I have been following Michael Fauscette on Twitter for some time and enjoy his updates, many include links to helpful content. Last month he posted a comprehensive set of predicts, Evolution of Change: Signs for the Future of Business, that tie different trends together. Michael draws on "The Singularity is Near" by Ray Kurzweil and the concept that we often underestimate the rate of change but and tend to look at change in one area in isolation rather than as a part of a set of related changes. Michael links some current change factors to conclude there are some dramatic and fundamental changes ahead for business. I would agree and a part of this, but certainly not all, is related to the combined set of initiatives grouped under the term enterprise 2.0.
I will not review all of the trends and I encourage you to look at Michael’s complete post. A number of them relate to what we are doing at Darwin Ecosystem and these are the trends I will focus on here. They include: cloud computing, everything as a service, networked business (customers, employees, partners), the power of community, internet of things, big data, predictive analytics, multifaceted business models, and necessity driven innovation.
Like many other firms we chose to offer a cloud solution and a services approach for the flexibility we can offer and the simplicity that our clients face in terms of technical implementation. We can host the Darwin Awareness Engine™ for a client or clients can do this themselves. In both cases there is little effort to integrate with their current technical architecture and/or involve the IT guys, even when Darwin is targeted at internal enterprise content in sources like Sharepoint and Domino, or multiple subscription services as Forrester, Gartner, etc.
The Darwin Awareness Engine™ can aggregate content across the networks that a business sets up or you can look within individual components of these networks. Clients can see the emerging themes and conversations their employees and business partners are holding. Michael writes, “The Internet creates hyper-connectivity and opened up the flow of information around barriers. The social web changed interaction models and redefined community.” Now you can look within these communities to better understand emerging themes.
The “internet of things” extends to television and opens up new models for traditional news media. Now you can combine traditional media and social media. Darwin lets you understand the emerging themes and breaking news. One of our clients, KETC, the PBS affiliate in St. Louis, is using Darwin as part of a pilot program connecting social media and television. Through Darwin they look for breaking news and trends within their news targets and then plan to also make use of Darwin to better understand the impacts of their new efforts within the program.
The proliferation of data and the need to look with this data for predictive analytics is the foundation on which the Darwin Awareness Engine™ was created. In 2008 more digital content was created than in the history of content and then the same thing happen again in 2009. Rather than try to impose external frameworks or use semantic techniques to try to comprehend this exploding content, we use Chaos Theory to allow the content to self-organize. Then we use data visualization approaches to allow the human user to determine which themes are in important for further exploration. In the process we avoid the potential for spam and the practice of SEO that other approaches bring.
Finally, we are exploring multifaceted business models, enabled, in part, by our cloud services approach. We offer can Darwin’s capabilities as a direct service, through other software firms to enhance their content discovery process, through content focused business partners that publish their own niche publications, and as niche solutions that set on top of the core technology. We began as a necessity driven innovation because of the difficulty imposed by current models of content discovery that often required complex semantic techniques and/or the need for taxonomies. This led us to Chaos Theory and the use of a radically different approach.
Thanks again to Michael for bringing these trends together and helping us reflect on their interconnections.
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