I remember years ago a heated discussion in a conference whether computer science is a science or engineering, my daughter had a "science day" in the high school that she'll attend next year, and while they teach computer science they don't view it as a science, for them science consists of biology, chemistry, physics and some of their derivatives.
Recently I came across an article in "Scientific American", about U.S. science degrees. In this article, as you can see in the picture below, computer science is neither classified as science nor as engineering, it is actually classified as technology. Interesting -- I think that computer science is not monolithic, and various sub-disciplines may be classified differently.
Somebody attracted my attention today that ACM Membernet Europe in its last issue, has written about me in the section "feature ACM European distinguished speaker". In fact, several months ago somebody from ACM approached me to ask what is the meaning for me of being recognized as ACM Distinguished Speaker,
The truth is that I intended to use this program to tour some exotic places in the universe, but did not have time yet to pursue it, thus I answered that my action after this recognition is to coach and mentor young people about presentation skills. Indeed I have added to courses and seminars I am teaching a pitch about presentations (I am a fan of Steve Jobs' style of presentation), while this is a "soft skill", it is very important in today's world, as the picture above shows - sometimes more than what you say. In Israel we have a tendency to underestimate it, and believe that good content will sell itself, this is also true on product packaging. While some people are naturally good presenters, presentation skills is something that can be learned, and it is very rewarding to see young people catching quickly and producing great presentations (last week a students in a seminar I supervise did very creative presentations).
Within the recent year Gartner promotes the term "Intelligent Business Operations" (IBO) - not to confuse with Business Intelligence (BI). Roy Schulte from Gartner wrote about "operational IQ". I am looking now at the concepts and facilities of IBO, in Gartner's view. One way to study it is by looking on a recent post by Jim Sinur (also from Gartner). Jim provides a success story in the medical domain, resource allocation in surgeries. The ingredients of this scenario are:
- Simulation-based optimization of scheduling and resource allocation in off-line for all surgeries planned for the next day.
- Real-time tracking of everything: physicians, nurses, equipment; monitor of procedure duration and status - using sensors, cameras and in Jim's terminology - exploiting the "Internet of Things".
- Determination of things already going wrong (not according to plan) or expected deviations from plan
- Re-applying the simulation based optimization (this time online!) and get updated resource allocation plan.
This may be instance of the "detect-forecast-decide-act" pattern we have identified as the basis of proactive computing, although in Jim's scenario it can also be reactive (the deviation from plan already occurred - there is no need to forecast anything).
I'll write more about the IBO concept and some additional ingredients of it soon.
Since the term "intelligence" is now back in fashion, it would be nice to have metrics for the IQ of some operational process like the surgery management.
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FFD (Fast Flower Delivery) is the example that accompanies the EPIA book. Recently Phil Windley, the CTO of Kyntex, started to teach a course in Brigham Young University, entitled "large scale Internet applications", Phil is using the EPIA book as one of the textbooks for his course. Today Phil posted in his Blog his variation of FFD as a totally distributed system, the illustration above demonstrates it.
This is interesting, indeed we see that event processing systems that started as centralized applications are getting more and more distributed. In Phil's version, there is no single EPN, but a federation of EPNs, per individual player (driver, store etc..), with pub/sub relations among them.
BTW - an interesting phenomenon, last week I have not written any posting in this Blog, have been busy in the last sprint of the EU proposal we submit (deadline tomorrow, so there is a light at the end of the tunnel), however, looking at the statistics, I think it was the week with the busiest traffic on my Blog ever both in page views and number of visitors, including a day which I think was the record high for this Blog for a single day ever, very surprising, I actually cannot explain it -- maybe some people got back from vacation and are catching up?. I'll publish some statistics in the near future.
An interesting post from Adam Deane, about "intelligent BPM", claiming that the obstacle for getting more intelligent software (in that case in the BPM domain) is the fact that vendors are focused on breadth and not depth, meaning providing products with simple (and shallow) capabilities, and focus on selling these products to as many customers, rather than working on providing "deeper" products and work with existing customers to improve the utilization of their products in more mature way. I guess that the accounting-based management of enterprises today contribute a lot to this approach, This observation is not restricted to BPM only, I think it applies to many areas --- maybe even in event processing?
The IFTF - Institute for the Future has published a report about future work skills for 2020. This report, summarized in the picture above, identifies six drivers of change in the universe:
1. Extreme longevity
2. Rise of smart machines and systems
3. Computational world
4. New media ecology
5. Superstructured organizations
6. Globally connected world
To cope with them, the study determines that ten skills will be needed:
1. Sense making
2. Social intelligence
3. Novel and adaptive thinking
4. Cross-cultural competency
5. Computational thinking
6. New media literacy
7.Transdiciplinary
8. Design mindset
9. Cognitive load management
10. Virtual collaboration
Some of these terms are not self-explaining, so if you are interested in the details - read the article.
It is interesting to see if the educational systems -- from kindergarten until university level will change fast enough to cope with future competencies.
I have not written for a while, I am spending much of my time in finalizing EU project proposal, yes - I know that I determined never to take upon myself coordination of EU project proposal again, but I had to re-learn and get to the same conclusion. The proposal is due in 10 days, and then I am back to normal life, but from time to time I am also catching up on other things. I found a posting by my colleagues from (former) ILOG, Daniel Selman about the "5 principles of the agile enterprise for 2012". The term agile became fashionable, and as seen in the picture above is used today as a medication of various illnesses. I first heard this term around 20 years ago in the context of agile manufacturing, later in the context of agile software development, and now, as you can see from the picture, agile enterprises.
Daniel's five principles are:
1. Exploit historical data
2. React in time
3. Make consistent., high quality decisions
4. Performance,performance, performance....
5. Move from segments to customers
Principles 1 and 4 relate to data -- use historical data, and exploit big data fast
Principles 2 and 2 relate to actions -- react in time (I would say even ahead of time, be proactive!) and make high quality decisions, and principle 5 talks about personalized actions rather than segmentation-oriented actions.
All of these have technological implications and supporting technologies are certainly helpful in making an enterprise agile, but the biggest barrier for agility in enterprises lie in the human and cultural aspects. Using technology to change the culture is one of the next frontiers. My recent posting about proactive thinking as a cultural change is part of this observation. More - later.
