I opened my Amazon Prime account and was faced with a commercial about Amazon Echo, a voice controlled device that sits at the corner of your room and responds to the name “Alexa.”
READ: Amazon Echo is the New Apple Newton
You can ask Alexa questions about news, weather, spellings of words, or command her to play music, tell a joke, or build your shopping list. Amazon says, “Echo’s brain is in the cloud, running on Amazon Web Services, so it continually learns and adds more functionality over time.”
This is a new addition to “digital” assistants like iPhone’s “Siri,” Android’s “Andy,” and IBM’s “Watson.”
The prophecy of James Burke, the creator and narrator of the infamous series “Connections” seems to have become a reality. In the first episode (named Feedback) of the 1997 sequel to the series “Connections” he talks exactly about this concept. He calls it “Electronic Agent – the electronic version of you that lives in the system and works for you night and day, does anything you want sometimes even before you know you wanted.”
The “Electronic Agent” coordinates his meetings, arranges his calendar, reminds him of his upcoming anniversary, suggests gifts that his wife might like, informs him that she completed the company tax returns, and reminds the 
electronic agents of other participants about his morning call. Life with an “electronic agent” seems so much easier. I want it!
Mr. Burke goes on to say that there is one thing that seems scary to some of us. That is for the electronic agent to learn to be another you, she needs to know you intimately, including every detail of your life and business. She needs to have access to your records, your spending habits, know your friends and nearest and dearest to you. The “Electronic Agent” collects data on all your activities on the network, analyzes and updates your profile every moment. It does that by applying the most fundamental element of learning, feedback.
Does it sound familiar? When we participate in social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, we are sharing our family, friends and professional networks and when we share, comment and like we are sharing our interests.
When we shop online we are sharing our purchasing habits. Many of these systems and associated Apps are now connecting to each other and sharing data about us. Our “electronic version” is out there in the cloud taking shape.
Yes, we are concerned about our privacy and cyber security, but we are willing to take those risks for the sake of better connectivity and convenience.
Now, our work experience is a different story. In fact, for many of us, knowledge workers, engineers, and product developers, our work systems feel like they are stuck in the 20th century. One wonders why the corporate world is lagging so much behind our personal lives. It surely be nice to have “smart” technology to help us manage complexity, make better decisions, accelerate innovation and product development, and deliver consistent quality. I sense that there are three major reasons:
- Cost: Technology requires investment, and the decision makers demand “value” of technology be quantified to justify its cost. Such quantification requires a narrative that connects the knowledge workers/engineers productivity to business outcomes. Typically this is hard, and becomes harder if we already sold decision makers on the previous versions of technology and, in their mind, did not deliver the promised value.
- Feedback, or lack thereof: For the proprietary company system to get smart, it needs lots of “feedback.” While feedback at “scale” is naturally happening at internet, it is not sufficiently happening at work, even in large companies. The databases are kept in silos. Many of the systems and tools do not exchange data and cannot be searched across. Often knowledge is shared in email which is another silo. If there was an internal social platform, it is typically not connected to the formal product development or PLM systems and searched across. Moreover, active participation in digital systems through searching, sharing, commenting and liking are typically done by only handful people.
- Culture or mindset: Reducing barriers to increasing “feedback” requires change, and change is difficult. Making change happen requires an organized and intentional approach. It requires top management to champion the change, provide resources and participate by role modeling the new behaviors. It requires that new processes and incentives be implemented to drive the organization to adopt the desired behaviors. Also, it requires patience and persistence to get to the desired results. In our fast paced world, who has patience?
I would love to hear your thoughts. Join the dialog by commenting below, or contact me personally at s.polat@cimdata.com.
Consider also joining a workshop I will lead at CoDev 2015, Feb. 9 -11 in Scottsdale, Arizona
