On future work skills

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.    

On agile enterprises

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. 

Top ten reasons why large companies fail to keep their best talent

I have written earlier this year about the Plato vs. Aristotle conflict - in the organizational aspect, putting the organization in the middle, and the employee serves the organization goals vs. putting the employee in the middle, and having the organization as a platform to achieve the employee's goals.   When talking about top talents, they tend to be in the Aristotle side of the spectrum.  A recent article by Forbes discusses ten reasons why large companies are not good at retaining their top talents.  I still work at the big blue (IBM Haifa Research Lab), so I probably not qualified as top talent, but I heard all of these arguments before from people who left big companies.  The ten reasons relate to large companies' red tape; failing to find a project that matches the top talent's passion; annual reviews and career developments issues; lack of patience from the company's part to the top talents' initiative which can be longer term; lack of other top talents around, and mediocre management that don't know how to manage top talent -- very interesting! 

New tutorial on event processing

Roland Stuhmher, whom you can see in the right-hand side of the picture, on the Jeopardy! set, in DEBS'11, has recently recorded a video piece giving a tutorial on event processing.  Some of the slides looks familiar to me (well, he mentioned my name is his slide about "attribution of the slides").   In the slides he mentions a term iCEP, which either means that Apple has a new CEP gadget in its i series.  BTW - according to Steve Jobs, the apple "i" (started with iMAC) stands for: Internet, Individual, Instruct, Inform, Inspire -- all start with I...  So does any of them apply to iCEP?  Another possibility is, of course, intelligent (I have used the term IEP in the past). Anyway -  good tutorial, with some glance of the ETALIS project developed in FZI.  Enjoy!

On event processing for real-time and non real-time applications

Chris Carlson has written in the Informatica Blog about the fact that there is a growing segment of applications that are using event processing and are not really real-time, and stating the fact that their share in the event processing market is growing.   I have written four years ago in this Blog about the term real-time and the abuse in its daily usage.  When some people (and marketing messages of vendors) are talking about real-time, they mean "very fast", while real-time really means "within time constraints", the time constraint can be micro-second, second, 5 minutes, or 2 hours.    Indeed, the early adopters in event processing, trading applications in capital markets, are based on low latency and fast reaction.   Many other types of applications use event processing for the functionality of filtering-transformation-pattern matching (or continuous queries in the stream oriented programming style), and the non-functional aspects are secondary.   The area which I am working on these days , proactive computing, has some applications in which there are real-time constraints, but typically not in magnitude of micro-second, but in seconds to minutes.  This is the case where there is a forecast for a future problem (e.g. a traffic jam will occur in 5 minutes), there is a time constraint on activating an action (e.g. within 30 second there is a need to change the traffic lights policies to mitigate the traffic jam).  This is a real-time application, but it has to react within 30 second, to impact in 5 minutes.    The interesting thing is that low latency applications may be "best effort" and not have real-time constraints.  Thus - there are low latency applications, real-time applications, those who have both, and those who have none.  Interestingly, event processing applications can be found in all four groups.  

five forecasts from IBM - innovations that alter the tech landscape within five years

The annual IBM predictions on "five in five" has been published.  You can read more about it in the IBM Smarter Planet Blog.  


 This year’s predictions are:

·    People power will come to life 
·    You will never need a password again
·    Mind reading is no longer science fiction 
·    The digital divide will cease to exist 
·    Junk mail will become priority mail

Some EP related news

Today I had some time to browse through some new staff on the web, related to event processing.  Here are some of the things I've found:

I noticed that Sidhhi has posted a presentation on Slideshare.   I have written before about this new event processing open source from Sri Lanka.   While comparison to Esper, as an open source is fine,  the presentation makes the impression that the state-of-the-art today is Esper and some academic prototypes.   There are of course many other things in the market -- my previous posting makes a reference to Paul Vincent's list.

Fujistsu announced that it has developed complex event processing technology designed for use with cloud technology that employs distributed and parallel processing. The picture about is taken from their announcement.  A new player? 

A new course to teach Microsoft StreamInsight is now available on the web.  The course is described in Richard Seroter's Blog, with a link to the actual course.  The course lasts for 4.5 hours,  I have looked at the beginning, seems to be a good one. 

More updates - later.