Constellation Connected Enterprise 2017 is kicking off today with a series of keynotes and panel discussions focused on exponential technologies—blockchain, AI, self-driving software and more. Here's a recap of the first half of the day.
Provocative thoughts on blockchain:
Constellation VP and principal analyst Steve Wilson moderated a lively panel of practictioners with hands-on, real-world experience with blockchain and distributed ledger technologies.
"Bitccoin is to blockchain what AOL chat was to the Internet," said Richie Etwaru, CDO of Quintilesims and author of a new book on blockchain's potential to impact commerce on a global scale. "The killer apps are on the trust side," Etwaru said. "[With blockchain] people aren't trying to build a new product or a new company. They're redesigning entire industries from the ground up. ... People are building completely new business networks and it's in the hands of the youth."
It's important to understand that blockchain can have more than one killer application within an industry, said David Chou, chief information and digital officer at Children's Mercy Hospital. "From the healthcare perspective, we're trying to tackle the big elephant of patient data, but you could break it down further into areas such as doctor credentialing," he says.
Once one gains a baseline understanding of blockchain's purpose, imagination must come into play, said Melanie Nuce, VP of corporate development at GS1 US.
"Intellectual curiosity is at a deficit in our society today," Nuce said. "The only way I can get supply chain people to udnerstand blockchain today is to talk about order-to-cash. I don't want them to reinvent what they're doing today on blockchain, I want them to do something different."
Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri on building a winning culture:
Bhusri was the youngest person on Workday's management team over his past five years as CEO, he told Constellation founder and CEO R "Ray" Wang during a fireside chat. Also, four or five years ago, instead of having an eight to 10-member senior management, Workday went to a 20 person team, with each senior executive essentially shadowing a younger individual tabbed to eventually replace them as they step back to different roles.
This dynamic played out very recently as longtime CTO Stan Swete ceded the chair to Joe Korngiebel. "It's bulky and cumbersome, but necessary to build that next generation," Bhusri said.
Workday's toughest decisions have always been around people—when to hire, when to fire. The company has nine percent turnover in Silicon Valley, an outlier by any standard, and less than three percent turnover in its Dublin operations. Half of the company is new within the past two-and-a-half years, including half the managers.
"We saw our culture under assault, mostly from the new manageers not knowing how to manage," and has been decisive but generous when parting ways with people, Bhusri said. Individual contributors, from developers to sales people, "do all the real work," he added. Workday seeks to bring on managers it believes are close to a 100 percent fit for the job—not 80 or 90 percent. "An 80 or 90 percenter will have problems," Bhusri said. Workday believes its employee-first approach is translating to happier customers.
Assessing the state of AI:
A number of panels on day one focused on machine learning and artificial intelligence. Panelists were asked for their preferred definition of the state of AI in 2017. "If AI could actually speak it would be like Bones in Star Trek," said Jana Eggers, CEO of AI startup Nara Logics. "It would say, 'I'm a mass, not a sentient being.' AI is a tool, it's not this oracle. I think we get that confused often. We are the people that use the tool."
Other panelists echoed the sentiment. "At this point we're still at the augmented intelligence level, where we make the decisions," said Bernt Wahl, executive director of the Brain Machine Consortium. "But in the future, more of those decisions will be made by autonomous entitites."
The question of ethics in AI came up multiple times on day one. Panelists emphasized that an AI system's results should always be tempered with skepticism. "We need to recognize that machine learning is only as good as the data fed into it," said David Bray, executive director, People-Centered Internet. Bray pointed to FaceApp, a an app developed in Russian that makes anyone's skin complexion lighter if they hit the "beautify" button. The data informing FaceApp's algorithms "may have been nondiverse," Bray noted.
