Concepts in a digital world, part 1

- Welcome to ITProTv, I'm your host... (hosts chattering) (bright music fades in) - [Announcer] You're watching ITProTV. - Hello everyone, welcome back to another exciting edition of ITProTV. I'm your host Vonne Smith, and we're in our VeriSM Professional series, and in this episode we're going to take a look at concepts in a digital world, and here Miss Worldly herself is Miss Jo Peacock. - I thought you were going to say Miss World there, I was going to say, "No, no, no, I'm far from that." (both laughing) - And then I realize like, "What's Miss Worldly?" I don't even know. (both laughing) - It's for all fat grannys. No, that's what it is, yeah. (both laughing) - You are wise, you're very wise and have lots of experience within this area. - Okay, all right, I'll take that one. How are you, Vonne, anyway? (both laughing) - I'm good, I'm excited to kind of, like, get into the meat of the particular topic area of the exam. - And by the way, you went "ching," I'm not paying you for that particular compliment, that was just you digging yourself out of a hole. - Oh man, okay, so that was only for that last episode. - Oh. Yeah, only for the last one. Yes, we are, you're right, we are going to, now start exploring sort of, you know, VeriSM itself was going to be, well, making our way through the exam syllabus that we showed you in the last episode, and we're going to start off by looking at the digital side of IT now. We're going to start off with a concept that I know that you are familiar with, we're going to start off with something called VUCA. - Oh yes, another acronym. - Do you remember? Yeah, it's another acronym, right. - Yes. - V-U-C-A, that's the acronym. Do you remember what it stands for? - Oh gosh, here we go. (chuckles) Volatile. - Yeah, okay. - Volatility, right? - That goes great. - Uncertainty. - Uncertainty, yeah. - Confusion, I always say confusion- - 'Cause she's confused. - But I know it's not confusion, it's- - It's not confusion, no. It's something's kind of, you know, made up of all sorts of little bits. - Oh, complex, complexity. - Right. - Okay. - Yes, complexity and ambiguity. - Ambiguity, right, okay. - Which really is confusion, so. (both laughing) - Yeah, that's what VUCA stands for. VUCA is a term, do you remember, we've covered this in another series, which is why I know that Vonne's familiar with this. This is why I kind of put her on the spot, we also covered this in the Foundation series as well, the VeriSM Foundation series. VUCA stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity. It originated in the U.S., I don't know, I can't remember whether it was the Army or whether it was the Air Force originally, which it's a term that they use when they are going into territories where they simply don't know what's happening. I use the picture here of volcano, I believe that that's Kilauea, I believe, that was what I looked for when I looked for a picture of volcano, is purely because I like Hawaii, no other reason to that, because the image of a volcano sums this up perfectly, 'cause when we think about a volcano, we never know when a volcano is going to go off, it really is in the hands of mother nature, isn't it? But we haven't got a clue when it's going to happen. Now, sure, we can predict up to a certain point, but only up to a certain point, we can tell when seismic activity is starting to increase, but we don't know exactly when it's going to erupt, so it is volatile. We don't know how big the eruption is going to be or how small the eruption is going to be, so there's definitely an uncertainty to it, and the complexity in this, if we think about, you know, what lies underneath a volcano, you think of all of the lava tubes and all of, well, I mean, let's face it, the earth is just one big ball of magma, and so how is that actually, you know, underneath the earth crust, how is that getting through to the surface and what sort of channels are being used? How complex are those channels? We really don't know. So we have that ambiguity of that uncertainty as well, we really don't know, and this is why I use the volcano picture, because that kind of sums it up completely, but think about disruption from technology, the impact of digitization, of being digital, comes from that disruption, doesn't come from the technology itself, it actually comes from disruption. Let me give you an example to this one. Have you ever been given something new and you don't know how to use it? - (laughs) Yes, and then I get really frustrated. (laughs) - Right, and what's the first thing that we do? Who do we blame? - We blame them. - Them, them. It's them- - Whoever made it. - Right, whoever made it, we generally blame the technology. Somebody's given me a new laptop, somebody's given me a new phone, somebody's given me something to use, I don't know how to use it, so we blame the technology, but it's not the technology that's actually to blame, it's the fact that we have been disrupted. So is there anything that we can do to prevent that disruption as service providers, is there anything that we can do? - As a service provider? - Yeah. - Mm, proper documentation. - Right. - Instructions. - Training, yeah. - I think that would probably be the biggest one. - Well, planning. - Planning, mm-hmm. - Yeah, I mean project planning. If we're implementing something new, I mean, communication, yeah? Planning, telling people when they're going to get something, then managing their expectations, telling them what they're going to get and how they are expected to make best use of it will minimize that disruption. - And I don't know if this is the right place to say this, but there's the responsibility of the user. It's like, "Did I read the user's manual before I turned it on?" - No, no, No. - No, never! You know? So they probably documented it for me, but I didn't read it, and then I'm like, "This isn't working," and then you go back like, "Oh, I was supposed to hit this button first," and then everything works perfectly. - Yeah, yeah. I mean, you say that there was probably documentation, sometimes there isn't, and in really bad projects then, you can't always be assured that there is going to be documentation available for you, but nevertheless, it's that disruption that we've got to minimize, however, we've got to also recognize the disruption as well, and we see that disruption all over the world in many, many different, you know, many different areas, many different fields, and it's all brought about by technology. Have you ever been into a parking lot where all of the, or car park where all of the tickets, all the ticketing is completely automated? - Oh yes. - Yeah, and then what happens when there's a problem? - (laughs) There's nobody to call. - (laughs) There's nobody to call, you end up getting a ticket or you might get a clamp on the car, or what you call it, I think you call it a boot, don't you? - Mm, oh, when they put the thing on your tire? - Right. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Yeah. You know, you might even end up getting the car towed, for instance, or, best-case scenario, you just cause a huge queue at the exit to the car park because the machine's not working or you can't pay. It's that disruption by technology, the disruption of technology, it's not the technology itself, it's the fact that we don't know what to do when it goes wrong in that instance, there's not a lot that you can do without technology now. If I think about, you know, I had this discussion at home actually just the other day, and I was told that, "No, I can still drive this car, I don't need IT, I don't need to know how to use IT in order to drive the car." Okay, maybe you don't need to know how to use IT in order to drive the car, but without IT you're not driving anywhere because you're not getting any fuel in the car, you can't pay for fuel, you can't actually have the fuel shipped to the petrol station or to the gas station, you cannot simply get any fuel into the car without technology, and the car that we have, no, you can't drive it without technology 'cause it's got a nice big display on it, and trust me, it's got to recognize the digital chip in that particular key before it's going to start anyway, so technology's everywhere now. - Yeah, and isn't that the first thing when you take your car to the dealership, nowadays- - They plug it in, right? - Yes. You have a diagnostics fee, and they just, bloop, and they spit out all this stuff, so your car runs on technology with how it's built, the gas, all of it. - Everything, everything is technology-based now. There's very, very few things that aren't technology based. I mean, even if you want to cook your dinner, you know, it's technology based, you have got some sort of technology in that oven that you're using to cook your dinner. If you want to go to the doctor's, there's technology involved in the doctor's now, everything is technology. - Even in this book- - Where? - You had to order it on Amazon, right? - Right. - It had to be delivered and it had to be, the post office had to have their routes all through their computers and everything. It's like, "Oh, but this is analog." (laughs) But wait. - Yeah, right, absolutely everything involves technology now and we cannot be certain about all of our technology, as much as we'd like to think that we can, we simply can't. How many times has technology failed? Just the other week I got a letter through the post, you know, a a piece of paper, a hard copy, a letter through the post advising me that I'd had a fine because I'd skipped a toll road in Florida, and then the picture that they gave me wasn't even my car, and it's not even a car I've ever owned before, and it certainly wasn't my registration plate, but hey, apparently I've got the fine. Technology fails and when technology fails, it's disruptive. When we implement new technology, it's disruptive. So the impact of digitization comes from the disruption, but I've talked about disruption in a negative way. What about the positive disruption of technology? That technology that we're all clamoring to get our hands on because we can't wait to use the new features. You know, when Apple launch a new iPhone, or when Samsung launched a new phone, and everybody's clamoring to get their hands on it because they know that it's going to help them achieve a certain outcome. The new release of that software that you know it's going to help you achieve a certain outcome, disruption is positive, it's not just negative. That new car that you want to buy 'cause it's going to help you parallel park, there's a lot of people that could benefit from that, by the way, (laughs) because, why are you shaking your head? - I can't parallel park, (laughs) so I would definitely, I need that, yeah, so. I'm really bad at it. (Jo laughs) Don't judge. - I'm not, yeah, I'm not saying anything. - I see your eyes. - Yeah, I'm judging, I'm definitely judging on this one. But the fact is that disruption can be a positive as well as a negative thing. So the next slide that I want to bring up is, well, it goes, it talks about VUCA again, the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, but look at the predictability and the knowledge. You'll see that that that moves, predictability and knowledge actually move. So let's take a look at predictability then. How predictable is something that's incredibly volatile and something that's complex? How, so if I can move my arrow here, it's not a very big cursor, unfortunately, but if I look up here in this particular half of this graph, how predictable is something that's complex, technology that's complex and volatile, subject to change? How predictable is it? - Well, it depends on how much you plan, I guess- - Right. - But. - Invariably not very. - Yeah. - If something's volatile, if it's subject to change frequently, and it's complex, then it's probably not going to be particularly predictable. Whereas, you know, something can be ambiguous but still fairly predictable, so we know we are going to get an update every month, but we just don't know what's in it, we're uncertain about it. So it can still be predictable, but if it's complex and it's volatile, in other words, we don't know and it's complex, it's probably not going to be incredibly predictable. - And it could be you predicted this change, which you didn't realize the complexity of how it affected everything else- - Right. - The kind of outliers that make it more complex than you think it is. - Yeah, yeah. And then if we take the look at the knowledge at the bottom there as well, well, and I've just knocked my glasses over. If I take a look at this knowledge and I see that something that is complex and ambiguous, where we don't know something, then unfortunately, if it's ambiguous as well as complex, we're not going to have a lot of knowledge. As I say, we don't know, you know? That's exactly the phrase that I'd use. Whereas if something is volatile and it's uncertain, so it's unpredictable, we don't know exactly when it's going to happen, and it might be volatile, it might be subject to change, we can still understand what that change is. As long as we don't have the ambiguity, we can still understand what the change is. So the chances those are, chances of us having knowledge are a lot higher. Does that make sense? - I'm totally thinking about hockey right now. (laughs) - Okay, all right. - I'm like what? Well, the uncertainty and the volatility, I mean, all of this is like if you're playing hockey or you're watching hockey, I know that if they score a goal, it's going to change the game, so I know it's going to happen, but I don't know when it's going to happen. - Yeah. - It's super complex with all the people running around, and it's volatile because you could score twice in 30 seconds, and then another team won't score the whole time. So it is just kind of like, "Oh, hockey." (Jo laughs) It's the Stanley Cup playoffs right now, from when it's recording and I'm in, Go Lightning. Okay, got my one plug. - And if you know what any of that means, please feel free to email, jo@itprotv. (both laughing) I would, yeah, I would love to have an explanation for that. - But the whole idea of, like, those different lines, I'm like, "Oh," it just, like, clicked for me, in something that I can relate to, of, like, the uncertainty and volatile, and I'm like, 'cause it's, oh, it's all just kind of confusion. - Right. - But wait, but when you kind of break it down into the different kind of quadrants, and the volatile, and uncertainty, I'm like, "Oh yeah, that makes sense." - This is why I use the image of the volcano, to be perfectly honest, because as far as, you know, that I want to take it out of IT for a moment and put it into something like a, you know, a volcano, put it into the perspective of anything that's just not IT. Because we realize that actually this is normal life now, this is normal, you can relate it to hockey, you can relate it to a volcano, you can relate it to pretty much anything, in that unexpected, or expect the unexpected because we simply don't know what's going to happen, but we want to try and be as knowledgeable as we can so that when something does happen, no matter what it is, then we're prepared for it. You see, I've got here a, just a list of what, you know, what digitization could mean, and I use the word could because we see digitization, digital transformation in every walk of life, and I've already discussed, you can't get into a car, you cannot drive anywhere without, you know, digitization, you cannot go to the doctor's without some form of technology. You can't go grocery shopping without some form of technology. I mean, if I look at all of this automation, we automatically think about automation in as much as, "Oh, there are going to be robots taking over my jobs" Yeah, we've heard about that, we've always heard, we always hear that in relation to sort of, you know, maybe manufacturing work, the robots are taking over our jobs, but actually if we think about this, where the little more of an objective perspective, you'll see that it's not just in manufacturing. If you work on a service desk or a help desk environment, then I want request fulfillment, I want request management to be as automated as possible because it then frees up my team to be able to do something else. So I actually want to encourage automation, not just in the manufacturing industry, but automate as much as possible. Just be careful though, because then we get into that situation where if you automate too much, you end up with a huge queue of cars just waiting at the exit to the parking lot. - I was just thinking of the parking lot analogy that you made. - Right. - Yeah. - Yeah. - It is great until, like, you go a little too far where there's not somebody, there's not like one manned exit or somebody on staff ready to service if anything goes down. - Right. - Yeah. - One of the challenges that we have is getting the balance of digitization right, in that if we over automate, if we bring in IT and technology, and rely on it too much without that human intervention, then unfortunately things can go wrong, and you know, it's not that we can't rely on technology, but you know, technology is only ever as good as how it's been programmed, and if it's been programmed and it has a flaw in it, then unfortunately technology is not going to be that reliable, and we talk about technology and digitization in terms of sociotechnical evolution. How do you talk to your friends? - Like, my real friends? (laughs) - She hasn't got any. She hasn't got any. - I got- - We just making them up for the case of this particular episode. - My cats love me. (laughs) - Does not help. - I know where you're going, Jo. - How do you talk to friends? - Mostly, it's a lot of texting. - It's a lot of texting. - A lot of texting. - Right. - Or maybe social media. - Yes. - Now, I mean, I'm 4,000 miles away from most, well, from all of my family, so I use social media all the time to keep in touch with them, to see photographs of, you know, new babies that have been born or new dogs that they've got, 'cause I'm more interested in the dogs than the baby, but anyway. (laughs) So, she's the same with cats. - I know, oh yeah. - So, you know, I use social media all the time, so do you, all right? I'm not the only person that uses social media, we all do, we all are online all the time, we use social media to keep in touch with our friends, we can't keep in touch with our friends without social media or without technology. Yeah, okay, 30 years ago we'd sit on the bottom of the stairs in the house, right? With a house phone glued to our ear and we talked to our friends. Yeah, that was 30 years ago, 40 years ago, not anymore, now we use text messages, we use instant messaging, we use other forms of digital communication to keep in touch with people. If we're arranging to meet somewhere, you send them a map now, it's really easy, you wouldn't do that 30 years ago. So digitization, technology's in absolutely everything. I mean, you know, where do you go if you want to know something nowadays? - You consult the oracle. - Right, 'cause, now it's called Google, isn't it? - Yeah. - That's what I say, this thing called Google, the internet. - [Both] Yes. - Yeah, that's why we talk about the proliferation of the internet. I mean, I don't know how these, I honestly don't know how I managed to survive throughout school without IT, without the internet doing my homework for me 'cause the internet's absolutely fantastic. - I know, we had to go to the library, and get the card catalog, the whole nine, yeah. - But yet, if I want to know something now, I go to the internet, and it's not just about wanting to know current events, right? I am not interested. Well, no, I am interested, I shouldn't say this, but I'm kind of fed up with seeing about, you know, the latest evolution of Brexit, for instance, which, you know, happened, is happening right now as we are, I'm going to film, but I'm fed up with seeing all about that, but if I want to take a look at a template for a service-level agreement, for instance, for the manufacturing industry, then it's really easy for me now to Google just that. I simply type in, "I want SLA template for manufacturing industry," and guess what? Google's going to give me possibly hundreds of different versions of service-level agreement template. - Yeah. You know, while you were talking earlier, I was doing the same thing because you're B-Y-O-X, I'm like, "I don't know what that means." Do, do, do, do, (laughs) and I had to look it up, and now- - I was going to ask you what that meant and now look at it. - Yeah, 'cause I'm just like, 'cause I was like, "If she asked me about that, I'm not going to know, so I'm going to look it up," and I guess it's bring your own everything. - Well it's BYOx, is bring your own- - Whatever. - Whatever. - The X. - Yeah, yeah. Because sometimes it's BYOD, bring your own device, and a lot of organizations will use BYOD, so instead of them having to pay and to buy for lots of different devices because everybody's got different needs, then a lot of organizations will say, "Well, look, bring your own and we'll actually give you an allowance, and you bring your own, and it's yours, and then you manage the backup," so you have to manage certain compatibility issues and you have to make sure that it's up to date with virus protection and that sort of thing. So a lot of organizations are doing that now, and some organizations simply don't want the hassle of maintaining lots of different platforms. We're quite lucky because the role that we play here at ITProTV, we all have different requirements, some of us are teaching Microsoft and need windows, some of us are teaching, well, I mean yourself, you know, you do a lot of Microsoft work, some of us, well, you know what? We are ingrained in Apple and we're sort of firmly entrenched in that, and so we have Apple devices and so we have, you know, our laptops, we have iPads, we have cell phones, and so we are sort of firmly entrenched in that, and we are really lucky because of the sort of work that we do, we can pretty much have what we want rather what we need. Some organizations actually prefer to shy away from management of all of that and say you can have whatever device you are familiar with, but you bring it yourself, which is where BYOD or BYOx really, because it could be, it doesn't necessarily have to be a laptop, it could be tablet. I want to go back to talking about that proliferation of the internet, 'cause I want to bring it into knowledge management and education, and I want to put a word of warning out there, because a lot of organizations will have some form of knowledge management database, a knowledge management database. Is it a physical entity or is it something that is logical? Knowledge management is a logical concept and it refers to the ability to access knowledge, ensuring that the right information is available at the right time, to enable an informed decision, that's what knowledge management is about, it's about being able to make decisions, having the information at our fingertips, so knowledge management itself is about being able to find that information no matter what database it's in. Now, when we're inside an organization, if we want to know something about that organization, then invariably we can search either on things like SharePoint sites, for instance, or dropboxes, we can search in various places, OneDrive, you know, for that organization, and that's where we would find the definitive answer to our question is, "How do I do this? How do I create something new for our marketing team?" For instance, then there is a process for that in our OneDrive repository, in our SharePoint repository. We know, well, we assume that that's accurate. The word of warning that I want to give you though is you could think of Google as being that knowledge management system for the world, and it's a search engine, it doesn't matter what search engine you use, by the way, but you could think of that as being the, you know, the knowledge management system for the world. However, how do we know that the information that you are accessing is accurate? Is it accurate, and how can you be assured of that? You see, what we have on the internet is simply, quite simply put, somebody else's opinion, that's what you've got out there on the internet. Now, sometimes that opinion is not opinion, it's actually factual, but sometimes it is just an opinion. I always issue a caveat when I tell people about, you know, revising or studying for exams. I'll always say to people, "Be careful what you find out there on the internet, and unless it's come from the examination board, then you cannot be assured of the accuracy of the information." There are a lot of people out there that will, with all good intent, create sample exam papers, unfortunately, unless they've actually had the seal of approval from the examination board, they could be wrong, and invariably there's something in those papers and in those questions that is wrong. So I always tell people to avoid them like the plague because they have not been endorsed and you cannot guarantee that they're right, and that could actually have you heading off down the wrong path when you are, you know, looking for ways to study. So I tell people to be very, very wary of that. But the internet is, it's a, I mean, it's a whole smorgasboard of information, but not all of it's true, so when we tie in sort of knowledge management in with the proliferation of the internet, I just want you to be careful because the information that's out there is not necessarily right for you, and I mentioned about, you know, I'm going to go and look for a template for an SLA on Google and it'll bring me a a whole raft of templates for an SLA, you have to select the one that's probably the most appropriate for your organization, and I use the word probably deliberately there because there's nothing that's going to be an exact fit for your organization. What you have to do is probably take that and then adapt it to suit your organization. Nothing is plug & play, there's no one-size-fits-all when it comes to something like a service-level agreement. So the internet is really useful as a knowledge management tool, but it can also be incredibly dangerous as well, and I'm not just talking about the dark web, I'm talking about the information that we're actually searching for. So the next point there is, well, new methods of communication. How good are you at embracing sort of new methods of communication? (both laughing) That'd be a no, then. (both laughing) - Change is always difficult, you know? - Right. - Change is something that, it's hard for people, "But this is the way I've been doing it for this long and now you're you're going to send me a text than a mail letter? Ugh." I know I'm going a little extreme here. - Right. - But it is difficult, it's hard to adapt when you're first changing over into anything new. - Yeah, no. It can be a challenge, new methods of communication, any method of communication can be a challenge, for instance, you know, we moved very, very quickly over the last few years, we've moved from sort of sending emails to now we send instant messages, and there was a point in time not too long ago when an email was considered an informal way of communicating with somebody, and now, however, the email is the formal way of communicating with somebody, and an instant message is the informal way of communicating with somebody. There's always something, there's always a change, and of course, we see that proliferation of voice activation as well. So we've got things like Siri, and we've got Alexa, and, you know, Google Assistant, and I mean, are they good, are they bad? I don't know what your experience is, some people's experience is good, some people's experience is bad. Me personally, I live in a world that's unfortunately foreign to me, and it's not that I don't understand technology, it's about the fact that technology doesn't understand me, and when I live in an environment where everybody speaks with one type of accent and I speak with a completely different type of accent, then me using one of those automated voice systems on any (indistinct) system, they don't work for me because it doesn't understand me, but we shouldn't be completely reluctant to use new technology. New technology is coming whether we like it or not, and so we have to embrace it, and we're going to talk about this as we get into sort of the meat of VeriSM, we'll talk about how we ensure that we do embrace new technology while still embracing a framework to manage that new technology. - Yeah, it's like the people, like, I'd rather have a conversation with somebody because how you inflect your voice and how you say things or emphasize certain words has a completely different context that if you read that line. I've had the same problem, you read an email and you're like, "That person's, like, yelling at, they're being so rude," and then when you actually, like, talk to them in person, it's like, "Oh wait, that's not." So sometimes the translation, the speaking in different accents, it does have, there is a little bit of friction sometimes. - Right. - Yes. - But then we've got emojis, so what more do you want? (both laughing) Okay. - And pictures are stronger than words- - Right. - Or whatever the saying is. - Yeah, a picture- - A thousand- - A picture means a thousand words or something like that, yeah. But yeah, we got emojis, I mean, why on earth do you need to worry about inflection of voice when you can put a smiley face at the end? - Yeah, you always, - or the words- - Or the winks. - That are placed. - Ha! (both laughing) So, you know, there are different ways of, I will never forget. So I mean, I'm old, and my daughter, when she first got a mobile phone, and I said to her, I said, "When you text me, I am not going to answer you if you text in abbreviations, full words, full words," and now I find myself doing it all the time, so, I mean, you know, I'm a hypocrite as well. (both laughing) - Yeah, but adapting- - But- - To that change in how we communicate, yeah, at first like, "No," but then, the more you get into, it's like, "That's actually a lot easier." - Yeah, it's a lot easier and it's lazy, but okay, I'll go do that. - It's efficient. It's not lazy. - It's efficient, it's not lazy, it's efficient. Well, it is, and there again, there's that evolution in that, I mean, I talk about evolution of value concept in a second, but it is that evolution in that I would never, I never ever saw that as being invaluable to me and now, or the use of abbreviations and now it's efficient and as long as I'm not using it in formal communication, I'm okay with that. - It's kind of like if your daughter sends you a quick little text when she gets home, that's valuable to you. Like, "Oh, okay, at least I know that she just checked in." She didn't have to phone call, she didn't have to wake me up, but I got a text message that verifies she's okay. - I'm lucky if she checks in once a month. (both laughing) I know what you're talking about. (both laughing) And the evolution of the value concept though, that means something slightly different. What that actually means is that in IT, as service providers, we are now more firmly focused on value and what value means to the business. If I think about how IT used to be before technology became so prolific, and it used to be a case of, "We will give you something that will manage your finances," that's what we used to do, we'd give the business something that would manage their finances and we wouldn't give them any choice, here is SAP, or here is Oracle, and this will manage your finances for you, and the business basically had to sort of, you know, like it or lump it, it this is what they got and this was how they were going to manage their finances, and the business quite often had to adapt their processes to fit the technology, not anymore. Since the evolution of ITIL and since, you know, that became so prolific, and also now that we are in a very consumerist environment, you find that it's really down to what I value, what me as a person values, and what the business values, and what I value is not something that's cumbersome and easy to use, and what I value is not you telling me what to use, it's that me, I should be giving you my requirements and you should come up with something that meets those requirements. So that evolution of value concept is quite an important one because it puts the emphasis back onto the business, it's what the business want in order to be able to meet their goals, it's not about what we, as IT providers, want to actually supply, it's what the business wants. We've already talked about internet of things and BYOx. Are you familiar with internet of things, IoT? - Mm-hmm, yeah. - Yes. - It's your home automation, it's your thermostats that you can control for your phone. It's the, they're all connected through the internet. - Everything's now on the internet. - You can turn on your toaster, stuff like that. - Right, yeah. You can actually boil a kettle now from the comfort of your own home. However, the internet of things has not quite, this automation's not quite managed to fill the kettle up for me yet, when it does, then I will be happy, but until then I'm going to have to get up, fill up the kettle, and then I'll pick my phone up and then turn it on, that's what I do. (both laughing) But that's what we mean by IoT. Like you say, all the home automation stuff, and the automation that we have around the office that everything's connected to the internet, which does actually produce security risks as well, it presents quite a lot of security risks. I mean, I've had cameras in my home for many years now and I can tell you now that one time I logged onto a camera at home and found myself in a place in Thailand, all of a sudden, luckily it was a car garage, it was some sort of workshop or something, it could have been a lot worse, it could have been somebody's home, which wouldn't have been a pleasant thing for them, but because we talk about the internet of things and everything's connected to the internet, then unfortunately it means that, you know, security is an issue. So what about big data then? Big data, you know, many years ago we used to have these concepts called mainframes and we still have them in certain environments such as banks and retail sector. Well, big data is pretty much, essentially, that it's having our data in one place, it's having data in a place where we can compare data with potentially other environments, potentially our competitors, or even just the industry sector, it's been able to manage, it's been able to process our data in large chunks rather than having everything in sort of, you know, either small servers or even having a lot of your information on your desktops, it's actually having that information either in the cloud or having information on our mainframe service, and then we talk about AI, artificial intelligence. When we think about AI, we think about robots running around everywhere, but that's actually not what artificial intelligence means. Artificial intelligence, I want you to think about machine learning, when we talk about artificial intelligence, where your machine learns what you like. We've had this conversation in the office a few times now, haven't we? About the fact that we know that Siri is listening to us and we know that Siri is listening to us because we'll have a conversation and all of a sudden there'll be adverts that pop up on our screen to do with whatever it is that we had a conversation about. - And then Facebook or any other app that you have on your phone, it's listening, it's not necessarily always, like, the device, it's maybe sometimes the apps that you have loaded on there that are out there. - Yeah. - Just microphone is on. - Right, and that's just one example of machine learning, where it's learning what you are talking about and it's actually doing something based off that. I mean, Siri the other day called my brother at 11:30 pm, his time, the other night for no reason whatsoever, which I'm sure wasn't particularly pleasant for him anyway, but- - You can go with, like, the auto-correct too, like certain words that you type that are not, like, regular words, it's like after a while it recognizes like, no, that's your word. - Right. - And then it auto-corrects that. - Yes, and that's exactly what machine learning is. You know, we use machine learning to do the auto-correction, it'll add words to a dictionary, for instance, after you've used it so many times it just adds it to the dictionary and says, "Okay, this is a common word, I see that they've, you know, that they've used this quite often," and then I've already mentioned social media 'cause we talked about the socio-technical evolution, I'm not really going to talk too much about that because, well, if anything at all, because we all know that social media is there and we all use it, let's face it, to talk to our friends, to keep in touch with our family. So this is what the digital age means, when we talk about the digital age, we talk about, if I could say it right, digital age, we talk about VUCA and we talk about all of this, but essentially the essence is that nothing is excluded from technology, technology's in everything now. So we're going to take a little bit of a break 'cause when we come back I want us to then think about how we actually succeed in that digital age, what success really means for the digital age. - Yeah, now you're making me realize we'll never be able to unplug, (chuckles) no matter what we do- - Nope. - But that's okay, we're just going to go ahead and keep on keeping on. So thank you, guys, for attending our session here, and we're going to go ahead and sign off. We're ITProTV, I've been your host, Vonne Smith. - And I'm Jo Peacock. - We'll see you soon. (upbeat music) - [Announcer] Thank you for watching ITProTV.