Seismic Shifts

Podcast Transcript

Rebecca Parson:

Hello everybody. My name is Rebecca Parsons. We're here with the Thoughtworks podcasts. Today, we have all of our co-hosts and we would like to introduce you to some significant shifts that we see in the technology community. We call them the Seismic Shifts. First, let's all introduce ourselves. Again, I am Rebecca Parsons.

Mike Mason:

I'm Mike Mason.

Neal Ford:

I'm Neal Ford.

Zhamak Dehghani:

I'm Zhamak Dehghani

Alexey Boas:

I'm Alexey Boas

Mike Mason:

So the first shift that we're going to talk about is something that we call humanity augmented. And this is the storyline where people and machines are working together to produce greater outcomes than before. And this isn't something that's new. People who've worked alongside machinery to boost our capacity. Ever since the industrial revolution and all that kind of stuff. But today really what's happening is more of a knowledge revolution when it comes to what the machines can help us do. Humanity augmented is kind of a positive storyline around what's happening with people and machines rather than the stories that you often hear about, which is everybody's going to have their jobs replaced by automation and going to have to find new things to do. So humanity augmented is really people and machines working together to the best of their strengths.

Mike Mason:

So people are very good at applying their experience and kind of intuition and sort of native understanding of all the kind of complex things going on in a particular situation. Machines are very good at crunching data, they're very good at looking things up very quickly. The way we sort of talk about it often is that machines are going to help us find needles in the haystack and then people are going to look at the needles so that the machines are found and then figure out which ones are the most appropriate to apply. This concept of working together and teaming between humans and AI is actually quite popular today in a whole bunch of different subject areas. So the best chess player in the world is not actually a machine right now. It's a team of people plus their chess playing computer and these three people along with their chess machine, they know how to get the best out of that combination of all four of them. And they're actually a world beating chess team together.

Mike Mason:

So a few examples of humanity augmented, I was at a conference last week in Toronto and they had kind of a one of these sort of startup pitch contests, which I always find funny because a lot of the startups in the startup pitch contest are really quite far along. And actually, active businesses running pretty well. But so one of the businesses was doing, it was kind of a mental health care mechanism where they would use questionnaires to very rapidly help assess patients in a way that was much quicker than kind of traditional screening techniques. And you could get feedback to a physician very quickly using this mechanism, which it didn't decide on a course of action for the doctor, but it helped them to sort of understand what the options might be and to kind of cover their bases and remind them of various treatment options.

Mike Mason:

The other example I was going to bring up here, actually, it was something that you mentioned yesterday, Neal, you said with your sleep tracker you can now quantify how many cocktails before it impacts your night's sleep.

Neal Ford:

That's exactly right.

Mike Mason:

So I thought that was a pretty interesting kind of augmenting your own ability to understand yourself.

Neal Ford:

Yeah. My whole point has been it's a third of your life and you know nothing about what's going on when you're asleep. So you might as well learn some something by using them some sheets.

Mike Mason:

What we're trying to get at with humanity augmented is not the machines are going to replace what people are doing. In some cases, yes, kind of fairly kind of roads or boring work may get automated. But what that actually allows us to do is free the humans up so that we can do more interesting things. We can think we can think bigger and we can add more value to an organization because we're not spending a little bit of time doing something that a machine might be able to do for us.

Rebecca Parsons:

So you don't think the robots are going to take over the world? Or just not quite yet?

Mike Mason:

Not quite yet. There's always a possibility someone will accidentally build a paperclip maximizer and it will reduce us to atoms in order to build more paper clips. And certainly, the AI revolution or the most recent resurgence in AI has been happening for a few years now and we're still not seeing this massive shift and replacement and huge cognitive ability from the machine intelligence. It's still very narrow use cases. And so I think the future of us and machines working alongside each other, playing to our individual strengths. I think that's a positive future.

Neal Ford:

All right, I'll go next. The topic that I'm going to talk about is platforms as catalysts, so the word platform is incredibly overloaded in the software world and in the past we've often thought of platforms as things like big package software from a SAP or Oracle or some kind of platform like that. But what we're seeing now much more across our client projects and in fact reflected on a lot of the technologies on our radar right now is this idea of using platforms as kind of an internal encapsulation mechanism that's broader than just a single business unit but not as big as the entire company. And there we're really trying to get at the kind of reuse we're trying to get at back in the service oriented architecture days where we really can build business capabilities that can be consumed by other parts of the business.

Neal Ford:

But that architecture's so tangled up that it always turned into a big ball of mud. And now we're looking at platforms both as a technical capability but more importantly as a business capability. And that's where this idea of platforms at catalyst come along because if you can successfully take a business details and encapsulate them effectively in an internal platform that other parts of your business can consume, it removes them worrying about all these operational concerns about how do I get to accounting info or a customer info, whatever that happens to be. They can just focus on the data that they're trying to gather up and utilize from a business standpoint. And so we see this as a nice level of encapsulation for businesses because they can't expose just the important parts of their details to the outside world without exposing too much of their details to the outside world and making it very complicated for their world to consume what they are producing.

Neal Ford:

Some signals for this adoption of a fully featured pass as a default delivery platform, so that becomes the default for your organization. Business outcomes are really important here. It's easy to get caught up in the plumbing and just think about the purely technical platforms, but the business outcomes, the really important thing here because that's where it becomes catalytic for the organization. When you can actually start taking advantage of being able to consume business services in a really nice, clean encapsulated way. We have several clients who are embarking on these kinds of digital platform strategies and we've seen some really great successes. When this is done well, obviously you can just go into this sort of ad hoc-ley you have to think about the kinds of things you need to expose and there are lots of interesting edge cases you have to worry about like transactional boundaries between your platform and other platforms. But at the end of the day, this is a really great way to give a nice exposed business capabilities through building a technical capability to augment that.

Rebecca Parsons:

And one of the things we hear a fair amount about is this notion of platform thinking. How do you characterize platform thinking?

Neal Ford:

Well, it's really that this idea that, "Okay, we're going to expose parts of us to the rest of the business. What are the useful parts of our platform? Do we need to expose to the rest of the business?" And so it's a thinking about a level of encapsulation and isolation and public APIs and public APIs or semi-public APIs are much trickier things. You have to be much more careful about versioning them and making changes to them. You have to ensure backwards compatibility in some cases. And so part of platform thinking is probably more stable APIs than you're used to producing for internal consumption because these need to be longer to live ways we're representing information to the outside world. So it does change the way you organize things both internally and externally to fully take advantage of it.

Zhamak Dehghani:

And it's interesting because I almost used platform thinking and product thinking in the same sentence most of the time, and it brings in another angle, which is about thinking about your platform as a product and thinking about the developers consuming that product as your customers. So applying the product thinking and bringing a great developer experience for them to discover APIs and test APIs and mill applications quickly is another kind of angle that we really emphasize.

Neal Ford:

Yeah, I think that's a nice symbiotic relationship between product thinking and platform thinking because of the platform becomes the external view of what your product is.

Mike Mason:

I think the other thing that we're starting to see as well as businesses that are providing themselves as a platform for other businesses to build on top of. So, you could think of even something as simple as the Amazon Marketplace actually being a platform on which you can have kind of small sellers starting to create a business ad seats. I think another good example of that kind of a thing, and you were also starting to see with more of a API driven set up between organizations, you can actually end up with quite a complex ecosystem where businesses are creating value based on a piece of value that some other business has created.

Neal Ford:

Well, a great example of that is the kind of integrator approach of somebody like Instacart, the startup that has people go do grocery shopping for you because we have several clients interacting with them. And it's interesting because this is sort of forcing our clients to create a platform that Instacart can consume because they need certain things from their vendors. But it actually goes both ways, both from companies wanting to do this but also being hurted into doing this because they want to integrate and interact with these other companies who have bought into this idea of platform thinking.

Alexey Boas:

Yeah, that ties quite well into... So in the business world, people who've been talking about prosumer, so the collaboration between producers and consumers and creating [Lex system 00:00:10:51] and that brings the technical platform to make that happen in the business world. So that's quite interesting as well. The next one and the one I wanted to talk about is evolving directions and well, this is really about evolution in the ways in which we interact with the machines and computer systems and well, part of that is continuous and it happens continually in an organic way. Part of that does, I think it's generational. I can only imagine how my two year old toddler will feel about many of the things that we consider innovations nowadays. But there's this wonderful book by Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and he talks about how science evolves and it talks about normal evolution but then about paradigm shifts as well.

Alexey Boas:

And these are the major leaps that science does. And in some ways it does feel that as far as these interaction is concerned, we are approaching a paradigm shift or a seismic shift in that sense. So we've been attached to screen watching, typing and pointing on that screen for quite a while. And that seems to be changing. So when we think about things like voice recognition and natural language processing, for example, things become much, much more conversational. And which a virtual augmented and mixed reality things become much more immersive. And that's powerful because it changes the very metaphors that we use to interact with computer systems. So why would you need an application or the metaphor of an app? If you can just talk to an assistant and the system will transfer some money, call a car, et cetera. So it does seem like a very powerful shift in pay in that sense.

Alexey Boas:

And trigger limitations. So take voice recognition. For example, if you, especially if you think about languages harder than English. There are limitations. I'm not sure if you've seen that, but there's these 2001 Odyssey parody video. What if Hal was based on presence was recognition technology. So they will do something like, "Hal, open the bay doors please and playing The Doors on Spotify now" something like that. Reports are happening. But I think technology is improving fast and we see businesses moving from using things like virtual reality is as just a gadget to present it at an event or something that's really being considered more seriously into their operations and into their relationship with consumers. So imagine when AR becomes more pervasive in mobile phones for example. And because it's happening at the moment and voice interfaces are expected by customers, for example, or also when things like a Google glass type gadgets becomes more acceptable.

Alexey Boas:

And it wasn't recently. So I've heard many people complaining that. Oh, I tried to talk to people using something like that and people kept looking not at me or not into my eyes. I was at an event in which there was an Oculus demonstration. So you could try things out. And the experience was really good, really immersive. But it was really, really funny. Just sitting back at the room and watching all those people sitting in chairs, looking many places and swiveling around, so it felt like weird. But as these things become more, more socially acceptable, I think they're going to be new challenges for businesses as well. So, and then businesses will be able to invest more seriously on things like chatbots for example, because people will demand that I want to talk to the business right now and it doesn't need to be a person as long as that solves my problem or can help me out with the challenges that I have.

Alexey Boas:

We've seen companies talking and investing on things like immersive training. So if you need someone to be trained on a huge piece of equipment, you don't have to fly this person around anymore. So that person can learn how to operate that from a distance. Or you could leverage an expert from somewhere else using augmented reality for example. And of course the way we think about design, I think it's going to change as well. So what happens to the practice of experience design when we have things like gestures or things like voice and virtual reality. So I think collaboration between technology and design is going to be even more important. So the merge in these two worlds that you see today, whether we've developed software or built ecology I guess is going to become more intense in the future.

Rebecca Parsons:

And how about when we think about the relationship between a business and their end consumer, when you have technology, possibly your own, but possibly even something like a digital assistant that's sitting between an organization and their end customer. What do you think about how that relationship that organizations try to build with their customers will be affected by this?

Alexey Boas:

Oh, that's a very good point. Because you don't have people of the business directly interacting with the customers anymore. So they are doing that through a technology and that might be a very good opportunity for leveraging AI to understand patterns and to then interact with more people and understand better customers and patrons in general. But at the same time, I think it's going to be a challenge on how to prevent that distance to becoming a problem to the business and how to prevent businesses to not understand the need of customers anymore. Or how to prevent people inside the business to not understanding people in the markets anymore so that they just definitely have a very, very important challenge that businesses are going to face.

Neal Ford:

It's fascinating to me that this is a two-way street that we're evolving our interactions, but our machines are making us evolve, too. So I just recently read a study that if you watch someone choose an elevator, you can tell their age because if they're over 20, they'll use their index finger to choose the elevator. But under 20, they'll use their thumb. Because the thumb has become the pointer finger for people under 20 because they thumb type so much on smart devices that that has become their primary digit not their pointer finger. So we're changing each other and all sorts of interesting ways that it'll be hard to predict.

Mike Mason:

A lot of businesses are not ready for as, we're still kind of living in the age of apps and this is something you mentioned very early on. Like I say, when my primary digital interface is my digital assistant rather than a specific app, then all of my interactions with businesses is going to be moderated through Siri or Alexa or whatever system I'm using and the business has then lost that direct connection that they have to me when I'm using their app today and I actually put quite a lot of control in the hands of the companies who are making digital assistants. I think that's going to be a really interesting kind of power shift and dynamic change to watch that play out.

Neal Ford:

Physical little men only replaced them with digital [crosstalk 00:18:22].

Zhamak Dehghani:

Yeah. I feel like a lot of the players in this space are fighting for my living space, which digital assistant would be in my lounge room or in my car, so it'll be interesting. Right. The next shift is a physical, now digital. And as the name suggests, it's about convergence of our physical lives and digital lives. So from wearing a digital wearable sensor to capture the events of our physical lives and not just to change our behavior, tell us how many drinks we should have before we have a good night's sleep or not above it or the digital devices that are controlling our living spaces, the smart doors and locks and cameras and lights and so on. And with this ever-growing global network of smart devices, really our lives are changing, the cities are being designed differently, the manufacturing is changing.

Zhamak Dehghani:

It's really impacting all of the different industries. The work that we see sends across a lot of different clients in different spaces, from agriculture to manufacturing, to logistics, retail. It's a widespread impact that these seismic shifts is having. And an interesting transition that we often see happens when people starts creating smart connected devices is that you often have an equipment like to give an example, if you have an agriculture equipment, but it's just doing its job. It's helping with agriculture and then you add a few sensors to it. So now it can sense the quality of the soil and perhaps give some information. The human may be operating the machine and augmenting slightly, that human behavior or the operation of the machine on the spot. And then that device becomes connected. So the smart connected device can get that information out to the Internet.

Zhamak Dehghani:

And I think that's where the magic happens. That's when you can give that information to an ecosystem of partners so that the people who can affect it can provide fertilizers or seeds and they all can become part of that smart ecosystem to the transition from an just the device to a smart connected device to ecosystems. So that's where I think a lot of these ships work together. So platform gives you the smart ecosystem ability to share data as APIs and augmented humanity. There's a lot of the data work in AI work that happens from the data being collected to, it might be interesting just to talk about a few projects and different works that we do in UK, we have the connected elderly in the health space. So, monitoring the health of the elderly, making sure they get their medication and the medical needs that they having needed in time. We see work in Germany in the smart energy having smart meters to know the energy that the whole house is consuming but also individual devices.

Zhamak Dehghani:

A lot of work is happening in the car space, in the car industry, in China with connected cars. The peer-to-peer car sharing versus be able to lock or unlock your cars from your digital devices. We do a lot of work in R&D and nonprofit in Australia helping blind people with a digital stick that's when they passing, crossing the road, it can detect the pedestrian lines so they can guide them through the road. So it's really widespread. And I think an interesting observation in the manufacturing space is that countries with more mature industries like in Europe, they have initiatives like Industry 4.2 that is driving upgrade of their manufacturing and adding automations and smart connected devices and countries with less mature maybe manufacturing and industries that really rethinking and innovating in that space like China, their technology in this space, it's diverse from doing embedded constrained device, forward development.

Zhamak Dehghani:

There's a lot of innovations happening there. You think about the connectivity, all the different protocols like LoRaWAN and things that works. A few we had on the network on their radar, which is about enabling kind of low power devices, being continuously connected to the network, edge computing for getting the processing and data to the right place, close to what it needs to be. I guess the most suitable place for it to be processed and the platform and the data on the other end of the spectrum. So it's quite interesting space in terms of all of these technologies coming together to serve the user.

Zhamak Dehghani:

We did have an interesting connected kitchen projects in U.S. which did go past the connected, although no connected toaster and it was knowing all the information that they need to know about the pantry, about your health requirements, about what's in your kitchen, your oven to give you smart recipes and then you direct you through the flow of cooking. And what you cook first, and what you do next, because often I'm running around the kitchen looking for the next thing. The half of my cooking time is finding the next spice or the next thing that I need to get out. So it will help you with that. But yes we have moved on beyond the connected poster.

Alexey Boas:

Yeah. Well one interesting thing. Zhamak you mentioned diverse ecosystem and diverse technology, so what interesting problems, how to bring software excellence and mature software development practices to these contexts that I think those issue are fascinating. How do you do, for example, continuous testing on a hybrid projects. So do you need to be some hardware to continuously generate the mechanical signal, for example, so that you can do the testing and these sorts of things. So I think there's lots of space to port and to understand how to bring those practices to very different contexts and scenarios.

Zhamak Dehghani:

Yeah, I absolutely agree. And I think that's where we're seeing really interesting work. So bringing the practices that we learned in the software world or in the web services world to the embedded world, we saw a demo offer work that our colleagues did in Australia and their first session on schematic design was using Post-it Notes and our client was very skeptical of, "Oh this is not going to work" But then we had a full to full end to end kind of build pipeline that had some simulators in place and some real devices and went from a Post-it Note based schematic to a fully functioning prototype in a very short span. So I think there is room for a lot of innovation and disruption in that world.

Mike Mason:

I remember our colleagues in Germany talking about AI connected coffee maker that they had done and this one's actually useful because it's a fairly advanced coffee maker and can put different amounts of milk and coffee and steaming and all these, I don't know, there's quite a lot of parameters for how a coffee machine works and the connected pile with the idea was you could sort of share recipes with your friends and there was the kind of the social aspect, but when they were testing it, they had an acceptance test suite that would run partially on the machine. But there's a laptop right next to the coffee maker and every now and again the laptop would prompt a human to push a button on the coffee maker because you still needed a hardware input. Every now and again, even through this sort of automated test suite. I thought that whole thing was, so it was pretty funny.

Zhamak Dehghani:

Machine augmented.

Rebecca Parsons:

Okay. And then the final shift that we want to talk about is reassembling trust. And this is really the intersection of thinking about aspects of security. And we know the security landscape and the threat landscape has become much more comprehensive and much, much more dangerous for organizations. And then privacy. We've talked a lot about applications that are able to collect increasing amounts of data and actually invade in personal spaces and understand more of the behavior of people.

Rebecca Parsons:

And we're starting to recognize, well maybe I don't actually want one organization to know that all of this about all of these different aspects of my life. But then there's also transparency. And when we think about data and when we think about organizations that we want to deal with, sometimes we want things kept private, but sometimes we want things to be transparent. And when we think, say for example as a citizen and how I relate to my government, I want my government to be transparent about some of the things that they are doing so I can understand, are the individuals in government acting in the best interest of the country and the citizens or are they serving their own interests?

Rebecca Parsons:

And so we called this reassembling trust because trust is becoming a central part of how individuals and organizations of all kinds interact with each other. If I don't trust Facebook, they are not eventually going to be able to stay in business because they're going to lose their revenue stream. If citizens don't trust their government, then what happens? When individuals now think about how they are interacting with each other? Trust is something that has to be present for us to be able to have these interactions. Again, we talked earlier about platforms and these ecosystems, these trading partners, they have to understand, they have to trust each other. There has to be a level of transparency amongst those organizations so that they can do business, but there also has to be a level of privacy and that those organizations have certain aspects of their business that they want to keep to themselves.

Rebecca Parsons:

And so we're looking at an interplay of the potential of technology for things like recommendations or targeted advertising or the detection of something in your health has now changed. I might be perfectly happy for a device to send a message to my physician telling them something in my health has changed, but I might not feel the same way about it being sent to my employer or to an insurance company. And so we have to have a much more complicated view of aspects of data ownership, data privacy, the ability to control who gets to use my data, for what purposes, for how long, what are they going to do with that data? Who owns that data, who has the ability to monetize that data? And so these different shifts are raising new questions about fundamental aspects of computing. We've always said data is a critical and an important and valuable asset of an organization.

Rebecca Parsons:

But as we are letting these devices into different parts of our lives, as we are interacting with devices in different ways, what does that mean for this whole notion of data and we have pressures. Well sure, I'd like better recommendations. I would like to learn about new authors on the basis of other people who are reading things like mine. Although Neal is a very good source of reading recommendations, but do I really want them to know all of the other things that in fact might allow them to make better recommendations for me? What is that boundary? How do I understand that boundary?

Rebecca Parsons:

And it's amazing the number of people who sort of blindly think, well of course that they will work in my best interest or of course this is subjective. Well, no it's not. And we as the people who are in this loop need to start to think differently about who we are allowing to access our data. How are we interacting with these different organizations? And there's a tension between privacy and security and transparency and how do we manage that tension and that's going to be an increasing part of the public conversation.

Neal Ford:

Well, I liked the name in particular for this one because it's about reassembling trust because the implication here is that we had it for a while and then eroded in a terrible way and now we've got to carefully repiece it back together a bit at a time. And you're right, I mean we rushed headlong into the benefits of social networking and all these benefits without really fully understanding the consequences of this both in good ways and bad ways. So we naively went into this, but then they were bad players, too. Doing things like taking a piece of information that's used purely for authentication, but then turning around and marketing to that is just a violation of exactly the kind of trust you're talking about. So I think it's contingent on both sides to, for consumers to be much more wary of what's going on. I think one of the observations that came out recently was particularly for social media, how has you pay for that social media account? Nothing.

Mike Mason:

Zero, right?

Neal Ford:

That means you're the product.

Mike Mason:

Exactly.

Neal Ford:

And so you got to be careful to realize that you're the product and sometimes that's beneficial but sometimes it's not and it benefits only them. And so reassembling that trust relationship between the media companies and consumers I think is going to be a journey that we're going to be on for the next couple of years at least to one.

Mike Mason:

And I think trust is important, not just for kind of the media startups and so on. But also so for the big incumbents, we were having a conversation a couple of days ago, the big banks are all actually quite nervous because there's all these new upstarts kind of in the banking space. And with sort of the ease with which you can create a business these days, they're really asking themselves, "Well, what do we have? What are our advantages as an incumbent?" And in a lot of cases that is history with consumers, a good brand name and your brand is how you feel about a particular company. And a lot of times that's to do with trusting them. There's also the fact that in a lot of industries, a lot of regulations and stuff like that, so a bank would have some, a bit of a technical leg up because they have some of those things in place. But really brand is hugely important these days and maintaining that and leveraging it can can help you stay ahead of the competition.

Zhamak Dehghani:

And I think on the architectural level, establishing trust is going, what the techniques to establish trust is going through the same maturity that probably we as humans have gone through in terms of establishing trusts. We have born with this giant brain. So we're disposition to trust our parents to take care of us because we can't take care of ourselves. And then our parents put that parameter around us, the house. So we trust everyone in the house and we don't trust the people outside of it. And then the parameter grows to the school and so on. And our systems and how organizations establish trust or provided security was the same way. You had one system with a giant brain and it was fine to put a parameter around it. But now that computing fabric has become so complacent with systems and your premise or system on the Cloud, the different SAS providers you're using and how do you establish trust when you have this complex network of communications and the techniques and the things you, Rebecca, you are talking about is super important.

Zhamak Dehghani:

The transparency and also how you establish trust and identifying, "Who am I providing a service to, who am I providing my data to?"

Mike Mason:

So I was at a conference last week and Eric Schmidt was there talking about a whole bunch of Google and alphabet things. And he got asked a question about smart cities, right? Which is sort of what's interesting here is all of these topics intersect, right? So he got asked about smart cities and said... well, some people are nervous about the Google's and the IBM's of the world providing smart city infrastructure because then they're going to own data and data is the new oil or data is the most powerful thing that we have these days. And he said, he was very careful in his answer, right? He said, "Well, the cities own that data." And that was all he said. And he didn't get pushed any further in that interview, but he didn't say, "The data's not on Google servers or we won't do X or Y with it."

Mike Mason:

I thought it was quite a calculated response. And if you're not looking for those kinds of things, personally, I think the really good thing that's happening in this space is the consumers are now getting more and more switched on to the importance of privacy and are going to start demanding that more. And frankly, I think this is going to take regulation. I don't think it's going to happen through just pure market forces because I think the companies involved have shown that they are pretty willing to do the wrong thing in the name of kind of commercial success. And I think it's going to take regulation and citizen pressure through government to actually reign it all back in.

Rebecca Parsons:

Well, I hope you all have enjoyed this edition of the Thoughtworks podcasts. Thank you all for joining me.

Mike Mason:

Thank you.

Neal Ford:

Thanks for listening.

Alexey Boas:

Thank you, bye.