Big Data

My Car, the Weather, and the Internet of Things

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CMS Wire just published an article of mine on the Internet of Things (IOT) and how the IOT could be used to serve business. I want to take a moment to share a section that I axed out of my article. It didn’t fit the article but I think helps show the benefit of the IOT.

I recently got the new Mazda 6. It has all the gadgets. I can listen to Pandora, connect my phone and iPod, and use it to find my way around town in the remote chance that I get lost. It even has a thermometer on it to tell me the temperature outside.

With all of that technology, it shouldn’t take much for my car to be contributor to the IOT.

It would be pretty cool for the car companies to sell to the Weather Service all of this data. Imagine, fleets of cars providing instant temperature readings to gauge current weather conditions. Add in the windshield wiper and headlight data, even more detailed analysis could be performed.

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2013: Waiting for the Culmination of Everything

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New Picture (2)In 2013, one trend that I had been watching for years finally culminated in the next stage. I got a position with Alfresco that will allow me to make a difference in the future of the industry. While it took longer than I thought it would, the future arrived.

In looking at my Predictions for 2013, I didn’t do well…at all. If it wasn’t for a slam-dunk prediction, I would have failed to even be half right.

Let’s see how poorly I did.

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The Rise of Big Content

This post arises from several thought streams that I’ve had over the last several months that coalesced the last week when thinking about the purpose of Big Data and how the Content industry has had a Big Data problem for years.

  • Big Data is a great term, but it doesn’t resonate when talking about pulling insight from Content.
  • Enterprise Content Management (ECM) has never caught-on beyond the industry that created the term.
  • Even without the need for Analytics, content is still growing exponentially and the number of formats isn’t getting any smaller.

So like every industry wonk wanting to make a name for themselves, I am going to try and push a new term out into the marketplace.

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Our Legacy Big Data Problem

imageA few days ago, I discussed how Big Data, as a technology, has relevance as a means to gain Insight. This is all fine and good, but is it a technology that we need in the Content Management space? Moore’s law seems to be keeping our data in good shape.

Except…

…inside every piece of content is information. It isn’t unstructured, it just isn’t in a structure readily interpreted by machines. That structure is what provides context and that context is the key to extracting insight.

Now extend that out to Petabytes. That is Big Data.

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Hyped Tech Lives Only to Solve Real Issues

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One of the joys of working for AIIM is attending a wide variety of events. In fact, one of the unexpected joys is is the board meeting.408234_10151195570639391_1800285567_n The reason is it brings a lot of smart people in one room to talk about the Information industry’s direction. Every single person there genuinely cares about the future of the industry.

As a result, we have a lot of good discussions on the drivers moving the industry forward. Last year, prior to my joining AIIM, it was observed that Big Data, Social, Cloud, and Mobile were emerging and important issues that Information Professionals are having to start addressing.

This year, as we reviewed the list to see if the items were still relevant, we turned these concepts on their head.

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What Being a Certified Information Professional Says

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Certifiied Information Professional (CIP) logoIt’s been almost six months since I took and passed the CIP exam, becoming a Certified Information Professional. At that time I said I thought it was a valid measure of someone’s worth as an Information Professional. Since then, everyone I’ve talked to that has taken the exam has concurred.

If it is a valid measure, then those who have become a CIP are the kind of person you want in a senior role on any Information-centric project. Right? Is that a true statement?

What about a Big Data project?

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You Can’t Sell a Platform to Users

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imageBeen working on building a new, solid, backbone for AIIM’s information since I joined as CIO. We finally reached the stage for detailed demos last week. While extremely time consuming, it was also extremely educational.

One of the things I hadn’t expected to be so obvious is the right and wrong way to demonstrate a solution built upon a platform. In fact, the dichotomy was so severe that almost every person not giving the demo commented upon it.

I thought I would share the two approaches that we witnessed and then relate it back to the Content Management industry of the last 10+ years. Before I get into that, I’ll provide some context in the form of the project background.

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The CIO’s Role in the World of Consumer IT

Hardly a week goes by when I don’t come across an article saying how the role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) is going to be diminished or that the IT budget is going to move to other departments.

imageThis just seems nuts. In a world where information is growing exponentially, the expert in helping an organization get value from information is going to be marginalized? As I see it, that is dead wrong.

The CIO of the future is going to have to be agile, knowledgeable, approachable, and working in step with every aspect of the business. From experience I can tell you that each business unit isn’t going to wait for their turn. This means that CIOs are going to actually have quality deputies to help out. This implies growth, not the opposite.

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Getting to the Big Data Problem

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The amount of data in your organization is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean you might think that it take a long time to read your inbox but that’s just peanuts to how much your organization touches in a single day.

– Mangling of quote by Douglas Adams in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

The amount of data in your organization is massive. Anyone who has been in the Content Management industry for more than a few years can tell you that much. All those content repositories are nothing more than messy, poorly structured, data warehouses.

The part that I didn’t realize until watching Clay Shirky’s keynote at AIIM 2012 was that the amount of data that many organizations is amassing isn’t always enough. Many organizations just are dealing with what I will now shockingly classify as “traditional” Big Data issue. They don’t have the volume, variability, variety, or velocity of data. (Your actual “V”s may vary)

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Debating the Future of Content Management at AIIM 2012

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imageBack before either Cheryl McKinnon or I were considering bringing our skills to AIIM, we submitted a proposal to this year’s AIIM Conference to moderate a panel on the Future of Content Management. For this discussion, we decided to bring representatives from the traditional, open source, and cloud-based Content Management worlds onto the same stage.

As a result, we have the following on the stage:

Pretty exciting group there. I have laid out some rules that we’ll be enforcing in the debate.

  1. No Selling: This is vendor solution approach versus vendor solution approach. Each speaker represents their entire Content Management vendor area, not just their own companies.
  2. Speak Ill of No Vendor: To be honest, if they want to say something negative about themselves, they can. If they want to say something bad about one of the other vendor groupings, that works as long as it is generic.
  3. No Speeches: Hoping for a discussion, not a few rehearsed viewpoints.
  4. No Selling: Or did I mention that already?

To warm things up, I asked them some questions to set the stage for next week. In addition, if you have any questions you’d like to submit to be put to the panel, add them to the comments below. I will be writing a follow-up afterwards to capture the debate.

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