Category Archives: Enterprise Software

Webinar Review: AI, The Key To Creating A Next-Gen Banking Experience

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VentureBeat hosted a webinar that missed the mark in the title, but is still worth a watch for those interested in how technology is changing the banking industry. Artificial intelligence (AI) was only discussed a few times, but the overarching discussion of the relationship between the young financial technology (fintech) companies and the existing banking infrastructure was of great value.

The speakers were:

  • Katy Gibson, VP of Application Products, Envestnet | Yodlee
  • Dion F. Lisle, VP Head of FinTech, Capgemini America Inc.
  • John Vars, Chief Product Officer, Varo Money
  • Keith Armstrong, Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, abe.ai
  • Stewart Rogers, Director of Marketing Technology, VentureBeat Sponsored by Yodlee

The opening question was about the relationship between fintech and banking organizations. The general response was that the current maturity of fintech means that most companies are focusing on one or two specific products or services, while banks are the broad spectrum organizations who will leverage that to provide the solutions to customers. Katy Gibson did point out that while Yodlee does focus on B2B, other fintech companies are trying to go B2C and we’ll have to see how that works out. Dion Lisle suggests that he sees the industry maturing for the next 18-24 months, then expects to see mergers and acquisitions start to consolidate the two types of businesses.

One of the few AI questions, one on how it will be incorporated, brought a clear response from Ms. Gibson. Just as other companies have begun to realize as machine learning and other AI applications begin to be operationalized, clean data is just as important as it always has been. She points out that banking information comes from multiple sources, isn’t clean and is noisy. Organizations are going to have to spend a lot of time and planning to ensure that the systems will be able to be fed useable information that provides accurate insight.

There was an interesting AI-adjacent question, one where I’m not sure I agree with the panelists. Imagine a consumer at home, querying Alexa, Siri, or other AI voice system and asking a financial question, one such as whether or not personal financial systems are good to buy a specific item. If the answer that comes back is wrong, who will the consumer blame?

The panelist consensus seems to be that they will blame the financial institution. I’m not so sure. Most people are direct. They blame the person (or voice system) in front of them. That’s one reason why customer support call centers have high turnover. The manufacturing system might be to blame for a product failure, but it’s the person on the other end of the line who receives the anger. The home AI companies will need to work with all the service providers, not just in fintech, to ensure not just legal agreements specify responsibility, but that also the voice response reflects the appropriate agreements.

The final item I’ll discuss was a key AI issue. The example discussed was a hypothetical where training figured out that blue eyed people default on home loans more often. What are the legal ramifications of such analysis. I think it was Dion (apologies if it was someone else), pointed out the key statistical statement about correlation not meaning causality. It’s one thing to recognize a relationship, it’s another to assume one thing causes another.

Katy Gibson went further into the AI side and pointed out that fintech requires supervised learning in the training of machine systems. It’s not just the pure correlation/causality issues that matter. Legal requirements specify anti-discrimination measures. That means that unsupervised learning is not just finding false links, it could be finding illegal ones. Supervised learning means data sets including valid and invalid results must be used to ensure the system is trained for the real world.

There were more topics discussed, including an important one about who owns privacy, but they weren’t related to AI.

It was an interested webinar with my usual complaint about large panels: There were too many people for the short time. All of these folks were interesting, but smaller groups and a more tightly focused discussion would have better served the audience.

TDWI Webinar Review: IoT’s Impact on Data Warehousing: Defining IoT in Terms of Its Data Requirements

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Two TDWI webinars in one week? Both sponsored by SAP? Today’s was on IoT impacting data warehousing, and I was curious about how an organization that began focused on data warehousing would cover this. It ended up being a very basic introduction to IoT for data warehousing. That’s not bad. In fact. it’s good. While I often want deeper dives than presenters give, there’s certainly a place for helping people focused on one arena, in this case it’s data warehousing, get an idea of how another area, IoT, could begin to impact their world.

The problem I had was how Philip Russom, Senior Research Director for Data Management, TDWI, did that. I felt he missed out on covering some key points. The best part is that, unlike Tuesday’s machine learning webinar, SAP’s Rob Waywell, Director Hana Project Management, did a better job of bringing in case studies and discussing things more focused on the TDWI audience.

Quick soap box: Too many companies don’t understand product marketing so they under utilize their product marketers (full disclosure: I was one). I strongly feel that companies leveraging product marketing rather than product management in presentations will be more able to address business concerns rather than being focused on the products. Now, back to our regular programming…

One of the most interesting takeaways from the webinar was a poll on what level of involvement the audience has with IoT. Fifty percent of the responders said they’re not collecting IoT data and have no plans to do so. Enterprise data warehouses (EDW) are focused on high level, aggregated data. While the EDW community has been moving to blend more real time data, it tends to be other departments who are early into the IoT world. I’m not surprised by the results, nor am I worried. The expansion of IoT will bring it in to overlap EDW’s soon enough, and I’d suggest that that half of the audience is aware things will be changing and they have the foresight to begin to pay attention to it.

IoT Basics for EDW Professionals

Mr. Russom’s basic presentation was good, and folks who have only heard about IoT would do well to listen to it. However, they should be aware of a few issues.

Philip said that “the tendency is to push analytics out to the devices.” Not wholly true, and the reason is critical. A massive amount of data is being generated by what are called “edge devices.” Those are the cars, refrigerators, manufacturing robots and other devices that stream information to the core servers. IoT data is expected to far exceed the web and social media data often referred to as big data. That means that an efficient use of the internet means that edge analytics are needed to aggregate some information to minimize traffic flow.

Take, for instance, product data. As Rob Waywell mentioned, many devices create lots of standard data for which there is no problems. The system really only cares about exceptions. Therefore, an edge device might use analytics to aggregate statistics about the standard occurrences while immediately passing exceptions on to be handled in real-time.

There is also the information needed for routing. Servers in the core systems need to understand the data and its importance. The EDW is part of a full data infrastructure. the ODS (or data lake as folks are now calling it) can be the direct target of most data, while exceptions could be immediately routed to other systems. Whether it’s the EDW, ODS, or other system, most of the analysis will continue in core systems, but edge analytics are needed.

SAP Case Studies

Rob Waywell, as mentioned above, had the most important point of the presentation when he mentioned that IoT traffic is primarily about the exceptions. He had a couple of quick case studies to talk about that, and his first was great because it both showed IoT and it wasn’t about cars – the most used example. The problem is that he didn’t tie it well into the message of EDWS.

The case was about industrial worker safety in the area of gas detection and response. He showed the different types of devices that could be involved, mentioned the multiple types of alert, and described different response paths.

He then mentioned, with what I felt wasn’t enough emphasis (refer to my soap box paragraph above), the real power that a company such as SAP brings to the dance that many tinier companies can’t. In an almost throwaway comment, Mr. Waywell mentioned that SAP Hana, after managing the hazardous materials release instance, can then communicate to other SAP systems to create the official regulatory reports.

Think about that. While it doesn’t directly impact the EDW, that’s a core part of integrated business systems. That is a perfect example of how the world of IoT is going to do more than manage the basics of devices but also be used to handle the full process for with MIS is designed.

Classifications of IoT

I’ll finish up with a focus that came up in a question during Q&A. Philip Russom had mentioned an initial classification of IoT between industrial and consumer applications. That misses a whole lot of areas, including supply chain, logistics, R&D feedback, service monitoring and more. To lump all of that into “manufacturing” is to do them a disservice. The manufacturing term should be limited to the actual manufacturing process.

Rob Staywell then went a different direction. He seemed to imply the purpose of IoT was solely to handle event-driven, real-time, actions. Coming from a product manager for Hana, that’s either an understandable mistake or he didn’t clearly present his view.

There is a difference between IoT data to be operationalized and that to be analyzed. He might have just been focusing on the operational aspects, those that need to create immediate actions, without minimizing the analytical portion, but it wasn’t clear.

Summary

This was a webinar that is good for those in the data warehousing and core MIS functions who want to get a quick introduction to what IoT is and what might be coming down the pike that could impact their work. For anyone who already has a good idea of what’s coming and wants more specifics, this isn’t needed.

TDWI Webinar Review: Putting Machine Learning to Work in Your Enterprise

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It’s been a while since I watched a webinar, but since business intelligence (BI) and (AI) are overlapping areas of interest, I watched Tuesday’s TDWI webinar on Machine Learning (ML). As the definition of machine learning expands out of the pure AI because of BI’s advanced analytics, it’s interesting to see where people are going with the subject.

The host was Fern Halper, VP Research, at TDWI. The guests were:

  • Mike Gualtieri, VP, Forrester,
  • Askhok Swaminathan, Senior Director, Product Management, SAP,
  • Chandran Saravana, Senior Director, Advanced Analytics, SAP.

Ms. Halper began with a short presentation including her definition of ML as “Enabling computers to learn patterns with minimal human intervention.” It’s a bit different than the last time I reviewed one of her webinars, but that’s ok because my definition is also evolving. I’ve decided to use my own definition, “Technology that can investigate data in an environment of uncertainty and make decisions or provide predictions that inform the actions of the machine or people in that environment.” Note that I differ from my past, purist, view, of the machine learning and adjusting algorithms. I’ve done so because we have to adapt to the market. As BI analytics have advanced to provide great insight in data discovery, predictive analytics and more, many areas of BI and the purist area of learning have overlapped. Learning patterns can happen through pure statistical analysis and through self-adaptive algorithms in AI based machines.

The most interesting part of Fern Halper’s segment was a great chart showing the results of a survey asking about the importance of different business drivers behind ML initiatives. What makes the chart interesting, as you can see, is that it splits results between those groups investigating ML and those who are actively using it.

What her research shows is that while the highest segments for the active categories are customer related, once companies have seen the benefits of ML, the advantages of it for almost all the other areas jump significantly over views held during the investigation phase.

A panel discussion then proceeded, with Ms. Halper asking what sounded like pre-discussed questions (especially considering the included and relevant slides) to the three panelists. The statements by the two SAP folks weren’t bad, they were just very standard and lacked any strong differentiators. SAP is clearly building an architecture to leverage ML using their environment, but there weren’t case studies and I felt the integration between the SAP pieces didn’t bubble up to the business level.

The reason to listen to this segment is Mr. Gualtieri. He was very clear and focused on his message. While I quibble with some of the things he said about data scientists, that soap box isn’t for here. He gave a nice overview of the evolving state of ML for enterprise. The most important part of that might have been missed by folks, so I’ll bring it up here.

Yes, TensorFlow, R, Python and other tools provide frameworks for machine learning implementations, but they’re still at a very technical level. They aren’t for business analysts and management. He mentioned that the next generation of tools are starting to arrive, one that, just like the advent of BI, will allow people with less technical experience to more quickly use models in and gain insights from machine learning.

That’s how new technology grows, and I’d like to see TDWI focus on some of the new tools.

Summary

This was a good webinar, worth the time for those of you who are interested in a basic discussion of where machine learning is within the enterprise landscape.

Cloudera Now, a mini-conference on data, analytics and machine learning, is a good overview

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Cloudera held a pretty impressive web event this morning. It was a mini-conference, with keynotes, some breakout tracks and even a small vendor area. The event was called Cloudera Now, and the link is the registration one. I’ll update it if they change once it’s VOD.

The primary purpose was to present Cloudera as the company for data support in the rapidly growing field of Machine Learning (ML). Given the state of the industry, I’ll say it was a success.

As someone who has an MS focused on artificial intelligence (ancient times…) and has kept up with it, there were holes, but the presentations I watched did set the picture for people who are now hearing about it as a growing topic.

The cleanest overview was a keynote presentation by Tom Davenport, Professor of IT and Management, Babson College. That’s worth registering for those who want to get a well presented overview.

Right after that, he and Amy O’Conner, Big Data Evangelist at Cloudera, had a small session that was interesting. On the amusing side, I like how people are finally beginning to admit that, as Amy mentioned, that the data scientist might not be defined as just one person. I’ll make a fun “I told you so” comment by pointing to an article I published more than three years ago: The Myth of the Data Scientist.

After the keynotes, there were three session of presentations, each with three seminars from which to choose. The three I attended were just ok, as they all dove too quickly into the product pitches. Given the higher level context of the whole event, I would have liked them all to spent more time discussing the market and concepts far longer, and then had much briefer pitch towards the end of the presentations. In addition, they seem too addicted to the word “legacy,” without some of them really knowing what that meant or even, in one case, getting it right.

However, those were minor problems given what Cloudera attempted. For those business people interested in hearing about the growing intersection between data, analytics, and machine learning, go to Cloudera’s site and take some time to check out Cloudera Now.

Data ingestion or data indigestion ?

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Data Lakes, the renamed ODS, aren’t the only solution for accessing data. Think actual need, understand supporting metadata, then build your data ingestion plan. Read my latest TechTarget column.

DBTA Webinar: Too many cooks, yet again

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Sadly, DBTA is becoming known for taking interesting companies, putting them in a blender and having each lose their message. A recent webinar included Cask, Attunity and HPE Security – all in a one hour time slot – again shows the problem. It was a mess.

Cask is a young Hadoop company with an interesting opportunity (Disclosure: As I’m discussing marketing, I need to mention I recently interviewed for a position at Cask). The company is working to put wrappers around Hadoop code to make it easier for IT to use the data platform. One of their products is Cask Hydrator, to help populate the database. That begins to move the message of Hadoop out of the early adopter phase and into a business message, but the presentation was still far to technical.

Attunity then presented and a key point was that they make data ingest easy. If that sounds like a similar message to Cask’s, you’re right. Why the two were together on the webinar when much of what they said sounded like competition wasn’t clear. On the good side, Attunity did a far better job at presenting a business message, both in how the presenter talked about the products and in which case studies were used.

HPE Security made another appearance, tacked onto the end of a presentation. Data security is critical, and HP has put together a very good message on it, but it didn’t vaguely fit the tone and arena of the previous presenters.

When Companies Should Share a Stage

The smaller companies seem to have a problem. It’s simple: Their involvement in webinars might be driven by marketing, but it’s being controlled by bean counters. Each of the three companies had something good to say, and each should have taken the time to say it in a stand-alone webinar. However, sharing costs was made to be the primary issue and so the mess ensued.

When should firms share the spotlight? That should happen when the item missing from the top of my presentation is there. The missing piece is having a joint story to tell. None of the case studies mentioned the companies working in partnership. None. When multiple vendors work to provide a complete solution to a client, even if the vendors might sometime compete, there’s a strong case for multiple companies in a webinar.

This webinar was not that. It was companies not feeling strongly enough about themselves for the other executives to overrule the COO’s or CFO’s and push a solid webinar about themselves.

All of these companies are worth looking at within the big data arena, just not in such a forced together setting. Stand on your own or show a joint project.

What Makes Business Intelligence “Enterprise”?

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I have an article in the Spring TDWI Journal. It has now been six months and the organization has been kind enough to provide me with a copy of my article to use on my site: TDWI_BIJV21N1_Teich.

If you like my article, and I know you will, check out the full journal.