But billing seems to be a real problem for Telecommunications Carriers, and Verizon is no exception.  When we signed on to the new service plan at a local Verizon store, we signed up for electronic bill payment via our bank account.  Somehow, the computer systems the stores use isn’t synchronized well with the billing systems Verizon uses.  Sometime in January, I started getting messages from Verizon that my bill was overdue and my service would soon be terminated.  I took a call in my car in which it was explained that I was not on an electronic payment plan and my bill was two months past due.  We settled up the account on the phone and asked to be signed up, again, for electronic bill paying.  The service rep passed me onto another rep who completed the order.

Or so we thought.

In April, I got another call from Verizon with complaints that my bill was past due.  I said, “how can this be?  I signed up for electronic bill payment.  Don’t you ever execute your customers commands?”  The rep apologized and was very nice, explaining that I would need to go onto the Verizon website and register for electronic bill payment in order for it to be valid.  I settled up the account and on April 18, I logged on to myverizon.com and signed up my account, for the third time, to their electronic bill payment system.

The other day, I got another call from Verizon telling me my phone bill is past due.  Two months past due.  I told them I had signed up for electronic bill payment once in a store in November, once on the phone with a rep in January, and once more on their website.  Don’t any of their systems actually work I asked?  The rep checked the online record and did see that my account was signed up for electronic bill payment on April 18th.

Unfortunately, he informed me, electronic bill payment orders take 30 days to process.  “30 Days,” I said.  “I’ve been trying to do this for 6 months.”  How can a modern business function if it can’t process bills from customers in six months.  And what kind of convenience is it to sign up for a service on a website in less than 10 seconds if it takes 30 days thereafter to “process?”

Ladies and Gentlemen, we may be on the doorstep of a Digital Economy, but the old economy, with all its ugly inefficiencies is very much alive and well.

Verizon, get your billing act together.

But if feeding a family requires a “minimum wage” of $21/hour and workers are only paid $8.40, who makes up the difference?  That is, these minimum wage workers aren’t dying in our streets.

They are surviving.  Just.  But how?

Well, they get food stamps from the Federal Government, Head Start pays for childcare, State and Local housing assistance gets them, if they are lucky, into subsidized public housing, and Medicaid gets them health insurance.  Which means that when the US government sets a minimum wage for workers, society provides a safety net so they don’t starve, freeze without shelter, or die from illness.  That safety net subsidizes corporations to pay their workers a poverty wage, and those safety net services cost taxpayers far more (because giant government programs have administrative costs) than the cost of directly paying workers a liveable minimum wage.

And every time the minimum wage gets increased 50 cents or a dollar a year, and we continue to force workers to rely on government programs just to survive, we are just optimizing a failed corporate subsidy process.

But how much are those corporate subsidies costing us?

How much should the minimum wage exactly be?

How would a higher minimum wage really effect jobs and inflation?

How do higher wages effect economic competitiveness in other countries?

How many people on minimum wage are not getting the government services they should in order to survive?

And how might our economy function if we transitioned from the safety net to a safe wage above poverty?

These are the kinds of Big Insights I want Big Data to illustrate.  We have it in our grasp to start unravelling all the mysterious inefficiencies of our age with the raw computing power of Big Data.

For far too long, the data was too dispersed to find, too disparate to aggregate, too hard to search and analyse.  But those days are over.  Lets get on with it.

50 million Americans living in Poverty are waiting for those insights.

The agenda includes:

1. Making its off-Broadway debut, The IBA Use Case depicts the struggle between competing corporate
factions and ruthless market competition as IBA tries to rescue its information products business
from new competitors, customer flight, internal stovepipes, and antiquated business practices in the
age of Big Data. Watch how CEO Barney Greengrass duels CIO Galia Greener, and COO Milton Friedman
and SVP Nimrod Hacker struggle for legitimacy, as we the company try to design an effective
Information Strategy to save the business.

2. Ontologies arent just for Knowledge Management geeks! They are key to transforming your
information infrastructure from a collection of industrial data reservoirs into a web of
interconnected information insights and discoveries. Computers process information in linear, binary
form. Humans process information in associative, linked patterns of recognition. For the last few
years IBM has been pioneering new forms of information processing – Quantum Computing, Watson, Big
Data, and Ontologies. Ontologies are tools you can use right now to see and understand associative
links in your structured and unstructured information to help you know what you dont know, see
patterns and relationships hidden by structure, format, and data types, and provide intelligent
search in every corner of your enterprise.

3. The Future of Analytics. Analytics are going social. They are going viral. They will be
integrated into every business and IT process. There will be analytics of analytics, models of
models, and our industry needs more data scientists, analytic experts, and Information Strategists
to add meaning and understanding to the ubiquity of analytics that is our future. At IBM, we
understand these issues and are plotting an Information Strategy for the future that we want to
share with you and we look forward to your feedback.

This is a meeting of peers. The participants are LOB executives, data and information management
professionals, governance and compliance leaders, data scientists and information strategists.

Please bookmark the dates. An agenda with registration information will be distributed next week.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/23/us/alan-f-westin-scholar-who-defined-right-to-privacy-dies-at-83.html?hpw&_r=0

Last year was no exception.  We met at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm for 2.5 days, and I am including the conference notes from my session to provide an example of the excellent conversations these yearly summits provide.  I speak at many conferences throughout the world.  This is the only event that IBM does not run that keeps me coming back year after year.  Take a minute to read the comments of the speakers in this session and you may understand why.

1st Day  SESSION 3     Smarter Governments, Transformative Models & Big Data

Chair & Moderator:    Steven B. Adler, Program Director IBM Data Governance             Solutions, IBM, USA

Speakers:

Annika Bränström, Director General Bolagsverket – Agency Swedish Companies Registration Office; Chairman, eGovernment Delegation, Sweden
E-Government Practices and Future Direction in Sweden

Latif Ladid, President IPv6 Forum; Senior Researcher University of Luxemburg, Luxemburg
Governments enabled with IPv6

Samia Melhem, Lead ICT Policy Specialist, Chair eDevelopment Group, Information and Communication Technologies Sector Unit, World Bank Group
Open Data and Big Data at the World Bank

Eikazu Niwano, Producer Research and Development Planning Department, NTT Corporation, Japan
“Omotenashi-Ozendate”: Towards Realizing Service Provider Driven eGovernment

Pascal Poitevin, Head of Department, Secretary Committee Strategy of Information Systems, Institut de l’Elevage, France
Livestock and Big data

Alan R. Shark, Executive Director Public Technology Institute – PTI; Associate Professor of Practice Rutgers University School of Public Affairs & Administration, USA
The “Big” Factor in Data, Civic Media: New Patterns of Governance

Anja Wyden Guelpa, Chancellor State of Geneva, Switzerland
Transformation Model: When a New Front End forces Back Office Changes

Day 1 – Afternoon – Parallel Session

Smarter Governments, Transformative Models & Big Data

Steven B. Adler, Program Director IBM Data Governance Solutions, IBM, USA, [www.ibm.com], moderating, welcomed the participants and opened the session with a series of questions to engage the audience.

When the financial crisis hit in October 2008… why were its causes and effects a surprise? When Greece couldn’t make its debt payments in 2009… why didn’t we foresee the impact on interest rates? Making predictions is difficult when we aren’t paying attention to what’s happening. And even when we are paying attention there is a significant lag between event and information.

There are ways that we can confront the need to predict crisis before they occur, as well as understanding crisis when we can’t predict them. One way of doing this is with “big data”.

Big data doesn’t’ just mean large data or lots of data. It is a very specific way of overcoming decades of IT dysfunction in information management by using very large scale computing to overcome structures and formats that have held us back from analysing large amounts of information in the past.

To give a theoretical example, imagine that there is a devastating earthquake in Perth, Australia, that destroys the whole region. Perth is a large mining center, they provide a lot of row materials to south east Asia. As soon as the earthquake occurs, markets will begin to price out. The impact of the earthquake on Australia as well as on the region because the disruption in the supply chain of row materials, of coal, of gold, of platinum, of copper, of iron, will have long-lasting effects throughout the region.

But markets are imperfect in their estimate of impacts. Today, we no longer have to rely solely on markets, because we can mind social media and Twitter feeds to understand at the moment exactly what people are talking about in the region, what manufacturers are talking about, the supposed impact on the supply chain. Furthermore, we can understand by studying logistical data which ships are in transit to Perth, which ships are in port, what they are carrying, what they maintenance record is, what their speed is, what their expectation in port is, what types of row materials are leaving Perth etc. All this information is available to us today. It is not often correlated this way, but it can be with big data.

We can also gather real time information on the scene from personnel in our company who are in the port of Perth taking pictures with their smart phones with GIS data, because each smart phone has a GPS chip in it. We can upload this data to our servers and immediately understand where the picture was taken, which port facility relates to, we can use image recognition to understand exactly which port facility that was, how much material is passing through that port and what the impact of this port destruction is on the supply chain.

We can also have the employees scour media reports in real time on their iPads, on their phones or on their computers, collecting this information and sending it to a centralized server. Using the metadata from the information we can analyse media reports from around the world and compare that to our other information to o get a clear picture of what people thing about what that crisis entails.

Also after the crisis, the employees may attend meeting and conferences. Their metadata allows to perform federated search on the meeting or conference they attended and index the larger contextual information to magnify their experience and provide richer context.

This information combines two kinds of ideas: treating human beings as sensors and big data analytics as actuators.

We can gather vast amounts of information across large geographies and analyse it at once. It doesn’t matter if this is structured information from a data base or unstructured information from an email or a live stream or feed or signal data. It can be video data that we can take apart frame by frame and use image recognition to identify all the people in the frame, take the audio feed out, convert it to text and mine the text. This can be done instantaneously. This is a revolution in data management. This is a really big thing and is going to change the way we are going to use information in the world.

Every day we are confronted with crises big and small and this technology can be applied to small crisis as well as big ones, or business purposes.

Some examples IBM was working on:

In Sweden, IBM helped manage traffic volume by using big data. Analysing signal data, real time feeds of cars travelling on roads was used to help the traffic systems allocate the cars more efficiently.

In Denmark IMB worked with Vestars, a large wind turbine manufacturers. Vestars used to employ lots of consultants to calculate the exact correct position of a wind mill farm, either off the coast, or on the coast or inland. And it used to take between 2 and 3 months to calculate the position of every turbine. Using big data, this can be done in 3 hours today.

IBM is using this technology not only for predictive analytics, for large crisis, but also for everyday business tasks are outsized operations.

Annika Bränström, Director General Bolagsverket – Agency Swedish Companies Registration Office; Chairman, eGovernment Delegation, Sweden, explained how Sweden is working on the e-government issues:

E-Government Practices and Future Direction in Sweden

Sweden is not a big country, with 9.5 million inhabitants and most people living in the southern part. 93 percent of the population have access to the Internet at home, 86 percent have access to broadband at home and 5 percent never used a computer. Swedish citizens are used to e-services, e-identification and e-signature. But still, there is a lot to do.

Sweden has 12 Ministries, but more than 250 autonomous government agencies. The government gives the framework for the different agencies as well as for the municipalities and regions. But, the agencies are autonomous, which means that when they decide about systems or procurement, they have to do it on their own. The government provides the rules, the framework and the regulation and some kind of funding, but until very recently, the agencies worked very much in silos.

Sweden has very good e-services. The country started to work with digital signatures in 2002. In 2012, 60 percent of the Swedish population used an e-service. However, when citizens want to use e-services in another municipality, they meet different standards, different interfaces and maybe slightly different interpretations and regulations.

The government found some years ago the need for some kind of delegation to put all these autonomous agencies together. There was a lot of duplication of works – every agency was doing almost the same in the efforts to increase efficiency and to develop more user-friendly interfaces for e-services. In 2009, the Swedish e-Government Delegation was appointed as inter-agency coordination organization. The goals and purposes are to make it as easy as possible for as many as possible, to use IT in the service of people, to simplify life for individuals and businesses, a smarter and more transparent public sector that supports innovation and participation, as well as an effective and more efficient public sector.

The director generals of the 16 most IT heavy public agencies in Sweden as well as the heads of municipalities were appointed to take part in the delegation.

The first thing the e-Government Delegation was asked to do was to draw up and develop a new IT strategy. It is still under negotiation in the government, but the Delegation continued to work as if the strategy has been adopted and many projects are already in place.

One of the main tasks of the Delegation is to coordinate all the works that are going on, in order to ensure that there will be only one solution for one problem. This is a rather challenging task as all agencies are autonomous with own financing.

There are approximately 4,5 million eIDs for a population of about 9 million. The private sector is the provider of eIDs and the public sector purchases authentication and e-signature services on a commercial usage basis. There is a big use of e-Ids in Sweden, but in the context of a global world and also to be in compliance with EU directives, Sweden has to come up with next generation e-IDs.

Verksamt.se is the Swedish business link to the government. There are 100,000 unique visits at verksamt.se per month.

Coordinating a lot of autonomous agencies, municipalities and regions is a real challenge. Especially because the Delegation does not receive any funding. Further challenges are regulation, even if the government provides its supports in this field, as well as architecture and standards. The delegation will end at the end of 2014 and should provide a proposition on how to continue afterwards.

Coming together is a beginning.
Keeping together is progress.
Working together is success.

Latif Ladid, President IPv6 Forum; Senior Researcher University of Luxemburg, Luxemburg, provided a great presentation of a very ambitious project:

Governments enabled with IPv6

“How can we make governments to be innovative and how can we update their networks” is a topic that has been addressed by a project funded by the EC. Partners of the project are some large governments, like Germany or Spain, as well as some smaller ones in order to have a kind of harmonization between the various stakeholders.

The issue is “why IPv6” and “why governments”. In terms of Internet, we have run out of IP addresses almost two years ago, from a central pool point of view. And in Europe we have run out of IP addresses already in September. It is like having a plane flying without kerosene, just cruising at that speed. It is just a question of how long this cruising is going to be happen. We have to make sure that the Internet not only continues to work but also to grow.

Why governments? Governments are the biggest ICT users and their purchase power is quite big. They can be the first, leading examples to ask the vendors and the service providers to provide them with IPv6, which will then help the industry to get business and create the business case for the next Internet.

How can we demonstrate this? Specific pilots will demonstrate how governments can move to the new Internet technology. Four national pilots and two cross-boarder pilots will be carried out in the following sequence: Germany and Spain will show how the networks of the governments can be upgraded. Another pilot will show how to use cloud services within the governments. A third one will demonstrate how to use this for increased energy efficiency. Another pilot will show how to use IPv6 for emergency services.

The two cross-border pilots look at how Europe can become more mobile, not only in terms of people moving from one place to another, but also businesses. The interconnection of national government backbones and European networks like sTESTA shall ensure a wider IPv6 readiness and interoperation for European cross-border services. Moreover, Public Safety Networks exploiting the greater benefits brought in to this critical sector by IPv6 features, such as “on the fly networking”. In Europe there is a big problem of interconnectivity between first responder communities (police, ambulances, army…). There is a European system called TETRA (in France Tetrapol). And here, the industry has forced the first responders communities, primarily in the US and that model then has been also used in Europe, that every vendor pushes the responders to use their own equipments with different frequencies (arguing that with different frequencies, nobody can interfere and nobody can disturb). But due to the different frequencies, they can not talk to each other… They use GSM instead, because GSM is basically interoperable and TETRA is not. Moreover, the TETRA equipment is rather heavy and bulky. Therefore, the London police for instance recently brought 60,000 iPhones. There is this problem in Europe, if there is a major incident and you want to fly different first responders to the crisis area, they can’t even talk to each other.

In order to avoid mistakes made in the “old” Internet, one has to know the history of the Internet. Elastic cloud computing has been designed by a team in Cape Town, South Africa. This South African team has seen that there are not much IP addresses to go around because you need end-to-end communications between the networks. So they created elastic cloud computing where you have a global IP-address and you can take it out and use it in other places, so there is no need to have many IP addresses. Amazon heard about this and hired the entire team. This is what created Amazon EC2, which is currently a proprietary model. All the other vendors doing cloud computing have similar proposals, but it is still proprietary.

What we have now is exactly what we had prior to the Internet: non-interoperable clouds, which are networks. And what we have to do now, is to create the real Intercloud, so that everybody can connect to it. But to do so, there is a need for enough IP-addresses and this is where IPv6 can solve the problem.

Samia Melhem, Lead ICT Policy Specialist, Chair eDevelopment Group, Information and Communication Technologies Sector Unit, World Bank Group, gave a detailed and passionate discussion on

Open Data and Big Data at the World Bank

The ICT unit of the World Bank is financing ICT applications and infrastructures for developing countries. The IT portfolio of the World Bank is increasing. More and more of the typical health, education or cultural projects contain large ICT components – in fact, 7 to 8 percent of each of these projects. The World Bank is investing more than $8 billion in ICT every year and thus has a big interest in the impact, results and in analysing how well these projects are going.

Success is not always obvious in large scale ICT deployments. A lot of these projects fail because they combine at the same time structural change, change management and installation of high tech equipment in countries and areas that are not always suitable or not ready for this – not having enough power, not having enough Internet infrastructure, bandwidth or skills.

In the last few years, the World Bank was more and more thinking, instead of doing this alone with governments, how to invite citizens, society, academics, think tanks to participate in order to maximize the chances of success. In 2008/2009 all these big movements of access to information, open data started to emerge. The UK was a pioneer, followed by the US with the open government mandate, and now more and more the Open Government Partnership. OGP is basically a growing set of governments who are complying to four main conditions of openness who are part of this partnership and more and more developing countries are joining it, such as Ghana or Kenya.

More and more of the governments the World Bank is dealing with are demanding help for coming up with smart government — smart government being defined as for “social”, so really invite the social media, the citizens, the beneficiary to be part of that government; “mobile, because mobile is so prevalent; for “analytics”, to analyse these huge amounts of data, to see what already exists and to make sense out of it; for “radical-openness” in the sense of open by default; and for “trust”, to ensure that there are no cyber security issues and information security problems.

Typical drivers for open data are the three objectives: transparent governments, improve public services and economic growth and social value. The World Bank recognizes in its new set of clients that there is a sincere and resolute aspect of their engagement with the World Bank to make sure that there are these three pillars around.

Transparent government: A lot of governments, including the US, relied on confidentiality and secrecy, with lots of secrecy acts. Some countries like the UK or the US have taken 40 or 50 years to change and transform. Some of the World Bank’s clients are trying to do this in 5 years. This is really a radical change, but they are seeing the benefits of transparency.

Improving public services means anything from the delivery of permits, let it be birth, marriage, divorce, death certificates, constructions, vehicle, etc. Getting theses from governments in many countries is often difficult, mixed with some corrupt behaviour from civil servants and officials. So how to help governments to improve public services by putting out the data, not only about the service itself but also those being related to it (the type of fees that are required, the time a transaction is required, the maximum time it requires to complete etc.). This makes a huge difference, especially when citizens are aware and can access this information.

Economic growth and social value is a direct impact of opening data. Some figures from McKinsey and the Open Data Institute in England: Open weather data in the US has created 400 companies employing 4000 people. In Spain, a study found that about €600 million of business and more than 5000 jobs have been created from open data with. Opening government data in the EU would increase business activity by up to €40 billion per year. The direct and indirect benefits in the EU are estimated to amount to €200 billion per year (1.7 percent of the EU GDP). And even it would just the half of this, that is still huge. An Australian study found the ROI of 500 percent from open data.

In Kenya, the World Bank is realizing a project of $180 million with the Kenyan Government. In that project there are lots of big government systems, e.g., systems for information management, budget, land registrations, citizen registrations, a lot of data centers, staff, hardware equipment, infrastructure, connectivity to the regional connectivity hubs, but also internally between universities. But there is also a small component of $6.5 million on open data. This component contains is a lot of training for civil servants, academicians and students. A lot of reform of the statistical units in the country, both at the central but also local and regional level (as Kenya is decentralized), some types of hardware platforms, security etc, but most of it is towards change management. This is over a period of 6 to 7 years and it will probably give 5 times its value in terms of investment to the Kenyan government.

What is the World Bank’s proposition in the open government and data ecosystem? The World Bank tries to address this as a total ecosystem composed of the following elements:

Leadership: High-level government leadership must be a primary driver for successfully executing any open government strategy. The World Bank’s knowledge sharing platforms such as the Leaders for Transformation Network bring together top leaders to share experiences and provide peer support in leveraging ICT for open government.

Policy/ legal framework: A supportive policy and legal framework is essential to open government. Issues such as data management, privacy, information access (including Freedom of Information), data reuse and licensing must be addressed. The World Bank has helped develop policies on ICT related components in a number of countries, including Moldova, Macedonia, Ghana, and Sri Lanka.

Institutions: Individual agencies hold primary responsibility for translating open government into real applications and services. Yet, open government on a whole-of-government basis requires high levels of coordination. The World Bank has supported the evolution of institutional partners such as the eGovernment Center in Moldova into first class managers of a major $23 million Governance eTransformation Project.

Applications and e-services: The World Bank partners with governments to help translate open government from words into actions that impact people’s lives through development of innovative applications and e-services. This is happening every day on a global basis – the Water Hackathon event organized by The World Bank teamed up more than 800 water and technology experts in cities around the world to create technology solutions to local and global water challenges.

Capacity building: Open government requires changes to how agencies conduct business, and even how they define their core mission. In the context of major eTransformation projects, the World Bank has contributed to increased capacity of government counterparts and other stakeholders, for example through HELP – the High-level Experts for Leaders and Practitioners group of leading CIOs and knowledge exchange activities (e.g., South-South collaboration with e-leaders like India, Singapore, South Korea and Estonia) and most recently through the development of an online Open Government Data Toolkit. For open government to be meaningful, responsive to public needs, and self-sustaining, a strong demand-side is crucial.

Citizen engagement: The World Bank supports citizen-feedback initiatives, which are vital to any meaningful open government effort. For example, in Nigeria, the Bank is working with Edo State to launch a crime mapping platform that draws on crowd sourced data reported by citizens.

Innovation financing: A dynamic, sustainable Open Government Initiative requires public investment and public-private partnerships both to support development of innovative apps and services (including co-creation activities and challenges) and develop an Innovation Economy. The World Bank is working with Ghana on a PPP for tax modernization. In Sri Lanka, the Bank supported creation of a Partnership Assistance Program to fund innovative services to under-served communities.

Technology: Implementing open government on a whole-of-government basis requires enterprise architecture, common open standards and interoperability frameworks, apps and adequate infrastructure to ensure connectivity and security. One pioneering example of the World Bank’s work in this area is its planned assistance to Moldova and Macedonia to introduce cloud computing for government using innovative PPP models.

Kenya’s open data initiative (KODI) is an example for open data in Kenya. Through KODI over 400 datasets have been made publicly available on the opendata.go.ke platform.

Moldova is one of the first countries that have opened up its budget. This has been a huge reform. Moldova is a poor country which has gone from very little informatization ot a government that is publishing everything in the open and training massively a lot of its population, both as users and developers through several hackathons.

More information can be found on worldbank.org/ict or worldbank.org/edevelopment. All these are public goods. The World Bank is more and more providing links to applications and of course, wants to engage citizens.

The World Bank has its own tool kit (data.worldbank.org/open-government-data-toolkit) which is intended for developing country policy makers.

Eikazu Niwano, Producer Research and Development Planning Department, NTT Corporation, Japan, presented a particularly smart approach of utilizing big data.

“Omotenashi-Ozendate”:
Towards Realizing Service Provider Driven eGovernment

NTTs vision and concept is that for a basic citizen life, it is necessary to realize the society which supports and connects individual, community and safety life. To realise this four visions, NTT  uses a “life hub” concept which integrates the four basic fields, which are medical, education, environment and disaster prevention. The idea is to offer a structure for convenience which supports “life” from four sides of relief – Connection, Individual, Community, Safety (CICS).

For the connect life: The society where every information-service (including public and private) necessary for life is digitized, and the service provider and user is easily connected each other.

For the individual life: The society which everybody can use the necessary and enjoy most suitable and optimised information services (including public and private) together.

For the community life: The society where the difference of use and offer of information services (including public and private) by the area is corrected, and it contributes to life security and the promotion in the area.

For the safety of life: The society which secure, guarantee relief and security when utilizes information service (including public and private) and can provide it like air and water.

What is important to realise this vision? First of all, a PPP opening government information to the public as well as opening distributed private information to the public. Second, an open hub – open connectivity among regional communities, entity and citizen partnership, but also partnership of central and local government is very important. Third, citizen origin, which means that information control and source of information have to come from the citizen. Finally, trust oriented approaches are very important.

Based on the above mentioned concepts, NTT considers sharing and the utilization of personal information will be one of key R&D issues to be studied. The company introduced the following two models: “Omotenashi-Ozendate”, a service provisioning environment, and diversity-oriented secure device management.

The purpose of the Omotenashi-Ozendate service provisioning environment is the realization of very fair public administration with “very returnable system” for tax payment. Currently, the filling out of applications is rather difficult for normal citizens. Most of the actions can be done by a service provider or the government.

Omotenashi is a very customized and optimised service provision without any order from citizen. Ozendate is a very readied service provision in case of order (or decision making). Distributed personal information are statistic or deterministic (conclusive) attributes, such as name, address etc. Big data or life log which is dynamic or stochastic (probabilistic) information attributes by social or personally behavioural analysis. The driving force is in the government. The only thing that citizens have to do is just to push a bottom.

The second model is the realization of flexible and secure and conclusive information service management and control for any service provider and user anytime and anywhere — by integration of various types of devices and NFC environment.

In conclusion, NTT aims at the provision of social information infrastructure to support basic citizen life from a point of view of “connect”, “individual”, “community” and “safety” (CICS vision). In order to realizing the vision, NTT introduced the LifeHUB concept which consists of “PPP”, “citizen origin”, “open hub” and “trust-oriented”. Based on the above four concepts and regards to “Big Data/Life Log” (distributed personal information), NTT proposed two models in applying, sharing and the utilization of personal information.

Pascal Poitevin, Head of Department, Secretary Committee Strategy of Information Systems, Institut de l’Elevage, France, explained the relation between

Livestock and Big data

The Institut de l’Elevage (French Livestock Institute) is a NGO developing R&D programmes for the agriculture specific livestock domain.

It is a very important topic of general interest. For public health reasons, human quality of life, species, or biodiversity, governments need indicators of animals to ensure food quality and environmental respect.

Data flows in agriculture and livestock are growing.

In 2009, there were 247,6 millions dairy cows worldwide, 39,9 millions in Europe, 38,5 millions in India, 34,3 millions in South America, 15,4 millions in North and Central America and 12,8 millions in China.

Today, in France, for instance, there are more than 20 millions of cattle, sheep and goats managed by 250,000 farmers. The livestock domain generates important needs in terms of advice in the field. There is  great demand for technical and economical studies and there is a very strong organization for research.

All this allowed the development of an well structured information system. Today in France, for instance, there are two big data bases, one for identification and traceability and one for genetics.

Since 2000, the 250,000 farms and the other stakeholders register the different animal movements in a unique national identification data base. This represents 10 million movements per year and 9 million births. Since 1990, the French genetic programme collects a lot of criteria on animals. More than 250 organizations in the field contribute to this collection and the data base counts today a huge amount of information. This data base represents a gold mine for researchers.

Just in France, more than 20 different data bases are convenient for the livestock domain, among those the ones for identification and traceability.

The new technologies are coming, in particular with RFID applications and the multiplication of sensors. As regards the development of milking robots in France, this kind of automate works alone and the farmer is managing the cattle from his office by using a computer. This introduces transformation in his professional practice. The same tendencies can be observed all over Europe and Canada.

What can be measured by sensors on the animal? Ruminal ph, temperature, the amount of ingested food, emission of methane, abdominal contractions, quantity, composition and physico-chemical characteristics of milk and many more.

What can be measured by sensors at the farm level? Energy, waste management, herd monitoring, water management, online services etc…

In Europe, the green farm 2.0 is already reality. A lot of processes are now included in a dematerialization programme, such as for instance the cows’ passports. In Europe, animals have to move with their paper passport. This is mandatory due to a European directive for information. In France alone, this paper passport costs more than 10 million euros per year.

(end of the speech not recorded)

Alan R. Shark, Executive Director Public Technology Institute – PTI; Associate Professor of Practice Rutgers University School of Public Affairs & Administration, USA, outlined with his usual eloquence and clarity:

The “Big” Factor in Data, Civic Media:
New Patterns of Governance

We suddenly connect the data between intelligent communities, open communities, smart cities, open data and big data – and how close they are related.

When looking at what is going on in the world today, is the paperless office an illusion or not? The real problem is the implosion of data and its impact on our daily lives. 90 percent of the world’s data has been generated since 2010. Everyday, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data.

And now we see the rise of Apps: 331.6 million subscribers in the US is nearing 40 percent smart phone penetration. By the end of 2012, there will be more smart phones than humans on the planet! Cisco predicts by 2016 two-thirds of world traffic will be from video, and tablets and other mobile devices will surpass laptops soon.

Things are changing and now, for the first time, we not only have huge data but also really innovative ways to display it, such as GIS systems.

New York City took to Twitter during the hurricane Sandy and these really helped those people who had power to get an appreciation of the impact of the storm and where the problems were.

Even the US Government started sharing more information in terms of map and road data. We are seeing more analytics, more clever ways of using our technology. The City of Boston for instance has a smart phone application known as Street Bump. As users drive, the mobile app collects data about the smoothness of the ride; that data provides the city with real-time information it uses to fix problems. Another example is the NASA applying deep-diving text analytics to airline safety.

What is the big deal with big data? It is the volume, the variety and the velocity of information (which is the speed at which data becomes available and can be analyzed). Moreover, social media generates big data. Every kind of social media has built-in analytics.

Chicago was the first US city to appoint a “Chief Data Officer” followed by Philadelphia, then San Francisco. There is a new emphasis on assigning people to make sense of the data. This should allow for better decisions, stimulate innovation, hopefully foster greater collaboration, promote predictive analytics, conserve financial resources, and become more effective, efficient, and equitable.

We know that most cities “tweet”, most cities have a Facebook page, most cities have some form of 311 system (over 15 million calls (data) are received per year in New York City). Other data collected are census data, tax data, etc. Nearly every city collects, knowingly or not, tons of data.

There are lots of examples: The Aberdeen city council has an open data project. There is a website in the US “data.gov” that tracks these very indicators in terms of how many websites or organizations are doing things in open or smart data and what is done with this. Europe has a similar project within its Digital Agenda. The Economist recently issued an article on the laws of cities – deluge of data make cities laboratories for those seeking to run them better. Stockholm recently held a big data conference.  It is a very big deal in terms of making cities smarter.

Ongoing challenges are training, staffing, budget, cooperation, coordination, system capacity, knowledge management and predictive analytics. Where is the gap today? Smarter governments require smarter people. The people part is the missing ingredient that we have to focus more intention to. This where the academic world and the business world come together. For the academic world, we need to better train and prepare people. For the corporate world, we need more PPPs when it comes to data. Students need to study more of how to apply this knowledge and information and for public managers it is about leadership.

On 13 November, the City Protocol Society will be officially launched in Barcelona, created to share information and data using a common protocol.

Data is like rain, it can be washed away, we can drown in it, we can waste it or we can capture it or we can master it. And this is our challenge.

Anja Wyden Guelpa, Chancellor State of Geneva, Switzerland, shared her valuable experience in dealing with unforeseen changes brought in by handling big data:

Transformation Model:
When a New Front End forces Back Office Changes

Every electoral data is big data. Maybe not in the mathematical sense of the world but definitely in the symbolic and institutional sense:  They are big in their consequences, as they define the political course of our communities the years ahead.

In Geneva, Internet is the 3rd channel for voting. Geneva was among the first ones in the world introducing Internet voting in 2003. The second channel for voting, postal voting, has been introduced in 1995. In 2003, Geneva was already using IT systems to count votes and thought by adding Internet voting, it would just add a new, user friendly interface. However, when looking at the current electoral organization, it is surprising to what extend it has been reshaped by Internet voting.

When trying to predict the consequences of Internet voting, Geneva focused on voter behaviour, not noticing that the own back-office processes were also affected. A series of unanticipated problems, affecting the back-office, started to appear. It was nothing really new. It was just old issues growing in size and becoming problematic.

The errors in the counting of paper ballots by polling stations were one of the problems. The time it took for polling stations to count their ballots. The fact that it was only possible to read paper ballots with optical scanners, while election ballots must be counted by hand, due to the very complex preferential vote system. But also the many involuntary invalid votes on paper ballots because people put in the name of someone who is not candidate or who is candidate in another town.

The main underlying factors behind these issues were a strong differential in ballot counting time and accuracy between centrally counted ballots, the postal and electronic ones, and the  once still counted in polling stations. The uneven position of users according to their voting channels – voters using Internet are prevented from casting and invalid vote, while those voting on paper are not. And more generally, the fact that Internet voting exposed the lack of flexibility in the back-office, while its introduction aroused expectations for more flexibility in the organization and the management of ballots.

Internet voting increased the divergences and inequalities in a way the votes were handled. An electronic vote has a 100 percent probability of being properly cast and counted, a paper ballot cast in a polling station has a bit more than a 99 percent probability. People might argue that this is no problem, as long as mistakes are evenly distributed they automatically cancel each other rout. It becomes a problem when a two-tier system in ballot casting and treatment is introduced. And while 1 percent seems irrelevant, it matters because we are dealing big data.

So, there was the need to bring the three channels in line to maintain a fair electoral system. Geneva tested a central counting of votes, including those cast in polling stations, and it was quite successful – it was faster and more accurate.

Geneva also tested the early counting of postal and electronic votes, of course no results were announced before the closing of the polling stations, but upon their closing it was possible to publish a very good forecast of the final results.

In the coming years, Geneva will also test the scanning of election ballots to improve the accuracy of paper ballot counting, but this requires a redesign of the ballots to match the flexibility offered online. Moreover, a permanent electoral commission monitoring all voting channels has been created. It uses Internet voting as a benchmark for accuracy and paper based votes as a benchmark for transparency. ID controls in polling stations have also been improved. So far, a voting card was enough to cast a vote in a polling station. Now, additionally a picture ID is required. This mixes 3 different identification stages of Internet voting: Identification as a voter to access the protected website and then, authentication for personal data to validate the electronic ballot. This also gets in the direction of getting rid of the two-tiers system.

The “e” element has proven to be a stronger change factor than for instance the time element introduced by early voting. Postal voting has not impacted the back-office as much. Testing paper ballots for accuracy and coherence simply wasn’t enough anymore. Ultimately, the front-end determined the back-office.

In terms of user centred dimensions of Internet voting, it offers voters a tailor-made tool, e.g. for visually impaired voters being able for the first time to vote on their own, or the elderly, not having to leave their home to vote. In the complex voting system of Switzerland, Internet voting reinforces the citizens’ power by making it easier for them to add a candidate to a list or a party they chose or at the opposite to cancel names on the party-lists they have chosen with no risks for null ballots. All in all, the introduction of Internet voting has been a very positive element, but  the road was much more challenging than supposed.

—  —

Q&A

The chair and moderator, Steven B. Adler, IBM, concluded that the US is pioneering a lot of consumer innovation, Europe is taking a different form which is very innovative and valuable as well. Europeans should feel a bit more of confident of their own unique forms of innovation, which are important types of social innovation, and not always feel like not keeping up with the Americans.

Alan R. Shark, PTI, commented that Europe and the US take two different directions. While the US is focusing on making data available, Europe has a stronger social agenda in the context of open data. Both approaches are different, but both can learn from each other.

Annika Bränström, Swedish eGovernment Delegation, emphasized that data in Sweden is already open, even if some aspects could be improved, e.g., in terms of standardization and interoperability. There are projects currently going on in Sweden, dealing with these issues. But there are many open questions, for instance regarding security issues. Has the view on data and information changed? Do we rely on the government and do we rely on the sources?

Samia Melhem, World Bank Group, wondered whether there is a set off very generic types of services and functions that are available through open data that are needed by citizens around the world? A basic common minimum denominator that could be reused?

Annika Bränström, Swedish eGovernment Delegation, stated that corresponding to her experience in business registration issues in Europe and globally, just making available the name and the organisation number, if there is a unique identifier, would help a lot.

Latif Ladid, IPv6 Forum, added that there is a clear need to set some open standard for this brand-new area. When you use open standards, you can do anything with it on a worldwide basis. So far, these are more closed standards, if not proprietary. So it will not scale or take a bigger dimension. This is probably an area where research can help.

Steven B. Adler, IBM, highlighted that IBM built a website cityforward.org which aggregates open data from 120 cities around the country for comparable analytics. This has shown that open data really doesn’t mean clean data. Different cities may use the same naming structures for data elements, like pollution statistics etc., but this doesn’t mean they are measuring the underlying information the same way. Even within the open data field, there is still a long way to go to standardise the way certain statistics are measured, like population statistics, unemployment or social statistics in different cities, but we are definitely moving in the right direction by making the data available.

There is an explosion of open data initiatives, especially in Europe. We need to match that with open APIs allowing any service provider to attach any other service provider, which allows any organisation to offer any type of service in any type of dynamic network. This is a revolution in the way applications are designed, developed and deployed.

Open protocols allow anybody in the world to interact with anybody else and offer any type of value added services immediately.

Samia Melhem, World Bank Group, stressed that this is sometimes too technical for policy makers. We should find a way to explain these things to regular people so that they understand how important this is. Rising awareness around these issues to the “non techies” who are leading the world and having the money is very important.

Latif Ladid, IPv6 Forum, informed that the W3C has started a new initiative called Web Index which is starting to collect indicators in various fields. There are about 60 counties involved in order to get the indexes. Government should open their data to that index.

This new role draws on multiple business and IT disciplines to help organizations make the most of their data

I am an information strategist. My job title is new, but my challenge is ancient: I have to get the right information to the right people at the right time. If the information is in the wrong format or if it is hard to read, confusing, or conflicting, with sloppy interfaces, then I have failed. Endless lists and search results without relationships, connections, and meaning are not what my customers demand. They want clarity. And they expect interfaces to match the ease of use they are accustomed to on their tablets and smartphones. This is the twenty-first century, and my job is to deliver information that is enlightening and entertaining.

My customers—both internal and external—need insight, so by definition I have to know more about their business than they do. That means I spend a lot of time sitting in business meetings, listening and asking questions to understand the structure and context of what customers are doing. I join sales reps on customer calls, participate in industry conferences, and use my extended network to understand emerging trends and ideas in very diverse forums.

Information strategists combine data management, information governance, and data science techniques to deliver refined, fit-for-purpose, high-value information products and services across the entire information supply chain. This role is an organic evolution of many information-centric roles that have been established over the past two decades to engineer data into silos, govern its uses, and ensure application access. However, information needs today extend far beyond data engineering and industrial automation. Most enterprises are filled with people who are information connoisseurs in their private lives—and these people are frustrated that enterprise information systems produce industrial interfaces. They want at work what they get at home: intuitive interfaces and information that is updated often and is fun to use.

The line between how people use data at home and at work is blurring in other ways, too. My customers use their own devices, and they work in coffee shops, hotels, airports—sometimes even at my office. They expect seamless access to information on every device. I encourage them to share what they learn in the field with their peers so we can transform the snippets of information they find into patterns of knowledge. I link their experiences, documents, photos, and conversations into richly visualized reports that their colleagues can comment on and enhance.

I report to the business and work with both operations and IT. My job is fluid, and my organization’s information needs change every day. Transparency and sharing blurs the lines above and below me, and everyone can be an information provider and consumer. Today, every employee is also a journalist, correspondent, chat partner, visual artist, author, and critic.

As an information strategist, I have to be a jack-of-all-trades. I work with diverse groups to collect source data and produce advanced information products and services that drive value for all of my internal and external customers. I can roll up my sleeves and talk ETL with a data warehouse team in India; work with regulators and audit on governance, risk, and compliance issues in Canada; dive into my social network to discuss best practices in data science and ontological research; discuss business results, sales, and marketing strategy in German; and conceptualize with product managers to build tantalizing interfaces that provide customers with the information they think they want, as well as the information they don’t yet know they need.

My source data comes from public and private databases, document repositories, PDFs, websites, spreadsheets, and information services. I use open data from raw, semi-finished, and even finished sources. My data management teams have automated and bespoke data supply chains for collecting, collating, extracting, transforming, and cleansing these data sources into information repositories. I use metadata files to track where the data came from, who owns it, how it came to use, how I process it, who touches it, and so on.

I have robust information governance programs on many levels, working with compliance, legal, privacy and security, data quality, and audit. These data governance processes help ensure that the use of internal and external data sources meets all regulatory requirements, protects customers’ privacy, and safeguards our firm against risks from bad data quality. I monitor a team of database administrators and transform our application data when testing our code abroad. I use maturity models, best practices, systems theory, and policy simulations. I develop new methods and models on the fly using my extended social networks for guidance and insight. And I hold regular maturity assessments, using advanced simulation tools to understand the impact of process and policy changes on our governance program.

The data scientists on my team monitor social media feeds to understand emerging trends and use our crowdsourcing networks like human botnets to solve critical problems and divine new innovations. We work together to develop new analytical tools that make our Hadoop cluster more efficient, linking our big data results to our governance program through metadata tagging and business glossary lookups. And we index the insights we discover by using semantic search technology that lets us federate our vast information resources.

I work with freelance product designers in my GitHub ecosystem who use open APIs and an open data model to develop new kinds of information products and services. Because no one has a monopoly on good ideas, I keep our systems open and dynamic—which lets customers define the structure of the information delivery they require. I am measured by the success of the markets I create through the information products and services that customers purchase. All of these factors make my job fast and furious, dynamic and exciting.

Information strategists like me exist in many organizations. They are often unsung leaders who work with metadata, information architecture, data quality, records management, open data, open APIs, and social networking. They are evangelists and facilitators, working to disentangle vital information from historical formats, proprietary fiefdoms, industrial staging, and organizational hierarchy. There aren’t many of us out there today—but in the years to come, everyone will participate because every person is both an information producer and consumer. Join me and be a part of the future!

The irony of the Informatica site is it is called “Govern Your Data,” which I guess was the only reasonable domain name available that had any proximate association with Data Governance.  I say irony because of course Data can’t be governed.  It is inert.  Only people can govern the use of data by other people and Informatica seems to realize this because they distance themselves from the confusion of their domain name within the first sentence of their description: “Data governance is not about the data. It’s about the business processes, decisions and stakeholder interactions you want to enable.”

Now it’s pretty embarrassing if you have to repudiate your own site name within the first sentence of its description.  The rest of the site has a pleasant interface and many other obvious copies from the Information Governance Community.  They have crowdsourcing, topics and discussions, blogs and events, a maturity model assessment and a business opportunity map, and… wait… they have 10 domains of Data Governance.  Wow!!!  :lol

It’s not polite to disparage one’s competition and Informatica is a formidable competitor.  But guys what you put up is tame and boring, risk averse and derivative.  And it’s three years too late.  We yearn for real trailblazers who have marketing and social networking innovations that make us so envious we want to copy them…

On February 28, 2013 we will be meeting at Kievits Kroon in Pretoria, South Africa to define the Information Strategist Role through interactive use case problem solving and semantic definitions.  This event will be fun, informative, leading edge, and we will add our contributions to a global standards process.

Information is the currency of the Knowledge Economy, and organizations need a “controller of the currency” to reach the next level of maturity beyond Data Management and Data Governance.The Information Strategics brings Data Management and Information Governance out of IT andOperations into the Front Office of every organization, transcending the application focus of IT,the compliance focus of governance and risk, to make advanced Advanced information Products and  Services ubiquitous on every platform.

Organizations today want the same seamless and instantly  available information products they experience on smartphones, pads, and tablets. They want it in  the cloud all the time, with the ability to create new analytics from internal and external sources when the need it, where they need it, easily and instantly.

The Information Strategist includes works with large extended communities of experts, customers, partners, and suppliers; understanding information requirements; setting standards and best practices; working with new tools and interfaces; able to see the big picture across the entire information and product supply chains. It is a role, team, and cross-functional organization that reports to the business.  It understands how data is sourced, refined into information, complies with all internal and external obligations, and provides insight and value to the entire organization.

This event will be one day for a select group of people.  We are already 50% booked and I encourage you to register soon to participate.  Please note the agenda updates.  The conference fee has also been increased slightly and denominated in USD to facilitate processing.

TO REGISTER: Please fill out the form on Page 6 of the brochure and email it to irene.

IBM Information Strategy Symposium @ Kievits Kroon

I am excited about this meeting and look forward to seeing many of you again in South Africa next month!

Dear Colleagues,
I am an Information Strategist.  I work with diverse groups to collect source data and produce advanced information products and services that drive value for all of my internal and external customers.  I am a jack of all trades with a broad education and global experience.   I can roll up my sleeves and talk ETL with the data warehouse team in India; work with regulators and audit on governance, risk, and compliance issues in Canada; dive into my social network to discuss best practices in data science and ontological research; jump upstairs to discuss business results, sales, and marketing strategy in German; and I can conceptualize with product managers to build the most tantalizing interfaces that provide all of my customers with the information they think they need and don’t know they need in Danish.

I am an Information Strategist.  My role is new, but my challenge is ancient.  I have to get the right information to the right people at the right time.  If the information is in the wrong format, is hard to read, confusing and conflicting, with sloppy interfaces – then I have failed.  Endless lists and search results without relationships, connections, and meaning are not what my customers demand.  They want clarity and they expect interfaces to match the ease of use they are accustomed to on their tablets and smartphones.  This is the 21st Century and my job is to deliver information that is enlightening and entertaining.

My customers need insight, and that requires me to know more about their business than they do.  It means I spend a lot of time sitting in business meetings listening, asking questions to understand the structure and context.  I tag team sales reps on customer calls, participate in industry conferences, and use my extended network to understand emerging trends and ideas in very diverse forums.  I report to the Business and work with Operations, and IT.

I am an Information Strategist.  My responsibilities are wide and I use data management, governance, big data and advanced analytic technologies.  I use maturity models, best practices, systems theory, and policy simulations.  I make up new methods and models on the fly using my massive social network for guidance and insight.  I am measured by the success of the markets I create using Information Products and Services that customers purchase.

Information Strategy is THE role for 2013 and beyond.  Everyone wants to be an Information Strategist and every organization needs one.  This Symposium is the first of a global series dedicated to helping data and information management practitioners the world over to become Information Strategists.

It is an essential process, and we are meeting at the Campus of Discover Financial Services in Chicago to build new information assets that will define the roles and responsibilities of Information Strategy.

This is your opportunity to contribute and I look forward to seeing you there!