Remember personal web pages? Chock-full of genealogy, figurine collections, kite-flying tips, computer building experiences or just your endless holiday snaps – stuff that you couldn’t get away with talking about with your real-world friends. These sites were all designed and built by amateurs keen to connect to their fellow odd-balls on the World Wide Web.
I’ve taken to asking students in my analytics classes if any of them run a website or even a blog and, these days, I am more likely to be met with dumbfounded looks than knowing nods. MySpace and then Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter came along to help us manage our online presence for good or ill. So, we probably don’t all need our own www.lookinsidemybrain.com. But along the way we have become consumers rather than producers of content and have traded some of our creative power for convenience. And this, more than the evil of the tech giants, strikes me as a more compelling explanation of why we have got in such a mess with social media.
This story of our move away from self-reliance is, of course, as old as civilization. We don’t generally wish to cook from scratch, make our own clothes, or devise our own entertainment, instead outsourcing those things to the professionals. Again, this passivity and dependence reduces our power but we do gain convenience. And it’s even more than that, isn’t it? Sometimes a re-watch of “Breaking Bad” seems more entertaining than a game of charades after a hard day’s work. Sometimes the market just does it better. When I bemoaned my lack of carpentry skills to my father a few years ago, and wondered how he had become so accomplished, he replied “Because I had to!”. It turns out sawing and cursing away a Saturday afternoon, that could have been spent doing anything else, was for economics rather than passion. Who knew?
So, let those who want to code their own websites work away. Let those who wish to binge-watch Netflix do that. No judgement here, this is a safe space for couch potatoes, whose ranks I often join of a dreary, sodden Irish evening. Hopefully though, we do find ways to break out of our creative slumbers from time to time.
And I am not the only one to have felt the urge to move from consumer to doer. There is a thriving maker movement now, coding and designing, crafting and sculpting, welding and printing their way to their next creation. Many of my friends get much of their intellectual and creative stimulation through music, art and travel where they find respite from the pressures of making money and other responsibilities. And, in the sense, this is the best of all worlds as, those of us lucky enough to have leisure time, can choose how to use it.
But how does this relate to the world of business, you may well ask? Well, now you can get the latest ERP package as a service, keep all of your data in the cloud (where it is presumably managed by angels) and analyse everything from customer churn to revenue projections with a few mouse clicks. So perhaps it is it time, like the carpenters, website masters and seamstresses of yore, to hang up our tool belts and leave tech to the techies?
I say…..not just yet. As in our personal lives, it’s great to automate away all the stuff that is just painful and is, in any case, not going to differentiate you from your competitors. No need to manually balance the ledger for the year-end accounts on Christmas Eve, while Tiny Tim waits hungry at home. No need to install a quarter–ton server in a back-room to host your staff emails and pictures of the office party.
But what about the technology that you really would like to do something with, the ones that have your curiosity going, the ones that that, according to the breathless reports in the media, are about ot transform society and the economy adding trillions to GDP?…. the AI, the IoT, the eCommerce, the Blockchain. They all seems pretty interesting but are, one by one, fast turning into another set of mass market products that we are being sold. Again this is fine as far as it goes.
But what of your own business ideas, the ways you could imagine transforming your business if you could only somehow marry those ideas to these latest technologies? Well, if there was “an app for that”, by definition, everyone else would be using it anyway so it would just be part of the background – not exactly a recipe for innovation that will separate you from the crowd.
My favourite example of D.I.Y A.I (or DAIY) is the Japanese farmer, Makoto Koike who built a computer vision system to sort his cucumbers by size and shape, saving his family hours of back-breaking labour. You may prefer to stay indoors and work with customer, product or process data rather than cucumbers. That’s fine. The point is that you can use the new tools to find that internal effiicency or to build that compelling service that you can sell to your own customers. (Yes, as a consultant, I am contractually obliged to use the word “compelling” in every article.)
These days the software and the algorithms are already there. You just need a good business rationale and a way of slotting the pieces together to make something very interesting and useful. You don’t have to build things from scratch with a massive technical team and you don’t need an army of consultants to tell your ideas back to you. You don’t need to be a technical hands-on guy like Makoto either. I’m biased but I think that talking to small companies like Last Mile or making one or two good hires in this space is sufficient to get your A.I. capability up and running and your A.I. powered products released out into the wild.
Let the competition “Netflix and chill”. Time to take an active role in the technological destiny of your business.
