Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Data Science and the Changing Nature of Research and Innovation

Last month, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) released the results of a new study, ARISE II: Unleashing America’s Research & Innovation Enterprise.  The study examined the current state of US research and innovation; looked at the role of its key players: academia, industry, and government; and proposed a set of recommendations to better address the highly complex challenges we face in the 21st century information economy.

ARISE II notes that all major players in the US research and innovation enterprise are struggling to adapt to new economic realities and societal challenges.  Given the intense competitive pressures they face, US companies have reduced their investments in fundamental science and technology research.  The payoffs from such investments are now significantly shorter, and financial markets have a low tolerance for the expenses and risks associated with long term research.  Thus, even more than in the past, many of the fundamental discoveries driving private sector innovations have to come from long term research conducted in universities and supported by government.

But, government is facing its own economic constraints.  The US has been going through a prolonged economic downturn, with continuing high levels of unemployment, long term debt and rising healthcare costs.  Pressures to decrease government spending make it harder to support long term research. 

At the same time, society faces a number of formidable challenges, including the search for clean, low cost energy; adequate food and water to satisfy the requirements of a growing, better-off world population; universally available, affordable healthcare and education; and the rapid urbanization of the planet.  Science and technology can be a great help in addressing these problems, but they require a high degree of collaboration involving experts from different disciplines.

The Continuing, Transformative Impact of IT

Last month, the McKinsey Global Institute published Ten IT-enabled business trends for the decade ahead.  As is generally the case with McKinsey, this is a well researched, well written report.  There are few surprises.  Any technology expected to have a transformative impact on business over the next decade has to at least be already in the hands of leading edge users.  Disruptive innovations take time to play out.

“Many trends reflect the growing dominance of the Internet as an enabling technology, as well as a model and metaphor for commercial and social interactions,” says the report in its introduction.  “Twenty years into the Internet revolution, businesses and consumers have come to expect that information is a Google search away, friends and associates are always available on social networking sites, and goods and services (including public goods such as education and government services) can be had instantly from an online vendor anywhere in the world at any time of the day.”

The social matrix, the Internet of all things, big data and advanced analytics, and realizing anything as a services are the report’s top four trends.  SMAC - Social, Mobile, Analytics & Cloud, - has become the new plastics, capturing the future of IT in one word, or rather, one acronym.  Just about everyone agrees that these are foundational technologies, like the Internet twenty years ago, that every business must embrace.

Cloud Computing and the Changing Role of the CIO

Last week I wrote about the 2013 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium which I recently attended.  The Symposium included a number of talks and panels on the key issues facing CIOs, as every business is essentially becoming a digital business.  Big data and cloud were the most prominent transformative technologies discussed at the Symposium.  My remarks last week were focused on big data.  I now want to turn my attention to cloud computing, and its impact as a key driver of the changing role of the CIO.

These days, few question the importance of cloud to individuals, companies of all sizes and the economy in general.  In a just published report by the McKinsey Global Institute, Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy, cloud is listed as one of 12 technologies with significant potential to drive economic impact and disruption by 2025.  The report said:

“The cloud is enabling the explosive growth of Internet-based services, from search to streaming media to offline storage of personal data (photos, books, music), as well as the background processing capabilities that enable mobile Internet devices to do things like respond to spoken commands to ask for directions.  The cloud can also improve the economics of IT for companies and governments, as well as provide greater flexibility and responsiveness.  Finally, the cloud can enable entirely new business models, including all kinds of pay-as- you-go service models.”

New Tools Beget Revolutions: Big Data and the 21st Century Information-based Society

On May 22 I attended the 2013 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium.  This year’s theme was The Transformational CIO: Architecting the Enterprise of the Future.  “The enterprise of the future will be very different from the one we know,” wrote the organizers in the event’s website.  “It will be complex, develop hitherto unforeseen forms, and will have to respond to unforeseen challenges.  All while the windows of opportunity and response will continue to shrink.  There will not only be the need to be agile and adapt to changes as they occur, but to be proactive in shaping the next generation enterprise to be ready for the future.” 

The Symposium included a number of talks and panels on the key issues facing CIOs in our post-digital world, that is, in an era when digital technologies permeate just about every nook and cranny of the business, and where every business is a digital business, the title of one of the talks at the event.  While a number of transformative technologies were discussed, big data was the most prominent.    

MIT professor Erik Brynjolfsson led an all-MIT academic panel of experts on The Reality of Big Data.  In a brief introductory talk, Brynjolfsson pointed out that throughout history new tools beget revolutions.  Scientific revolutions are launched when new tools make possible all kinds of new measurements and observations.  In 1676, for example, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek used a microscope, a relatively recent and rare tool, to discover the existence of microorganisms in a drop of water.  Thus was microbiology born, leading to major discoveries in biology, medicine, public health and food production in subsequent decades and centuries.