The Future of Big Data with David Mathison from the CDO Summit — Episode 18 (2/3)
The Future of Big Data (2/3)
Today I’m interviewing David Mathison to discuss the future of big data. David is the CEO of the CDO Summit & CDO Club for Chief Digital Officers and Chief Data Officers.
He is the world’s leading authority on CDOs, having been quoted by CNBC, Computerworld, Deloitte, Financial Times, Forbes, Guardian, McKinsey, MIT Sloan Management Review, VentureBeat, Wall Street Journal, and ZDNet, among others.
From 1999–2002 he was founder and CEO of the Kinecta Corporation where he raised $30 million in under 2 years. The Kinecta Corporation is now part of Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL).
From 1994–1999 David was VP with Reuters, where he pioneered online content syndication, years before RSS was invented.
Back to Blockchain and AI
So let’s say but but in so in terms of like security, right, and internet security and Blockchain and AI. It’s all a bit like a hyperbole for for a lot of people like they just lost in this kind of world of techno speak and jargon is just what techies use and how do you think like Blockchain can can actually assist us with with security.
David
The wonderful thing about distributed ledger ledger technologies. Blockchain included, I would also expand beyond the open source Blockchain to things that are more private but have higher transactions such as you know, Hedera their transactions are fast! https://www.hedera.com/ hundreds of thousands of transactions per second.
Whereas with Blockchain it’s it’s still very slow, you know, just a few transactions per second. So, widespread use of Blockchain. The real big use case or best use cases everybody knows has been cyber, you know, crypto currencies such as Bitcoin on top of the Blockchain, the LT but I certainly think the to simplify and summarize the importance of Blockchain going forward.
To me, it’s as simple as looking at 1994 to 1995, you know, 1994 you had all these heterogeneous, you know, completely spread out systems if you wanted to get your continent to AOL. Yeah. The right Blackbird if you want to get into MSN for Microsoft network.
Generating Rain Man. Fortunately, everything standardised over HTML over HTTP and we had a standard protocol and the standard markup language so that anybody with a browser could look the web.
Now, Blockchain takes that a step further and the wonderful thing about it is that in for me, because I come from a media background and you know, I published a book called be the media https://www.amazon.com/Be-Media-David-Mathison/dp/0976081458 which was really looking at the renaissance of any author, musician, filmmaker, journalist, photographer could really take advantage of the internet and not have to sign that onerous publishing contract or soon distribution arrangement or, you know, music label agreement so that they move away from these indentured servitude, you know, programs where they don’t get 15% or 7% to 15% of the royalties from their work.
Now, they could actually get self publishing a higher percentage of royalties. Well, the challenge with all that what it was or it still is, is that there wasn’t really a mechanism let’s say you put a photo up on Facebook.
It wasn’t really a mechanism to track the intellectual property of where does that photo go? Does somebody use that photo and post it into a marketing brochure where they’re making money off of your work?
Well, the wonderful thing about Blockchain is you can track the intellectual property of anything that you put out on the internet. This is the future of big data and full traceability off all your assets!
You could also include, for example, smart payments where if somebody uses it, you know your photo for a wedding, you know, album or for a print publication or a marketing brochure. Everything is delineated in the smart contract and you get paid the originator of that content gets paid as a micro transaction or a fee for each one of the uses of their work. Well, this is to sum up the Blockchain for at least for independent artists, and for anyone doing authentication. You know, big financial service firms, insurance agencies, anyone doing a lot of work with crypto currencies and central banks.
Blockchain right now is as big as 1994/95 was for the internet, it is going to not only dramatically change and shift the playing field, but it’s also going to disrupt a lot of disruptors.
You know, not only is it disrupting incumbents, and you got to be a lot of big financial services firms and insurance companies and others taking Blockchain very seriously. But it’s also going to disrupt Pandora and YouTube and Spotify and others where they’re aggregating both, you know, music and listeners, but there’s really no way for the musician to make any money from that Spotify or Pandora model, they’ve got to get millions and millions of spins just to make pennies.
So what I thought you know, when I published my book. The media was going to be a renaissance of creativity and the ability for artists to fund their work through their fans never materialized. We saw things like Indiegogo and Kickstarter help with the onboarding process of getting not no need to get a label contract just to get an advance that’s what the Indiegogo and Kickstarter help with. You no longer need to get an advance because you have your funds your fans from the project, but there was no real ongoing method of tracking and getting paid for the work as this stuff goes out across the internet.
Well, you know, Blockchain does that and much, much more. So I think from both the perspective of big corporations needing to get involved with Blockchain and also young, independent artists. It’s a great way of monetizing content and being able to track the origination and distribution of that content. But you know, there’s a lot of interpretations in different fields on how this is best views. But coming from my perspective, I see those as some pretty big use cases.
Nat
I mean engagements I mean, gaming is huge, I just avoid that myself. But I think in terms of in terms of kind of like traceability of ROI on marketing, like Blockchain if we can, you know, in five years time, the traceability on marketing. You know, when one of these people how many years ago said, you know, out of 100% they spend on marketing, they don’t know where 50% has gotten right.
David
I think so, Blockchain potentially has the power to actually slap the the social media and Google and all these other people into into check and say well actually, you know the infrastructure here could be could be much better and and you know products are being developed all the time to target people you know I mean I did an episode with Billee Howard who’s in New York as well.
We talked about this this new marketing technology that those guys are pioneering and it’s and it’s basically about storytelling and how to tell your story better to get a brand message right so that people buy your stuff and tell other people to buy your stuff. So everything’s going to become a lot more targeted.
Doing all this kind of all this stuff with Facebook and you know how they persuaded all these people to do things they didn’t want them to do and all this lost data and all this other stuff, right?
GDPR has made advertising actually more focused and more targeted on people. Because action, those people will buy the product, they will enjoy the marketing messaging because that marketing messaging is targeted towards them. So that so actually GDPR has done the marketing world a favor because it’s actually good to improve ROI based upon that and reduce spam, right.
We all hate spam! I’ve heard a lot about AI within security and how how, you know, AI is going to really improve security but but I think with the chief Chief Digital Officers, which is your your specialty.
What amazing things have some of these people done? David that you know about that you think is going to get better in the next sort of five years?
David
Yes. Well, it’s funny, you know, when we were chatting earlier, you mentioned you learned a lot from the 2014 London CEO Summit!
So, you know, for your listeners, I’m the founder of the CDO club. We are a membership organization, founded in 2011 for Chief Digital Chief Data, Chief Analytics Officers, Chief Information Security Officers.
We started running summits in 2013. And by 2014, we had done our first event in London at the BBC. You know, just thinking about some of the talent that was there. I mean, that was an incredible event we had so just some of the big organizations that were represented included like you know, Mark Dearnley https://www.gov.uk/government/people/mark-dearnley at the time was Chief Digital and Information Officer HMRC I mean to think about, you know digitizing the tax process.
Then also, in the States, the HMRC for listeners here, it is the equivalent of the IRS. It’s a massive, massive project.
Mark had a huge brief.
We also had Mark Read https://www.wpp.com/about/our-leadership/mark-read at the time was CDO of WPP digital and now since then he’s become CEO, about a month ago he became CEO of WPP. That is the world’s largest ad agency and Mark Read started as a CDO.
We had Charlie Redmayne https://www.harpercollins.co.uk/corporate/about-us/executive-committee/ who was originally CDO at Harper Collins, and he became CEO at Harper Collins.
Because anyone doing the job of digital if you’re if you’re the one who’s led the organisation and lead that company from an analogue to digital company, it’s likely that you’re going to be running the show and you know, Charlie’s been there since 2013. He’s been CEO of Harper Collins for four years.
We also had Mike Bracken, you know, who at the time was incredible. He was executive director of the government digital service and that was a massive project for Mike we made him CDO of the year.https://gds.blog.gov.uk/author/mike-bracken/
That year we had Amanda Hill who is chief brand officer at the BBChttp://cdosummit.co.uk/speakers/amanda-hill/
and Ralph Rivera, who is the director of the digital transformation at the BBC :-
https://www.thedrum.com/news/2018/10/26/nba-hires-bbc-eurosport-alum-ralph-rivera-oversee-europe-and-middle-east-expansion
Now for these people who are so accomplished in their fields for, you know, the last decade, whatever the things are looking at, I can tell you the main projects that if you put it to three broad categories.
- Digital transformation never seems to end. I mean, did HMRC has now been through, they now have a new Chief Digital Officer, so the goals that they had for Mark Dearnley and his team you know, they went through all those goals and now they have new strategic goal that they need to hit because there’s a new disruption does your you know as blockchain comes out, etc, etc. Digital transformation really never seems to end you know, because of the disruptions are coming fast, fast and furious.
- Data is driving everything you know data literally is driving all decisions real time data to be more predictive and prescriptive with your analysis on anything from you know retail outlets to you know weather affecting traffic patterns and not only physically in on the roads and in the streets but also in stores. After data and within data with bundle you know pretty much AI- DL deep learning, machine learning, cognitive you know both bundle at all in under under data.
- Security
Lastly being cyber security which is an ongoing issue we just had yet another massive breach of this time the Marriott where not only were passwords and home addresses stolen but also people’s passport numbers. So after the Yahoo breach You know, this is the second largest breach in the world and it continues on and on so how to countries companies, individuals, you know how to individuals protect their privacy, but also how to companies and government organizations get enough information from these people from from us so that they can continue to, to to do business and to provide government services for us in an efficient way without encroaching on our guard, increasing need for privacy and security.
These are the balances and those three things data, digital transformation and cybersecurity are really our focus. And in 2010 or 2011, when we first started doing this, we kind of made a bet that this was all going to be important.
We’ve gone we’re now in just about every country, we’re just starting to dip our toes in the water of China, it’s huge.
The opportunity there, especially with AI and with security, and we don’t see this going away anytime soon. Especially the data side, which is just way overshadowing the Chief Digital Officer side we’re seeing a tremendous amount of growth in the new hires of Chief Data Officers and Chief Digital Officers.
Big Data Should Underpin the Entire Business Economy!
Nat
It’s it is absolutely massive. It’s it’s becoming the actual, well the underpinning of all business enterprises, without those three things and actually keeping an eye on it though there are going to be many more businesses just disappearing and folding.
Because they’re not going to allocate resources enough you know to to the right areas of the business they’re not going to be able to keep up with demand they get a they get a basically just keep purchasing stuff that they just don’t need at the wrong prices and their competitors are going to put them out business.
David
I mean, I hate to say that exactly. Yeah, no, it’s been happening for the last 10 years and now it’s happening even too. So now we’re at the point where the disruptors are getting disrupted. And by that I mean to the hundred years for Craigslist to put the classifieds out of business and the newspapers basically undercut the entire business model of in an entire industry, newspapers and books.
This shoot shortly thereafter you saw things like especially they got more nuanced by that. I mean not just classifieds like personals but if you think about personal as well Craigslist then got disrupted by by you know plenty of fish and by match.com so that took only 10 years and now you’re seeing like match.com got disrupted by Tinder and Grindr you know we’re all it is it’s swipe right, swipe left.
Yes we are still being disrupted!
I mean, how much simpler Can you be for user interface right now the disruptors are disrupting the disruptors in a timeframe that’s more aggressive doesn’t take 10 years to disrupt the company anymore now It only takes a year or two so you know what’s next? Can personals be disrupted further absolutely think about you know virtual reality you know where you can meet people in a VR world or you know wearables where my T shirt Can you know like your T shirt and our T shirts can go out on the date I mean you know like they’re all kinds of possibilities were even personals will be disrupted. And you can think well, you know, swipe right swipe left…
User Interface doesn’t get more simple than that, well, maybe it does. Maybe we don’t even need to swipe. Maybe it’s, you know, it already knows our preferences. It looks for people who are in line with the people that we want to meet, either professionally or personally, these are the kinds of things where I said before, that data is getting more predictive and prescriptive, that, you know, I don’t need to physically be in a location to meet somebody, you know, and our AI robots can do the work for us, you know, large majority of the vetting process of doing personal So, you know, you could think that across any field, the fact is disrupting is coming faster and faster and furious or and even the disruptors are getting disrupted at this point with with a very low at a very low cost. That’s the big key is you don’t need to have these giant server farms anymore. Just plug everything into AWS and you’re up and running.
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