Tod Maffin at Mearie, June 2016 - by @todmaffin

Thank you very much for having me. And thank you to Desjardins, obviously. This is the second time I've been here. I was here about 5 or 6 years ago or so, speaking on different topics, obviously. I've been asked to tell you a little bit about the changing space as we see it, at least in our industry and in those of our clients. And I've chosen to focus in sort of looking forward 5 years or so. So the things that I wanted to talk about first is around this whole idea of the Internet of Things. You know, there's going to be within 5 years 25 to 26 billion devices connected to the internet. There's an enormous opportunity for energy companies in the space called middleware, which not a lot of people know about. And so I want to share with you some of the really interesting studies that have been done there. Don't worry, there are no charts in my presentation. Well, there's one chart in my presentation. Lots of data, but no charts. The other is once we get a sense of kind of where the modeling is going to take place and how you can benefit from connecting these devices. And some very interesting stats, by the way, on consumers. Consumers whether or not they trust you to provide information, to share their energy consumption data, to give advice. There's some really interesting stuff there. We'll get it right off the top. The next step in that is going to be for you to analyze some of that data and its usage. So that's the second area that I'm going to talk a bit about, which is the use of big data, which organizations at your scale have already been using a little bit, but are just really starting to get into. There's some phenomenal stuff underway in the U.S. in your— in your sector. And then the other, the third, is going to be more internal to you, and that is those goddamn millennials. And they are coming. And not only are they coming, they are moving into key roles into your organizations. And I do not believe the mythology that you hear that they are self-entitled brats. There is a way to work with them. I mean, look, this is the first time in workplace history where we have had 4 generations working together. At the same time. So we're going to spend a bit of time talking about those generations, how they work well, how you can pull the best out of them, and so on. Let's play a game. This is a study that came from Accenture last year, 11,000 energy consumers. There were a whole bunch of questions that were asked. By the way, all the stats that I have, I like to source them. I'm not one of these presenters that's like, "People say." I have the stats for this stuff if you want to know for your own research where the actual source of the data came from. I'm happy to share that with you. This is Accenture. They asked a number of questions. Two of them were very interesting to me as it relates to what we're talking about here and in your next couple of years. The first question they asked was, "Do you trust your energy provider to safeguard your personal data?" Personal data meaning obviously things like email address, home address, energy consumption, and so on. Alright, so let's play this as a game. If you think 50% or more said yes, I do, put up your hand. If you think 50% or fewer said no, I don't trust them to safeguard my personal data, put up your hand. Split, kind of split, interesting. The actual answer is they do trust you. And pretty high. When we actually, I kind of went into this study in more detail, that the number overall is in the 63-65%. But when you actually split the data apart and you look at people who are active digital— active users of digital channels, that number is really high. More important than this, when you dive really far into it, and forgive me because this is the best I could do for a screenshot, when you actually dive into the study, we find that two-thirds of them also, also said that they are comfortable with you sharing their data with third parties. Marketers would would kill for this. This doesn't appear anywhere. No other industry. And think about it for yourself, not as an energy consumer, but think about it yourself for regular provider, you know, regular user of the internet. And you go to download an app and the box pops up and it says, "Mind if we share this data with whoever the hell we want?" Don't you uncheck that box? For your customers, they trust you with their data so much that they're even willing to let you share it with third-party providers. We'll come back to that in a moment. Now then, this question: do you trust their advice on how to optimize energy usage? How many of you believe you have the trust of people in giving advice? How many of you believe you do not have the trust of people? You do not have the trust of people. You do not. Now, if this were a study of 200 people, I wouldn't even be presenting it to you. It's not relevant. This is 11,000 people. This is sample, you know, done correctly by Accenture, by a legitimate firm. I think there is opportunity here. When you look at the breakout here— actually, I'll go to this side because these people are laughing more at my jokes than these people. I'm just saying. So pick up the pace, you guys. I'm just kidding. You know, when you look at the difference between these two, there is a really clear opportunity in your space, as I did the research in this, that I want to talk a bit about. And that is in middleware, which we'll come back to. They are happy with you having their data. They are happy with you sharing their data to get advice on how to optimize their energy usage. They do not want that advice coming from you. And I'm sorry, 'cause I know you have spent a lot of time in building apps and building websites and things to help optimize it. I think this trust will get better. I really do. But here's the opportunity that I see, and that is to share this— because remember, two-thirds of them will let you, are happy to do that— share the energy consumption with their permission. So don't just sell it off, but provide a mechanism to let others provide the advice. And there is a whole pool of services out there that can do just that. Let's talk about one example, because your consumers already want this technology. In fact, they are so ready for this technology that they are already investing in smart home devices that don't actually provide that good of savings, at least at the beginning. You know, you think about the smart thermostat, one of the most popular devices in this space. Nest's own calculations off of their website shows that a small condo would need to own this device for 3 years, 4 years before it pays off. Consumers aren't quite aware of this, even though it just comes right off of Nest's own website, because of the marketing. And that is assuming, that is absolutely assuming, that they program these devices correctly, or at all. Oh, any guesses as to what percentage of people do not program these devices correctly? Not 90%. Yeah, I actually heard the number in the audience. 90% of people, 90% of people, they don't— you know what they do? They buy, they take it out of the box, they stick it to the wall, and they're like, "I'm green, I'm so green," you know, and they share it on Facebook. "I'm helping the environment," and really they're not. But here is my point, and that is that they're buying these devices anyway. Even though there won't be a return on this for years. Technology is seductive. But more seductive than technology is data these days. Personal data, personal aggregation of your own data. And it's not just in your space, you know. I mean, this space is everywhere. In my own home, I mean, okay, look, I'm a nerd, alright? My first computer was a Timex Sinclair ZX81. Anyone else? No? The VIC-20? Yeah, there we go. Okay. So the Timex Sinclair ZX81 predated the VIC-20. All right, it was, it had 1K of memory. 1K, that's 1,000 characters. It was a masterpiece of shit, this computer, right? And the other thing with it is it had no storage medium. None. There was no hard drive. There was no cassette. When you turned it off, you lost it. You lost everything, which was— was that Sudafed or was that me? Did everyone hear that? Did I get louder or is that just the Sudafed? All right. So I'm a nerd, you know, I mean, I'm back in the programming days, you know, and so as a result, no surprise, I have a lot of these smart devices in my home. Interestingly enough, I do not have a smart thermometer because we have that milliwatt system in our— in our— so the devices don't work for it, at least not yet. But everything else is wired in my home. My scale is wired to the internet, part of the Internet of Things. It calculates my weight, it calculates my fat ratio, which is a horrible number to look at every morning. And then what does it do? Over the internet, it sends it off to an app, right? An app that calculates everything, keeps track of my BMI, keeps track of my weight. I don't know what the hell happened on February 2nd. Oh, that was pie for dinner day. That's, that's what that one was, right? But you see these devices not only in your space but in the fitness space. You know, we used to— this is old too. This is Remember we used to have these devices, these Fitbits, and they still exist, but now of course it's being built into smartphones, it's being built into watches. Keeps track of everything, uploads it to the internet, keeps track of how— of your personal goals. Data aggregation, personal collection of data is not— are no longer devices you need to buy, they're now just built in everywhere, and people are using them more and more. Just yesterday, was it, or the day before, I think it was yesterday, Apple came out with a whole new set of tools for developers that allow them to do that. Keeps track of your sleep patterns. And of course the real opportunity is to push this to middleware, which is where you guys come in. You log your food. If it's packaged food, you just scan the barcode and it keeps track of everything. Keeps track of everything you eat, everything you drink, every— oh shit, sorry, that is the wrong slide, sorry. That was for the Vancouver crowd. You know, and because it's connected to the internet, you can see teams, you can see this is my wife, and see how they're doing and so on. Here is where I think, oh, the other thing that these do, and the watch does it as well, and these devices, is that they will vibrate if you haven't been active for like 30 minutes or something like that. Which I've learned you can defeat. If you don't want to get up, you just do this. You keep typing and you just do this, and then it's like, congratulations on your 30K run. You're like, that's right, stupid. So here's where I think a lot of the opportunity is for you, and that is not to provide the data evaluation services, not necessarily to provide advice, not necessarily to spend millions of dollars on apps and build these tools out to let people slice and dice which way, but to free your data, to free your customers' data. Industries, some industries like real estate are a little loath to do this, which we'll get into as well, but on the other side of that, there are just a an enormous amount of devices that connect to the internet, that relay information to the internet. GE has a whole series of internet-connected devices. So why would you want your washing machine to be connected to the internet? It sounds really stupid until you realize that maybe it's, you know, you can get an advisory on your watch when it's ready to change the load. It's not a big deal. You know, maybe when you decide that you're going to go on vacation, you can at the airport set the— set your hot water heater down. Things like that. So lots of devices out there, bedroom motion and so on. Middleware is, is the chunk in between your customers' data and what customers do with the data. And for a long time, large industries like yours have tried to do end-to-end, tried to be all things to all people. And I don't think you need to do that. I would be giving you different advice If the results of the Accenture study came back and said, customers trust your advice, or it said— and/or it said— customers don't trust you when it comes to sharing their data. But it doesn't say that. It says they're happy for you to provide their energy consumption patterns to third parties, and they don't trust your advice, but they may trust others' advice. One of my favorite middleware providers is a site called IFTTT. Has anyone heard of it? IFTTT is short for If This Then That, and it's the way that you build these— they call them recipes— out. So if my smart meter has detected no energy use in 3 hours, if this, then that. And that, that can be anything. So let me give you a couple of examples. On the sense of a motion meter, right? So tho— that— the one that I showed up earlier. It sits in your home. It detects when people move back and forth. All right? So that's the device. Now, if we were to talk about this in terms of your data, which we'll get to in a second, this green bar here would be your customer's energy consumption patterns. Eh? It doesn't matter what the source of the data is. This could be number of times someone sneezes. It doesn't really matter. The middleware sits, as you might imagine, in the middle.. And you can ask this middleware any number of questions. So here we take the data from the motion meter. The motion meter says, oh, someone just moved in the kitchen. All right? So then you hook this data. You provide— you give this meter permission, or you give IFTTT permission to see this data. The consumer does this. They hook it up. Happens once. Authorized forever until they reverse it. Then you ask IFTTT these questions. You'd say, you know, if there's motion in my shed or if there's been no motion for 18 hours. I mean, imagine if you have an elderly parent and you have a motion detector in their home and there's been no motion in their home for 18 hours. Wouldn't you want an alert on your phone? Wouldn't you want something? You know, if there's more than 6 people detected when you're out of town in your home, probably your teen having a party. So that's the first stage. The first stage is getting the data. The second stage is, here are the questions I ask. And the third stage is IFTTT's genius. IFTTT, I should say. It has not just 4, hundreds and hundreds of possible channels, things you can do with it. So if it detects that there are more than 6 people in a spreadsheet, I want you to log that shit in a spreadsheet so I have proof. Then I want you to text me that my kid's having a party, and then I want you to post terrible things about my teenagers on Facebook. Right? If this, then that. And there's lots of sort of various things, you know. Here are just some starter— they call them recipes— starter recipes that they have. Here are the ones that I have active. So we— I read Reddit, which is a horrible website because I hate myself. But whenever our company's name is mentioned on Reddit, it's probably a problem. So I want to get an email. Anytime I take an Instagram photo, it automatically posts it to Pinterest, right? If this, then that. If you see an Instagram photo, then that. And that is send it to Pinterest. So that's why they call it middleware. It sits in the middle, it does a bunch of things. Every time my phone detects that I've left the office, Log it in a Google spreadsheet. Anytime an article that I'm watching or paying attention to on Wikipedia changes, then send me an email. If there's rain in the forecast, then put a task in my inbox. This one, we have Hue lights, which are light bulbs that change colors and they have Wi-Fi chips in them. So you can control the lights. So, you know, I mean, anytime you get an email from your spouse, all the lights in your office could flash red if you want them to. In our case, we have it so that these— the lights automatically turn off at 2 o'clock. Some people are writing that down. Oh my God. That's a great idea. Red light, spouse, email. So if— what is the if in this case? The if is the time. If it's 2 AM, then turn all the lights out. My wife and I are avid video gamers, and despite us both needing sleep, sometimes we will just be like trying to get that last level in Fallout. You know, just that last bloody quest. And at 2 in the morning, all of the lights in our condo shut off. Now, I could have programmed this to shut off the Xbox as well and I did that, but that causes rage. So here's how it would work in your world, right? You already have the data, right? You already have the energy consumption patterns. You've already got the usage. You've already got how much people use over time. You've got that stuff. You have to put that stuff in a database somewhere. Remember, your consumers are okay with you sharing that data to third parties like IFTTT, which is why I put that right up front, as long as you have their permission. So what would we have IFTTT ask? Any number of things, right? People could set up recipes that say when my usage is higher than yesterday, when a power failure detected, when I've consumed less power than my friends. Here's my point. For years, your industry has been trying desperately to do all of this stuff in various ways and building it and hiring app developers, and these apps cost millions of dollars, and websites and backends and legacy systems, all to try to provide increased service to your customers when you don't have to. This middleware already exists, and your customers are telling you not only do they want to do that, they trust you to do that. What they don't trust is your advice. That's fine. Let the backend, let these apps, let these things that are connected to IFTTT. And what happens? Any number of things, just like with the motion detector, right? When a power failure is detected, then I want you to post it on WordPress. When I've consumed less power than my friends, I want something up on Facebook. I want a little note saying, "Yay!" I'm having that competitive. Let the middleware do the work for you. Your investment would be phenomenally less. And this is something that many regulated industries like yourself wrestle with. Just last week I was in Nashville. I was keynoting the leadership conference for Royal LePage, which is the largest real estate company in the country, and they have a big problem. Well, they don't really have a problem, but they're under kind of a similar issue with data, which is that when you look at the MLS system, you can get a lot of information in Canada. Off of MLS. What you cannot get currently, because it's locked down by the Real Estate Trade Association, or any associations, is historic pricing. You can't find out what that property you're looking at has sold for in the previous sales. The only people with access to that are the realtors. And let me tell you, the realtors are happy to let that go. They really are. It's only the real— the organizations that represent the realtors that are desperately trying to hold on to this, and they're losing this fight. They're losing the fight over data. When you think about an organization like Zillow in the US, which is like MLS but a lot wider, they have an enormous amount of detail, right? You can get a list of, of what the sale prices has been for any number of services, and they provide this data in a backend format known as API. Which you may have heard of. It's a nerd way of saying we're just gonna— it's a, it's a basically a pipe out the back of the database where you can authorize certain providers to access the data in raw form and let them slice and dice it. On the other hand, what I get from my power company, from my energy provider, is very, very little. I'm in Vancouver, I'm not in Ontario, so I have BC Hydro. This is what I screenshotted just this morning. Of my energy usage. This is all I get. Now, it's a hell of a lot better than before the smart meters, I'll tell you, because before it was just, you know, once a month or whenever the meter guy came to read it. So it's fine, you know, I get some historical data and so on. But here's my point, right? I'm a nerd. I am like so many others in this— in the space of the Internet of Things, in the space of personal data aggregation, where 5 years from now everyone will not only demand access to their data, but we'll expect it. It's— we're already almost there. Even with that, I can only do two things with this data today. Actually, I can only do one thing with the data, and that is to export it by clicking that little button up in the top. And what do I get? I get a little Excel spreadsheet of numbers. The second I click the export button, that data is out of date. The only way for me to keep it up to date and pump it into a system that'll analyze and give me recommendations on energy consumption patterns, because Like people in the Accenture study, I don't trust BC Hydro to tell me how to consume my power. The only way is for me every day to completely re-export it over and over. That's why these APIs are going to be so important. Free the data. Let these third-party providers like IFTTT, right, take— because then I could have it, I could have it say, you know, the way— and the way it works at BC Hydro is various tiers, you know, Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3 pricing. So I could have it say whenever I enter Tier 2 pricing, or I'm about to enter Tier 2 pricing, I want all sorts of things to happen. I want my lights to go off. Now these are, you know, LED lights, so they won't consume enough electricity to actually push me into Tier 2, which would be ironic. But I want my lights to flash. I want an email. I want my wife to get a text alert. I want all these things to happen or nothing to happen. That's the future? All BC Hydro lets me do? This is it. This is the extent of the customization I can do with the data. Send me an email. That— those are my only two choices with my data. Spit it out into a spreadsheet, which will be out of date the second it hits my hard drive, or send me an email when I hit stage 2. What about send me an email when I'm 10% below I was yesterday? What about send me— what about send me a text message as soon as it notices that there's a power failure? Power failures are really important to our family. My wife uses a wheelchair. She's paraplegic. We have one elevator in our building. When the power goes out, it's a big deal. We live on the fifth floor. It happened once so far in the building that we're in. If you have ever seen a paraplegic try to get up five flights of stairs, it's kind of funny actually, I'll admit. But they, you know, they just haul themselves out of the chair and one step up, up, up. So why can't I get an alert? To my choosing. But again, like I said before, this is not stuff you have to provide. I'm not asking you to build apps that do all of these things. I'm not asking you to build websites. I'm not asking you to build your own version of this that has 47 million versions and support it and tie it into your backend. All I'm saying is free the data. Let the middleware providers have access to it. So what could I do? You know, I mean, where is my ability to post good news on Facebook automatically, or prompt me to do it? Where is my ability to put it in an Evernote note? Where is my ability to dim the living room lights? Where is my ability to get an iPhone notification? Because there's interest already. There are products already doing really well in this space. But the only problem with the products like this which is a fine product, there's nothing wrong with it, is that they, your information-hungry consumers, can only monitor what they plug into it. So if they wanted to monitor everything in their house, which remember, you have access to this data, it's already there, already aggregated across all the outlets. But today, to get this data, I would have to either buy 30 of these things and plug them all in, or I would buy one of these and 6 power adapter things, 6 power— what are they called? Expanders? Bars? 6 power bars and route extension cords all into one big hub. Is that safe? I don't know, I'm not an expert. Doesn't sound safe, and it wouldn't work. I'd blow the circuit, right? So there is— this demand is out there. These things are an enormously popular category, even with their limitations, right? Even with the fact that I have to buy 30 of these to get aggregated to the data, aggregate data that you already have. Even the fact that these people have these Nest devices and 9 out of 10 of them are slapping it on the wall and thinking they're saving money, and they're not because they're not programming them right or anything. You have a pool of data that's much wider, that's much broader, that your consumers are saying that they're happy happy to have you share with third parties as long as they have that permission, as long as they are the ones that authorize it. The middleware system is built out already for you. Another area that I think we'll begin to see in the coming years is the concept of gamification, right, which is competing, having people compete back and forth on energy savings and earn little things that you can put up on your Facebook page, or, you know, maybe in the future Snapchat will have a geofilter automatically via an API.. So that if the— in the event that you get 25% savings over the previous week, you get access to a Snapchat geofilter, which by the way you should look up because they are the next big thing in digital marketing as it turns out, sadly. So, you know, this kind of stuff works really well. There's a— this platform company did this really interesting contest in San Diego, mostly as a bit of a pilot project, pitting participants against each other in order to save the most energy. And here's the best part. Because the platform company had access to the energy company's data, all consumers had to do was sign up. They didn't have to submit logs. They didn't have to go in and enter the data, right? Because the stats were already there. They just said yes and the data did all the work. And you know the best part about it? Even people who didn't win the iPad, because that was one of the 3 iPads, 3 iPads were the prizes for this. Even people who didn't win were still happy. Here's one quote from one of them: "I didn't win it, but now that I think about it, we saved more than enough to just buy a damn iPad." This is phenomenal PR. Phenomenal PR for your industry. And this gamification has actual science behind it. You know, when people don't want to do something, one way to help them do it is to incentivize them through competition through gaming. A friend of mine, Michael Ferguson, runs this company called Eyogo. This is in the healthcare space, right? And so the way that they have is they have gamification systems for diabetes management. So, you know, I mean, if you're a 13-year-old, you don't want to prick your thumb twice a day. But if you have it in a contest where you're competing against other diabetics in your community, you know, that kind of stuff helps. For the last couple of years, we have seen countless industry articles talking about how, how you folks have to go out and build your own apps.. And I would suggest you don't have to. And if you have done this, you have probably learned that they are not cheap to build. And they are not cheap to maintain. Here's something else I know about your industry. I'm not, certainly not an expert. I know you're not rolling in it. It is not as good an industry as it was 20 years ago. Am I right? In terms of profitability? You know? It's not. I think people believe that it's the way it used to be. Where coal was everywhere and it was kind of easy to produce. Well, there's no coal, as I understand it, right? Nuclear power is not cheap. So there are some benefits to this two-way data exchange that the apps can offer. And for those of you who haven't done this, who haven't built out the apps and the websites, which is absolutely fine, because for those people your work is almost done, right? You don't need one. There are a lot of steps in making these things. Let third-party developers have access to the data. Let them slice and dice it. Let them make the recommendations on energy consumption. Free the data and let your consumers have access to this stuff. Because remember, according to that Accenture study, two-thirds of them say they're willing to have you let this data go as long as they control where it shows up. And look, even some of the oldest, stodgiest technology companies, or, or companies, regulated companies like real estate, like yourself, no offense, are getting there. Just not even 2 months ago, not even 2 months ago, I was keynoting a conference of developers, SAP, SAP, big huge programming company, and they were doing an annual kickoff of all of their developers. So we talked lots of nerd stuff and VIC-20s and things like that, and it was lots of fun for me. And one of the things that I challenged them is I said, you know, we, you should be solving human problems. If— and I use credit card companies as an example. You know, if credit card companies have access to the purchase history, to the purchase data, why don't I get an alert on my phone like this as soon as something's purchased on my credit card? Why do I have to wait 3 days for it to show up? Like, who— like, it's— we know it's electronic, you know. It's like, have you ever tried to pay your credit card company from another bank? And they're like, "It'll get there in 3 days." Like, are you mailing this shit? Like, what? Are you people writing out checks and faxing them? Like, what the hell? But this stuff is changing fast because 2 weeks after I gave this speech where I railed against it and I said we need a notification like this, 2 weeks later TD came out with one and it's great. And the app tracks my spending overall. It tells me whether I'm on track. It gives me a notification on my phone. And here's the iPhone one. This one is even better because it automatically guesses the category and it tells you whether or not your spending is above typical or below typical. I have had— and it happens instantly. Instantly. I know the deposit that this hotel put on my credit card. It was $300. I know it the second it happened because when they rang it through, about 3 seconds later my phone went, "This has been added to your card." I now know how much gas stations give a pre-bill for. Why is this good for me as a business owner? Because when weird stuff— you know, we've got lots of internet services we use. Weird stuff pops up. Wait, what the hell? So it's possible, right? Even the technology, even regulated companies like real estate companies, like credit card companies are getting into it. And you know, when we take a look at the large studies in your industry, this is even bigger than Accenture. This is— this is OPOWER, 12,000 energy consumers. They found 5 universal truths. I'm not going to read them all to you, but the thing that I want to point out is that 3 of the 5 directly involve consumers getting access to data. 3 of the 5 universal truths are all about their access to data. So don't worry about building it. Your customers trust you with their data, so open up the data. That's the first thing I want to talk about. The second is big data, and I know I don't have a lot of time, so I'm going to give you the simple explanation of what big data is. Big data is essentially an intermediary system of multi-platform data sources at the high RDL— that's important— measurement analysis using Hadoop and NoSQL in a real-time computing current application, deploying best-of-breed practices to facilitate salometric analytic discovery. See, simple words. And actually, that's all the time I have. Are there any questions? I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Here's a simpler example. This is me when I was about 8 years old. Shut up. I don't like— every year, hobo or ghost, I just kept going back and forth, back and forth. And I couldn't eat sugar as a kid. Back then I was what they called hyperactive. Today it would be called ADHD, and I'd be medicated and things like that. God knows I should be, probably, but I'm not. So I didn't eat sugar. That seemed to get most of it. So what my mom would do is I would go on Halloween and collect all the candy, and then I would trade it in. But before I would— I'd trade it in for like sugar-free stuff like carob. Carob, which by the way, is manufactured from chalk and wood stain, as far as I can tell from the taste. Wow, some of you took that seriously. Awesome. It's not. If there are any carob manufacturers secretly in the building about to sue me. So I would trade it in. But before I would do that, because again, I'm a nerd and always have been, I like to categorize things. So this is how I would have fun. I would group everything by color. I'd put them in little buckets and then I'd mix them up and then I'd group them by individual ingredient or primary ingredient, right? And then I'd mix them up again. And that would sadly provide hours of entertainment for me because I had no life or friends. That's all big data is. And we know big data from a number of words. You know, if you've been in the tech space, you know, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, we used to call this data warehousing. It's the same thing. Before that, we used to call it VLDB, very large databases. It's the same thing. It doesn't really matter what words you use. It's really the same thing. And it's really just about So having different buckets of data, usage patterns, your customer data, credit history, all sorts of things, as we'll get into, and asking the big database questions. This is the first big data machine, by the way. It's the IBM 77 Collator. Collator is the opposite of a sorter, of course. This thing was used to process Social Security. This thing was so big and so heavy, they had to reconstruct the floor of a building in Philadelphia to put this machine, these machines in, like to just structurally bear the weight of it. And it was slow, read 240 cards a minute. But back then that was amazing. But what I'm always interested in, because I'm again a nerd, is the patent applications and how it worked. And if you actually look at the patent application and the process, the workflow, This workflow of this machine from, you know, the 1600s or whenever the hell it was made is identical to big data. This is, this is almost identical to what the big data flow looks like today. I mean, think about all the buckets of data that you know about your customers. Some are easy to get into, some are not. Here are the easy buckets for you to acquire. Well, you know their account status. Right? You know whether they've paid or not. You know how frequently they pay, how good they are at paying. You know their energy consumption patterns. You know things like their postal code. All of this stuff is structured data, right? It's in a database. It's in a format that's easy to get out and so on. Then there's structured but less easy data. You know, like customer visits to your website. Now, why— it's still structured, but it's less easy because it's probably offsite. You know, your website is probably not hosted in your actual office. It's probably hosted by some big internet provider in the US. So it's still structured, but it's a little harder to get into. You know, whenever you send emails out or satisfaction surveys, those respond, you know, you might use a survey provider like PollDaddy or SurveyMonkey or any of these providers. It's still structured data, but it's somewhere else. And then the third group are things that are completely unstructured, but still important. Your customer service rep gets on the phone with someone and they have just an amazing idea. What does that CSR do with it? Write it on a Post-it note? That's fine. That's bucket— that's information collection, but there's no structure to it. You know, if people— if you're doing a community event, which is— we'll talk about with millennials, very important— you're doing a community event and they have— and they're using Snapchat and they're tagging their locations, how are you collecting that data? So we have all these buckets of data, right? We've got the stuff that's easy for you to get into because you've already got access to it— energy consumption patterns, customer accounts, and so on. We've got the stuff that's structured but harder to get at, 'cause it's probably offsite. We've got the completely random stuff. All big data is, is you take all of these buckets of data and you dump it into one big database. And then you ask the database questions. So what could we ask the database? How many of our customers who attend our community events are unhappy? You wouldn't be able to get this data before, but by putting them all in one big bucket, you can ask the database the questions. And where do we get this data? Well, we get the satisfaction data from your member satisfaction survey. We get the attendance data from Foursquare or Snapchat or Facebook and so on. Or what energy-saving programs are our happiest, highest net worth customers most likely to already be interested in? We get the happiness data from the surveys, interest level from time spent on specific web pages, and the net worth data from their accounts. If you're not using this kind of real-time data, it's, it's like operating your business by looking through the rearview mirror. 'Cause all you're doing is looking at stuff that's happened before. However, that is how a lot of organizations still do it. 1 out of 3 business leaders— this is an IBM study— 1 out of 3 business leaders say they make decisions without trusting the data. And not just occasionally. These were people who responded with the word frequently. If your CIO came and confessed this to you, I frequently make business decisions without a trust in the data, You would fire them. Half of them say they don't have the access to information they need to do their job. And you can ask these databases any number of questions, right? Once you kind of pull them all in together, once you get those data— and trust me, 5 years from now, by the time 2020 hits, everyone will be in this space. But you should be starting soon. Get your CIO, ask him. Just in fact, it'll blow his mind if you actually use the word Hadoop. Because Hadoop is the leading big data provider. If you just walk up casually and say, "How we doing on Hadoop?" Your CEO, CIO will have one of two reactions. Either, "I have no idea what Hadoop is, so fire him or her." Or, "How the hell do you know about Hadoop?" And they'll probably get excited. But think about all these things that you could be finding out. How many times do we need to ask a customer about switching to e-statements before they agree? Are we accurately detecting and identifying defective meters or meter theft? All of this stuff. All of this stuff. And once again on the energy side, we see providing usage to data— to customers rather— is the top reason that energy companies are using big data. But also notice that there's significant marketing opportunity in here. 2 of 5 companies are using it to identify customers who are likely to participate in new energy savings programs. This is a query. This is a single-line query of a big data database. Phenomenal. You will, I guarantee it, be using big data because you have to. Because your competitors, other groups, people you do business with are no longer looking in the rearview mirror. They're actively seeking out stuff right away. So that's the Internet of Things. I think the opportunity with middleware That's big data. Let's talk about those goddamn millennials, shall we? I hate to say it that way. We've just hired two interns at my agency. But millennials have a bad rap. They really do. New York Magazine wrote this, and you probably heard about the whole entitled, you know, they love themselves. New York Magazine wrote this, we are now in the me decade, dwelling upon me and every delicious nuance of my conduct and personality. Have you heard this about the Millennials? Yes. New York Magazine wrote this in 1976. Now it's just their turn. Here's the point: every decade, every generation has been the me decade. I was born in 1970. 46. I'll save you the math. I was born in 1970, so I came up in the Gen Xers, slackers. We were all entitled. We were exactly the same as this generation is being called. And if you want a good drinking game, by the way, just read any article about Gen Ys, or now we call them Millennials, and look for the word entitled and take a drink. You will be drunk in half an hour. Or Or, oh wow, or Papa Sudafed. Either way, Millennials are not self-absorbed, and not any more than anyone else. Millennials are not what you hear them to be. They post selfies on Snapchat to connect, not to show off. They use Instagram to communicate, not to show off. So don't fall for all the myths that you hear about them. Myths like Millennials— if you want to market to Millennials "Millennials, you need to use bright colors." Like, who thinks of this shit? Seriously, you know? They can't take care of themselves, they have to look after each other. And how do millennials react to this? They do not write letters to the editor. They go on YouTube. First step towards being able to reach your younger demographic is to appeal to their senses. Use bright neon colors because like many insects such as moths or flies, millennials are attracted to light. That is because their senses differ from yours and not at all because the advertising industry is flooded with lies and hopelessness. Which I love. You know, some are great at technology. Some are not. Some want to start startup companies. Most do not. Some are self-absorbed. Most are not. So don't fall for the myths. We're also in this weird space where we're working with 4 different generations for the first time, really. And this has happened about, started about 6 years ago, 5 or 6 years ago. We start with the old people. My apologies. The traditionalists. Right? Traditionalists love rules. Nothing would please a traditionalist more when you hire this person on the first day of their job and you give them a big policy book. Right? A big huge manual of policies. Nothing will please these people more. This is the generation that worked with punch cards, for instance, you know. Then there are the Boomers. How many of you consider yourself Boomers? Just a quick show of hands. All right. Good. You know, when Boomers were coming out of colleges, they thought that by this time in their life, they would be completely retired. It didn't happen that way. And not just because of the financial crunch, by the way, but just we're living longer. Women live 4 years longer than they did in 1976. We're just living longer. It's easier. And this is also the generation— oh God, I shouldn't have asked you to put up your hands. But this is also the generation who has home landline phones, which is adorable. Do you all still have landlines? What's wrong with you people? My mom has a landline. Actually, my mom has a landline so she can pay for privacy, because I guess you can pay Telus like $2 to keep you out of the phone book? And I'm like, Mom, first of all, there hasn't been a phone book in years, okay? I mean, I'm sure it still exists, but no one uses it. But she's all about privacy, right? And I'm like, you know, I said, Mom, if you like— forget about privacy, dude. I can get, I can get a satellite photo of your house from Google in like 10 seconds. Privacy is gone. And then, and she's got one of those old phones for— not, I shouldn't say old phone, one of those phones that's anchored to the wall with a big long cord. You know one of those, right? The snakes are— she's still got that one. I think it's still the phone that I grew up with. I'm like, why? She's like, well, in case there's an earthquake. I'm like, it's attached to the wall, Mom. If there's an earthquake, the wall's going to collapse. Your phone— anyway. Oh, sorry. I blasted past that a little bit when I was making fun of the boomers. So interesting about this generation, which we'll come back to when we talk about millennials, this is a generation that likes to work with each other. That's different than Gen X. Gen X is a loner, which we'll get into in a moment. But this generation values teamwork. They tend to be optimistic. They tend to be fairly ambitious and so on. Then we get to my generation, Gen X. How many of you are Gen Xers? Okay, some of you are pushing that a little, but I'm not here to judge. You self-identify however you want. I'm just saying, some of you are pushing that. I have the ages right there. This generation is very different than the Boomers in their work style. Very different. They're loners, right? This is a generation that in school did things by themselves. They were handed a report, they were handed an assignment, they went away, they did it by themselves, they came back and presented it by themselves. That's how they were raised in university and colleges and schools and so on. They do tend to work really well. They tend to be risk takers and so on. But they are really good when they're working alone. Then we get Gen Y, who is the opposite. You know, they think about the way that they were taught in school, and it was all team-based. It was all team-based. It was all based on, you know, getting a group together. And we talk about hiring in a moment. We'll talk about how important that is to understand. Not all are technology savvy, right, as I said before. And one of the interesting things that I think when you kind of study this stuff is that the use of technology is very different between generations and the reaction to technology, right? The traditionalists wanna know if you have approval to use the technology. The millennials will just take advantage of the technology. They don't ask permission first to use it. I have a great example that happened to me. Like my first year at CBC, we have this— does anyone here use GroupWise? Yeah, couple people. So GroupWise is an email big system that was invented in 1622 and has not been updated since. Am I right? Like, it's a terrible system. And one of the things that GroupWise— and it's a competitor to Outlook and a competitor to Google and so on— but one of the interesting things about it is it, like all those systems, has this like groups system, right, where you can create a group of your employees and they can all communicate together in a little folder just like an Outlook folder. Well, I thought, because I am of the generation that just uses technology without asking for permission, without checking with the manager. If it's there, I'm just gonna use it. So I created this thing in GroupWise called the BC Buy and Sell. And my idea was that everyone in BC who worked at the CBC, both of them, we would be able to, we'd all be able to get into a group and buy, you know, if you have a bike you wanna sell, isn't it better to sell it to someone who you work with? Work with than just trust some idiot on Craigslist, right? So that was my idea. BC Buy and Sell. So I created it. Now one of the things that GroupWise does when you create a shared folder is it sends an email to everyone who potentially has access to that. And the email is worded horribly. You can't change the text of it. You don't even know it's sending it. It doesn't tell you it's about to do it. It's just as soon as you create it and invite people, they get this very generic message, and the message says something like, "Tod Maffin has accessed your email folders and has added BC Buy and Sell." Like, it looks like it was written and then translated from a foreign language. You know, like, it's just horrible. So I had all of these people, old— especially, you know, baby boomers and traditionalists who didn't quite understand, didn't understand why I had permission to do this in the first place. Like, "How are you in my email?" How did you get in my email? And they started getting— I mean, IT just started getting flooded. And I felt so bad for IT. IT had so many phone calls about this that I went and bought— you can go to Subway and buy a, like, a 6-foot, 10-foot sandwich. Seriously, it takes them a couple of days or a day or so. So I bought them like this enormous sandwich just as an apology. And they said, can you just delete the folder? And I'm like, yeah, no problem. So I deleted the folder. Guess what GroupWise does when you delete a shared folder? Come on, guess. It sends an email, I know, right? Oh, you follow patterns, that's good. You know what they said? Oh, an engineer, excellent. Perfect. Right, so it sends another email. Now this one's even worse. This one says, "Tod Maffin has deleted email folders in your account." And what was interesting to me was the usage by demographic. People under 30 thought it was great and just started using it. People from 31 to 45 were like, "How did you get in my email folder?" They weren't really clear about it, they were afraid of using it. People over 50 just wanted to know if I'd had permission from my manager to touch the technology. Honestly, no joke, that's the way it broke down. But see, it didn't even occur to me that I needed to ask permission to use technology. And millennials are like that as well. Millennials also require immediate feedback. This is how they were raised in universities. And they're good at feedback too. They want to be part of the decision at a top level. That doesn't mean bring them into the board of directors meeting on insolvency or acquisition talks, right? But it does mean get their feedback. They really, they will be offended if the organization doesn't bring them into levels of decision-making or at least gives them input of levels. That previously generations or people of that age were not— didn't have access to. The feedback is an important one as well. They're good at immediate feedback. I used to, you know, my very first job in radio was for a little radio network called KBS in the Kootenays. It was like WKRP. And our boss didn't give us any feedback except for once a year, the annual review meeting. He wouldn't tell us how we were doing all year long. But unbeknownst to us, he would— every time we did something wrong, He would write it down on this thing that we all called the shit list. He would write it down, and then you'd be like, you come to your annual report, your annual meeting, you know, expecting a raise, and he would just like just roll through everything you did wrong. And at the end, you're like, just take half my salary, I'm sorry, I'll just work from the shed in the van in the back, you know. It won't work that way anymore. Annual reviews are not even— they're not even really understood by this generation. They expect immediate feedback. My friend Kelly is a charge nurse at Vancouver General Hospital. She had this student nurse working with her for a while, and they were going on rounds. The student nurse had like read the computer chart wrong or something, and so Kelly, who is my age, a little bit younger, started in on her and said, "No, no, you're supposed to first pull the data here." And this student nurse interrupted her mid-sentence and said, I said, "You're doing this all wrong." Kelly said, "What?" She's like, "Feedback?" "You're doing it all wrong. See, first you're supposed to say something nice." Have you been to leadership school? Right? "Then you're supposed to give me the constructive feedback. Then you're supposed to wrap it up nice again." So Kelly said, "Okay, nice shoes. Now listen." Which I thought was the best answer. Which I thought was the best answer everywhere. A lot of people are confused as to where the conflict in these four generations lies in the workplace. And what most people believe the conflict tends to be is between the millennials and the baby boomers because of the parent-child relationships and so on. In fact, when you actually look at the data and in the workplace, you find that it is much more likely to go between these two generations because primarily of their completely different working styles. Gen Xers want to work alone. Millennials want to work in teams. I am being very broad. I'm not a big believer in big broad generalizations, but that is one that holds to a point. And one of the things, if you're going— if you're involved in recruiting them, that you have to understand is that these people's primary motivation in the job that they have is they want to change the world. They're very environmentally focused. They're very community focused and so on. You know, work values are really important to them. And when we look at the values in sort of previous decades, you know, we realize that they haven't always been aligned. Back in the '70s, the values was just stability. I mean, you look at the insurance rates back in the '70s, and they were just monstrously unaffordable. So people wanted a good job, stability. Right? You work there for 30 years, you get the gold watch. And then in the '80s, the primary work ethic in the '80s was money, you know. And guess what they called it? Remember what they called it back then? The Me Decade. Just like every decade before it. And the way that I like to kind of take a look at these things is by looking at the, by looking at the popular culture, right? That's a good indicator as to the primary values of a decade. No, true. It's true, right? But you look at the main popular culture and it was about celebrating, you know, money and time off and gluttony and, you know, all sorts of things. And that was one of them. And then in the '90s came balance, and that was the primary ethic. And, you know, we missed the ball as employers. We missed the ball back in, back in the late 1990s. I was an employer. I started a dot-com company called MindfulEye. We took it public in 18 months. We developed an artificial intelligence software that could rank the subjective— subjectively rank the mood of public opinion on the internet. It was phenomenal technology. And we had, you know, several dozen people working for us, 30, 35 people or so. And I thought because they wanted balance, they can, you know, work-life balance. So here's how— what my solution to balance was as an employer. Because we had this photocopy nook. We didn't have a photocopy in it because we were a tech company. So, I put a door on it. We painted the room black. I got one of— you know those glow-in-the-dark stickers, those moons and stars? I put them all over. I went on eBay. I got some beanbag chairs. I got a table. I got a bong— or a decorative glass structure. And see, I thought I was providing balance, but I wasn't. I was doing the same thing that video game companies do. That Google does, that all the tech companies do, which is when you— and they have great programs, right? They have great things like, you know, we'll wash your car while it's in the lot, we'll do this, we'll do that, you know, we'll feed you. And all of those things actually send the wrong message because when you think about what they say, they actually say, yeah, for sure, you know, enjoy your time here, but whatever you do, don't leave the office. Today, Millennials have taught us that what they're looking for is meaning. What we're all looking for is meaning. You know, I'm sorry to spoil it, but a big one, you know, The Secret, which basically— sorry for the spoiler— if you think good things, good things will happen to you. Kind of a silly concept, but this is the stuff that resonates. You think about the, again, the pop culture in the movies, you know, that in the last 10 years that have been so popular— fantasy, religion, faith, history, and art all in one. You know, these are messages that resonate. I have no explanation for Shrek. Study of 4,700 Canadians recently asked, what's the most important thing you look for when you're looking for a job or when you're deciding who to go with as an employer? Fulfilling work, number one. This barely ranked 15, 20 years ago. In Quebec, when they did this study, that number was 70%. So you as an organization have to articulate meaning. What do you actually do that helps them in their work, in their day-to-day work, you know? And one thing that— another regulated industry that did really well with this is Change Everything. This is actually Vancity, which is the largest English-language credit union in the country. It's based in Vancouver. And they did this great website where people would put ideas of how they wanted to change their community for the better. Community could mean anything, you know. Millennials reacted phenomenally to this, and they posted little bits of information, little things like this, you know, just— and they would tag it. And if you'll notice, a lot of the stuff there was around transportation, biking, and so on. And the idea, the original idea came from this young woman who was studying at Simon Fraser University who'd just been back from Europe, and she noticed that the city had bought all of these bicycles, like 100 bikes, and they just let them loose in the city. And you— if you— basically, if you needed a bike, you just stole one with the city's permission. You'd take it and you'd ride it to wherever you wanted, you could drop it off. And the beauty of a system like that is it all just organically worked. The bikes were in the position they needed to be in at the time because that's the way the city used it, you know. The bikes all migrated from the residential area to the university area mid-morning because that's what— we would screw this up if we tried implementing this, wouldn't we? As Canadians, we would have— we'd have like task forces and a fleet of vans, 3 in the morning, would be pick them up and reallocate bikes. It just worked phenomenally well. So VanCity did this. They actually took that, right? They took the message they heard about changing the community and they did something. They bought 60 bicycles. This program ran for 2.5 years. They recovered 48 bikes, which is a miracle in Vancouver, frankly. So they've got to have something to believe in, right? So obviously you provide energy. But what do you really stand for? How is the energy you're providing changing lives? How is it changing, how is it helping communities? These are the messages that your potential employees, millennials, as they're trying to figure out whether they want to work for you, these are the things that they want to hear about. Hire in packs is also really important because again, they're used to that, right? In teams. They're used to that with studying together. The corollary with the hiring in packs is that people tend to leave in packs as well. And just a shout out as well, Muri has this really great system, and part of the— it's called Management Pro. It's on the HR side of things. Highly encourage you look at it. And part of the reason I like it is that it really takes into account stuff that a lot of the HR software doesn't, which is things like motivational, organizational fits. Self-management potential. The softer things that are really important are quite critical. And also let them tell the story. Let them— give them the tools to tell your story. If you are doing phenomenal things for your community, unleash these people on social media. They're better at it than you will ever be. This was, by the way, the same message I had for the Realtors who are so proud about, I will post it on Facebook. You go with me and you want to sell your house with me, I'll— I have an Instagram account. Okay, good for you, Charlie, but like, you know, take a look at the people who are buying the homes. Take a look at your customers who are 22, 23 years old. They are better at it than you will ever be. Some of the best social media I've seen from Realtors has nothing to do with the photo itself. All they do is they get a sign that people can hold up in the photographs, and this— they will— their customers will Instagram, Snapchat the hell out of this. So millennials, right, give them the tools to tell others. Give them the tools to share the story of what you're doing in your community. It'll do really well. So just to sum up, we talked about 3 things. First, this Internet of Things, which is really popular, of course. Take a look at your data, free it. Your customers trust you already with that data. They trust you to share it with third parties in levels that other organizations would kill for. There's enormous opportunity in big data. Go to your CIO, drop the word Hadoop, see what their reaction is. Right? Very important. Big data is going to be phenomenally important. And you have to, when it comes to the millennials in your workforce, especially in the next 5 years, you have to articulate how you're helping. This will assist you. Not, I should say, not just in hiring, right? But millennials are your customers as well. Right? This will help enormously. Not just for that generation. But for others as well. And with that, I want to thank you so much for having me in this beautiful place. I hope your conference is a huge success. Thank you.