AboutPhilip Lafeber Expertise I have been specialising in knowledge analysis and modelling. I have an interest in the way models of programs, architectures, business processes and the like are properly made and analysed. What`s meant by `properly` depends on the goal you`re trying to achieve. The analysis of this goal and the way it can best be realised is something you might want to ask me about.
Experience
Past/Present clients University of Amsterdam, Bolesian, Canon europa, Solveware, NetlinQ
Question In what ways do you think technological advancements will assist in the management and support of the ever increasing complexity of data as it pertains to business operations?
You have stated it is easier to build a robot than to figure out how it thinks/should think - I'm paraphrasing. Why do you think this is the case?
Answer Hello,
My apologies for replying so late. I have been moving house this weekend and have had no computer available at home.
Data as it pertains to business operations is called business intelligence. It drives strategic decisions if an organisation knows what's good for it. But it has to know what questions to ask, what it needs to know.
Data itself can be stored in heaps and piles that no one in their right mind would touch. The amounts of data that an organisation can acquire is practically limitless. Asking the right questions to the data centre should then give a meaningful answer to drive the strategic decision making.
This means that there are two parts to the 'management and support' you are referring to:
* Managing the data
* Accessing the data
Managing means gathering and searching. Making the data that you store accessible is essential.
Accessing the data is the difficult part; like I said it's about asking the right questions.
I think that user interfaces for databases, knowledge bases and the like will be more and more supportive so that decision makers or their support will be able to discover the data that they need. With the vast amount of data available, there is a need for filtering, analysis, statistical approaches, and also representation that will help people find what they are looking for. An interesting area is multi dimensional representation. Traditional techonological tools present everything in 2 dimensions only, for istance on computer screens. They may present it as 3D graphs, but it is still 2D in origin. But hologrammatic representations, or alternative approaches with size, colour and sound might bring insight in the data. That is certainly the future for analysts trying to reach new levels in data processing.
Asking the right questions is a completely different field of expertise; it requires understanding of the business goals and the market situation. I think the area of Artificial Intelligence, particularly knowledge management, will bring part of this understanding first to the organisation itself (my experience tells me that contemporary organisations are in their adolescent stage in terms of self awareness when compared with the ideal; organisations that know what they are doing, why, and how to reason about themselves) and then to the tools that support them in decision making.
It is reasonable to assume, though difficult to view from where we are, that technology will greatly support decision makers by analysing data themselves and provide alternatives to the decision makers without intervention from analysts and double checking with the underlying data model. Just as in medicine, computers are very much able to handle a lot of information and support the decision making process. Not so far that computers decide what should happen next, as in far-fetched science fiction doom scenarios, but they can do everything up to presenting the pros and cons and reasoning behind all possible options when strategic choices have to be made.
Your other question is more of a philosophical nature. It is about understanding the world that we live in and what we can do with it. We know we can do a lot, but do we know what it means? If we don't even know the meaning of life, why do we live it?
We know we want to try and make intelligent autonomous agents, for instance like the robots in Isaac Asimov's "I, Robot" (hot topic!). One would say that scientists first need to find out how they work before they can build it. But this is not the case.
Consider human beings. The general consensus is that they are intelligent. So it would be a challenge to create one ourselves, because we would then prove we could create an intelligent being.
So, hypothetically, a group of physicists could, given the right tools, map the building blocks down to the molecule of a human being and build one, bit by bit. Again, hypothetically, they would jumpstart this being and our goal is reached. Nice effort, but after this feat we still know nothing more of what makes a human being tick. What makes it intelligent? What makes it different from a plant or a rock? We still wouldn't know but we would have created one.
The same could happen with robots. And Isaac Asimov actually predicts this. In his stories, the human race has not fathomed the ins and outs of positronic brains, but they can fabricate them and make them work. And why has it come to this? Simple; there is an added value for robots (labour and all that), but less for the understanding. Who cares what makes them work if at least they do their work! :)
Consider the same for a marketing situation; who cares why my clients buy my products, as long as they do. Of course, afterwards I'd like to know why, because it will help me retain or expand my market share.
Hope this helps, and I'd be happy to hear your thougts on this,
Philip.
