Thornton A. May

In a simpler time executives made decisions based on what happened in the past. In today’s environment, however, leaders need a working knowledge of what happens next. To do that requires real-time, insightful data, or more specifically, analytics and Big Data. Identifying and harnessing the right analytics, however, is a struggle within any organization given the vast amounts of information available, the different technologies at work, and the divergent personalities who own the data. Futurist Thornton May, the opening speaker at the inaugural Data Scientist Summit offers solutions from his new book, The New Know: Innovation Powered by Analytics on how to identify where analytics and Big Data sit within an organization, deal with a new breed of analysts, and optimize current technology to link analytics to innovation.

We have come to a critical decision point – is this the end of the current way of doing things? Status quo business models are struggling. Productivity gains and payback associated with ‘inside-the-box’ technology solutions appear to be flattening out. Does this mean that the old way of thinking, knowing, doing and computing are just about kaput? Mainframes gave way to minicomputers, which gave way to PCs, which gave way to client servers, which gave way to the web, etc. We find ourselves at a technology and business model inflection point. Is it time to ‘kick over the chessboard’? What are you going to do?

Marcel Proust believed, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” The next best thing to new eyes is many eyes. Thornton May – futurist, entrepreneur and author of The New Know: Innovation Powered by Analytics has just completed a massive ‘walk-about’ asking literally thousands of executives – what do they see and most importantly, what are they going to do about it.

In the much simpler world of 30 years ago, Coca Cola assembled 200 multi-ethnic youngsters on a hilltop in Italy and had them sing. The message – the whole world could be united in its desire for a single product.  While the world might be able to coalesce in its desire for a carbonated beverage, it certainly can’t make up its mind what we need to know, who needs to know it, who should be teaching and how security and privacy best practices should be taught.

It has become common knowledge that all stakeholders in the enterprise should ‘know a little something’ about security and privacy.  Procter & Gamble has decided that privacy will be as much a vital part of Tide as the chemicals in the box, as much a part of Pampers as the paper and plastic, as much a part of Maxwell House as the beans…What has your company or agency decided?

The original business plan at Amazon.com is reputed to state, “We will sell a low-touch commodity product (like books) via a process that allows us to extract information that will form the base of follow-on high value services…”.  At the base of the information age is information management.  At the base of information management is the question: “How much information about your customer will you be allowed to collect and repackage?”  At the base of this question lies the practice of security and privacy.

Everyone knows there’s a security/privacy tug-of-war going on in the minds of the public.  Nobody seems to know what to do about it. Everyone knows buyers care about their personal information…nobody knows how far they will go to protect it.  Everyone knows buyers can be tempted to trade private data for personal gain…nobody can figure out the nature of such trade-offs.

We live at a time of unique opportunity to change how we think and do digital security and privacy.   This is sure to be an informative and entertaining session that you won’t want to miss!