our assistant, our driver, our customer service algorithms will be in every part of our business. And we're slowly moving from specific artificial intelligence, which we all know, we use it in our daily lives. Siri is specific artificial intelligence. Your Google account, your gps, whatever. But if you ask Siri to drive you a car, I wouldn't get in because it probably will end up very bad for you. The next step is generic artificial intelligence, which is Siri, who can drive a car. And the final step is super artificial intelligence, which is Siri taking over the world. That's still quite far away. Experts say we should reach that stage around 2045, 2050. But it is something that we should be aware of. And already we see algorithms in our workplaces at many different places. A few months ago, Facebook launched Messenger bots, algorithms becoming your customer service department. And there are already hundreds of companies who use a bot. So instead of you calling the customer service department, you start talking to an algorithm. What about Associated Press? They use algorithms to, to write the financial reports. And these are not reports that are very in depth, but they are more reports about the profit and loss of an organization, what did they do in the past quarter, etc. But these are reports that used to be written by analysts. And it's just a matter of time before also the in depth reports will be written by algorithms as well. And did I mention that in the future you will have an algorithm as a boss that already exists. Deep Knowledge Ventures is a venture capital firm from Hong Kong and they have given an algorithm a seat in the board of directors. And this algorithm analyzes all kinds of data sources. The mixed data approach. It analyzes news information, market information, company information, etc. And the algorithm gives an advice on whether or not to invest in a certain stock and board of directors. They listen to what the algorithm has to say. It's a completely new world and we are just the beginning of it. So what we will see is that we have more and more algorithms, more and more very smart algorithms and algorithms that you can just buy off the shelf as well. Instead of developing your own algorithm, you can also buy an algorithm for, from a marketplace. Use five lines of codes and you have your algorithm in place. Nothing new exists. Already company Algorithmia has developed an algorithmic marketplace where you can buy off the shelves algorithms. So if we look at how are we going to change your organization, how are you going to prepare your organization for a data driven world where data is in everything that we do, where you have to ensure that you have the right algorithms to, to create an organization that is ready for the next decade? I think if you have three trends that I've just shared with you, if you use those three trends to create an organization that's ready for it, you have a very good chance to remain in business. So the first one is, as I mentioned, empowerment. Empower to your employee. Power to your employees. Give your decision makers the tools to analyze the data. Give your decision makers the tools to come up with insights that help them detect the unknown unknowns. And I'm not talking about the decision makers in the board of directors. I'm talking about the decision makers who deal with the customer, who sell your product, who are in the factory. Those are the ones who need to make the decisions that matter. Empower your organization, your employees. The second trend is the blockchain. The blockchain is a revolutionary technology and I could talk for hours about it, but I won't do that. But because the blockchain is completely changing how we create our businesses, it's changing how we create our industries and it's changing how we build our organizations. So start looking into it. Investigate what the blockchain can do for you. Because if you do it well, you can reduce your cost and you can improve your customer services. You can become a much more efficient and lean organization while having a better product. I think something that we all should want. And the final trend is looking to algorithms. See how you can automate your business. See which algorithms you can use. Where can you use an algorithm? Where can you use artificial intelligence? In your customer service department, in your marketing department, in your finance department. Algorithms are becoming smarter and smarter and better and better. So if you have the right algorithms, if you know how to use the algorithms, you have a big chance of improving your organization. So empowering your employees. Start using the blockchain and start using algorithms and I think you will be ready for the next decade of our data driven world. Thank you very much.