Digitalization

I attended into a one day seminar in Finlandia talo that was organized by Cisco called "Suomi ja digitalisaatio – nyt visioinnista toteutukseen" (Cisco Connect 2015). The topics of the presentations were closely related to ideas about conrete and virtual businesses (Virtual and concrete) and ideas presented by several speakers in (Nexterday and Slush).

Several good points in different presentation. Some ideas that I picked up:

• IT and business are coming together: you should not have separate IT strategies and business strategies. The modern IT means providing platforms and tools for business to become more effective (How big is big data)
• Datacenter business have interesting potential as part of the energy business. Sonera is building large scale datacenter into Helsinki. The datacenter is planned to have 15 000 m3 of space, can contain 5000 racks and have electrical power of 24 MW. The datacenter can sell excess heat for city district heating network.
• Disruptive ideas. Digitalization makes possible to reach customers in any business bypassing traditional ways customers interact with the business (Virtual and concrete). Disrupt or be disrupted said some presenter meaning traditional business needs to restructure itself to be competitive from customers perspective. Some presentors argued that any organization should have a unified way to interact with the customers so they feel the service to be on the same level desptite which communication means are used. These are the same things that were outlined by Mr Dixon and Mr Nordström (Nexterday and Slush).
• One guest argued that this will also happen to healthcare as any part of the healthcare organization needs to be able to reach the population directly to be able to survive. Very interesting ideas as Finland is about to conduct a healthcare reform in the upcoming years.

More information:

• In Finnish
• The Cisco Connect 2015: "Suomi ja digitalisaatio – nyt visioinnista toteutukseen" (Cisco Connect 2015)
• Valtiovarainministeriö: Digitalisaatio (Linkki)

Nexterday and Slush

I visited two consecutive events at Helsinki i.e. Nexterday north and Slush. Some random thoughts:

• Patric Dixon has published a book called the Future of almost Everything. Patric focused on the small data and customer angle: how business faces the customer and what kind of emotions are raised are the most important parts. Customers are getting impatient and only willing to wait for less than five seconds for web pages to load. This impatience is transferred to other business segments. You should be aware of the institutional blindness and from time to time act as a customer trying to purchase your own companies products.
• Risto Siilasmaa discussed open information sharing and how discussion builds trust. Risto said they did not have to vote for any decisions. I think what Risto is referring to is great minds think alike: when you get enough information you will probably end up into the same conclusion.
• Kjell Nordström is the author of Funky Business. He discussed how knowledge is opening up and what that does to institutions and individuals. Kjell discussed temporary monopolies that pop up and are destroyed after they become a necessity to do business. Kjell also outlined the karaoke nature of business and literature: most of the true inventions have already been said.
• Mårten Mickos dicussed leadership and has a blog called the School of Herring. One of the points touched me was that you should think about on what grounds you build your organization: attitude can be more important than the skills. Information is openly out there and you can learn, but it is harder to fix the attitudes.

It is very important how you approach and interact with the audience. It is nice to listen when a person puts his or her character on the line. I guess most of the things have already been said by great thinkers. Today it is more about interaction and communication.

Virtual and concrete

Amazon and Google are doing very concrete things: purchasing land, purchasing power company shares, constructing datacenters and manufacturing hardware. Amazon AWS which is the worlds largest cloud platform has currently revenue of 8 billion. It probably is also becoming one of worlds largest power consumers.

On the same time worlds largest taxi company Uber owns no taxis and worlds largest accommodation company AirBnb owns no properties. The business is a virtual service directly to the end customer.

We have entered an age where businesses and services are be virtualized. The capacity is available on devices in everyones pocket and background power comes from the cloud platform. You do not need anything concrete but the idea and programming to start the competition globally.

Business applications will have global competition in a new way. Applications are services that directly compete with any concrete business you can think of.

If you have a concrete business you should focus on your core and be competitive. Other option is to transform your thinking into service mode: how does your customer see your service? Can someone get in between you and your customer?

How big is big data?

My blog post: How big is big data? From archiving to analyzing (RELEX Blog)