Thank you to everyone who attended and participated in the 12th Metis Strategy Digital Symposium. As access to AI and other technologies becomes increasingly ubiquitous, CIOs and their peers are working closer than ever with peers across the organization to develop technology-led products and services. Leaders continue to explore emerging technologies like ChatGPT while connecting digital initiatives to clear and measurable business value. Amid a backdrop of cybersecurity challenges and economic uncertainty, leaders remain focused on developing both new and existing talent and leveraging analytics to better serve customers.
Highlights from the event are below. Stay tuned to the Metis Strategy Youtube channel and Technovation podcast in the coming weeks for recordings of individual panel discussions. In the meantime, click here to request an invitation for our next virtual event on May 11, 2023.
Among the discussion topics at February’s Digital Symposium:
Working backward from the customer and proving the value of technology investmentsTechnology leaders balance a portfolio of priorities and initiatives that have the potential to transform their companies. As artificial intelligence and other technologies evolve, executives are finding use cases that deliver value quickly in order to build momentum and secure long-term technology investment.
At clothing company Levi Strauss & Co., Chief Global Strategy & Artificial Intelligence Officer Katia Walsh sees cutting-edge technology as a way to maintain a competitive advantage. The starting point for any AI investment, Walsh said, is improving the customer experience. “If customers do not feel the impact of investment in AI, then it’s not worth doing.” After defining a strategy for AI, she noted that leaders must simultaneously establish the people, process, data, and technology building blocks necessary to execute on that strategy while delivering tangible business value. “It is absolutely essential that anyone embarking on this today delivers value immediately.”
Doing so requires engineers and others in IT to develop a strong business understanding, an increased commitment to customers, and a focus on business outcomes. To drive what he calls the biggest cultural shift at the organization, Goldman Sachs CIO Marco Argenti has implemented practices that require teams to work backwards from the customer when developing new solutions, thinking from both a technology and a product management standpoint to better understand what customers want. “The trick is to measure technology with business KPIs, because at the end of the day it’s all about outcomes,” Argenti said.
Upskilling talent and diversifying employee skill sets
As organizations continue to navigate ongoing social, economic, and geopolitical changes, technology leaders are seeking new opportunities to supercharge their talent strategies and prepare teams for whatever lies ahead. TIAA’s Chief Information and Client Services Officer, Sastry Durvasula, underscored the need to provide cross-functional opportunities for people to apply their strengths across the business while learning new technical and leadership skills. Durvasula launched internal gigs where employees can “major” in their current role, like analytics, and “minor” in a different role, such as cybersecurity. Giving individuals exposure to multiple fields creates a more skilled and flexible talent base and better prepares both individuals and the organization for the future.
As Oshkosh Corporation continued to enhance its data-rich culture, CIO Anupam Khare recognized the critical role talent would play in ensuring a successful pivot. However, like many other technology organizations, Khare had to contend with a shortage of data science talent. He decided to take a homegrown approach, identifying opportunities to develop internal talent within the organization. He recalled a member of Oshkosh’s legal team who was passionate about data, went through training, and is now one of the best data scientists at Oshkosh. Khare also brought data science education to the leadership level and received support from the CEO around creating digitally savvy leaders.
Exploring the potential use cases and threats of ChatGPT and generative AI
Over the past several months, ChatGPT has taken the world by storm, amassing millions of users globally and sparking conversations about how this new phase of generative AI can be used to unlock new business opportunities and create new products and services. It also means the demand for AI applications is growing significantly outside the IT department. George Brady, CIO at loanDepot, said loan officers are “experimenting like crazy with ChatGPT,” using the service to lower barriers for first-time homebuyers and provide more education to customers before they have their first conversation with a mortgage officer, thereby driving better engagement, decisions, and outcomes.
At the same time, this next phase of AI may present a number of risks. “A lot of us are in a position where we can’t get too excited about the positive applications [of ChatGPT] and have to think about guardrails so that bad actors don’t use this technology to cause harm to our companies,” Fannie Mae CIO Ramon Richards said. By putting appropriate guardrails in place, monitoring advancements, and leveraging those advancements safely, Richards is helping to protect the organization while positioning it to take advantage of this emerging technology as it evolves.
Aligning with business partners and strategies
Truly transforming an enterprise requires tight alignment across different organizations to advance business and technology strategies in parallel. Technology leaders play a key role in making connections across teams and using technology tools and new processes to enable business partners.
At Vulcan Materials Company, CIO Krzysztof Soltan is refreshing the company’s data strategy by tying it to the corporate business strategy and connecting it to each business function. By making real-time data accessible and available across the business, Soltan is able to better support Vulcan’s business processes and make more informed strategic decisions. As the needs and desired outcomes of the business change, so too will the data strategy and its success measures.
As Cardinal Health went through a reorganization, CIO Michelle Greene took the opportunity to drive “enterprise thinking” and solidify the organizational change by establishing key roles specifically focused on alignment with the business and its needs. The tight alignment has blurred the traditional lines between technology teams and others in the organization. “When sitting in a room, you might not be able to know who’s business and who’s IT,” she said.
Exploring continued opportunities for professional growth
Technology’s expanding influence across the enterprise is enabling leaders to gain new responsibilities and avenues for professional development that may have not been on their roadmap.
At Cenlar, Rob Lux first held the CIO role before transitioning to the COO role when the former COO departed. He then took on the co-CEO role when the company’s CEO retired earlier than expected. “I’m an accidental COO,” said Lux. “It wasn’t part of my career or succession plan.” He explained that the path from CIO to COO can work because CIOs are one of the few C-suite positions that are able to see across the breadth of the organization. For those that want to move beyond the CIO role, Lux advised getting out of the comfort zone and taking risks, even if just for a period of time. “Don’t be accidental like me,” he said. “Build a career plan so you’re prepared.”
Meanwhile, Intercontinental Exchange Inc.’s Mark Wassersug went through a number of title changes himself, most recently from COO to “accidental CIO.” Through these roles, Wassersug was able to oversee a number of successful acquisitions and ensure early communication, bringing corporate tools together, and solidifying culture throughout the organization. The CIO and COO roles have been particularly useful when overseeing mergers and acquisitions, allowing Wassersug to not only bring the required tools and technologies together, but also to ensure smooth transitions by being transparent about changes and strengthen the culture by having expertised colleagues work side by side with new colleagues across the organization.
Wassersug also discussed the importance of developing a relationship with the company’s board, and finding opportunities to educate on foundational technology and operations. By doing this quarterly, “there was a much deeper understanding during board meetings [that] made conversations much more meaningful and productive.”
As we enter 2023, many technology executives are preparing their organizations for a possible economic downturn. In addition to pursuing growth and transformation initiatives (though perhaps with a tighter budget than before), they are exploring ways in which technology can deliver efficiency and resilience.
In a recent episode of “Forbes Talks”, Peter High joins Diane Brady to discuss the growing role of the CIO and technology in the workplace, as well as the evolving technology landscape in 2023 and beyond.
Watch the Forbes interview with Peter High below:
In interviews with more than 100 digital and technology leaders on the Technovation podcast in 2022, executives shared the technologies and trends they believe have the potential to deliver significant value to their organizations in the years ahead. For the fourth year in a row, analytics, machine learning/AI, and cloud were the top three trends on executives’ radars.
A closer inspection of the interviews finds that more analytics use cases are bearing fruit across organizations as teams place greater emphasis on data strategy and governance. Developing solid data foundations enables new capabilities and opens the door for AI and machine learning at scale. We expect to see this focus continue in the year ahead.
Some new trends also began to emerge this year, including the metaverse and IT’s growing role in environmental sustainability and other ESG initiatives. There is also continued interest in the new ways of working and the tools and practices that will bring them to life. See below for more on the trends that are rising in importance in the year ahead.
Companies across industries are increasingly leveraging machine learning models to make sense of the large amount of data they collect. Today, machine learning capabilities are “not just niche to businesses that try to answer decision support-like type questions that rely on predictability,” said Neal Sample, former CIO of Northwestern Mutual. “Entire industries are being upended by better thinking around data.” What does this better thinking look like? Increasingly, it means leveraging data and analytics capabilities to deliver differentiated products and services for customers.
Anil Bhatt, Global CIO of Elevance Health (formerly Anthem Inc.), detailed how AI helps deliver better customer experiences through personalization. The symptom triage function in the company’s Sydney Health App, for example, can identify the symptoms a member is experiencing and analyze why they are reaching out for care, helping them receive personalized care more quickly and driving higher member satisfaction.
Similarly, Rite Aid’s Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Justin Mennen, notes that advances in AI and machine learning “are driving a completely different level of personalization.” Through the company’s partnership with Google, Rite Aid is using data and analytics to drive insights for the business and for customers, including tools that help customers choose the right medical products based on where they are in their journey.
The continued rise of data and analytics capabilities brings with it a continued need for talented team members to drive those initiatives forward. Ashok Srivastava, Intuit’s Chief Data Officer, began the journey to advance AI nearly five years ago by investing in skills development and recruiting. “We built this team of artificial intelligence scientists and engineers and we focused them on what matters most, and that means what is best for the end customer,” he said. One win came from merging data and AI teams. “We could see that that data platform was powering a lot of experiences and as we focused those data platforms on AI and then on analytics, we could see that tremendous benefits were coming out of it.” Some of these benefits included Intuit’s “follow-me-home” approach to personal finance, in which AI models use data to understand how the customer is using the product, automatically categorize customer transactions, and provide insights to the customer about their financial health.
Check out our compilation of other technology leaders on Technovation with Peter High speaking about how their organizations are using artificial intelligence:
A new trend that has intrigued (and puzzled) some technology executives is the metaverse. The concept has been around for a while (see Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash and the virtual world of the Wachowski sisters’ 1999 film The Matrix), but only recently has it emerged in a business context. Today, we see executives largely focused on the adoption of digital twins and augmented/virtual reality tools – two technologies often associated with the metaverse – for use cases ranging from product development to employee training.
Susan Doniz, Chief Information Officer of Boeing, says the company sees benefits of digital twin technology, noting that the combination of physical and digital worlds allows the company to efficiently iterate on new designs, to “fly the airplane thousands of times before we really fly it, and build it thousands of times before we really build it.” At Raytheon, Chief Digital Officer and SVP for Enterprise Services Vince Campisi and his team are using digital simulations of factories to optimize facility usage.
Technology leaders recognize the need to stay up to date on emerging metaverse-related technologies, from digital twins to AR/VR and Web3. “Not all of it is always relevant in the moment, but if you don’t start to get yourself up to speed and know where the opportunities lie, then I think you find yourself at the tail end,” said Cindy Hoots, Chief Digital Officer and Chief Information Officer of AstraZeneca. Her team invested in an experience-based group at AstraZeneca called ‘XR’. “Whether it’s the virtual reality or augmented reality team, we’ve got our own metaverse environment looking at how digital twins that we already have play into that, and just trying to build up some internal muscle on some of these trends.”
The metaverse, whatever form it may take, also creates new opportunities for collaboration and culture building, particularly in hybrid environments in which many work remotely. Likening the impact of the metaverse to that of ‘dilithium crystals’, the material used in the Star Trek universe to power warp-speed faster-than-light space travel, Cummins CIO Earl Newsome said the technology can act as a “transporter” of sorts, bringing people together from across the world. “I think we’re going to be able to leverage the metaverse to do some of that,” he explained, “especially when the metaverse gets to be really mixed reality.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, cybersecurity remained top of mind for business technology leaders in 2022. As attacks grow more prevalent and sophisticated, CIOs continue to focus on mitigating risk and building a culture of cybersecurity awareness across their organizations.
At Cummins, Earl Newsome is training his team to minimize the number of preventable cyberattacks through the CyberSMART program, which equips “cyber soldiers” with the tools needed to sniff out phishing schemes, be more aware of their surroundings, and improve password management. “The issue is either on two legs or two wires,” Earl joked. “The two legs issue is the one that we need to focus on because 82% of all cybersecurity issues have a human element in them.”
The other 18% of cyberattacks may pose trickier to prevent, but CIOs are looking to new technologies and tools to help identify when attacks are occurring and mitigate the risk of exposure. Mike Feliton, CIO of Crocs, sees an opportunity with machine learning and RPA to quickly detect when an attack is occurring. “Noticing when a brute force attack is hitting your organization and being able to shut that down before any of your employees have to get engaged is essential because we can cut it off before anything starts to explode.”
More sophisticated attacks are likely to trouble some companies as computational capabilities advance. As research and development in quantum computing evolves, it is time for organizations to plan for post-quantum cryptography, said Kevin Stine, Chief of the Applied Cybersecurity Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Information Technology Laboratory. With the rise of quantum computers, even the most secure systems today could be at serious risk of being breached without new forms of protection.
Yet while quantum computers create the risk of more advanced cyberattacks, they also offer the benefit of more advanced cybersecurity measures. Sangy Vatsa, Global Chief Technology & Digital Officer of FIS, is excited about the possibilities quantum can bring to the cybersecurity landscape.
While not a “tech trend” we have typically tracked across podcast episodes, sustainability appeared much more frequently this year as executives contemplated IT’s role in contributing to enterprise ESG initiatives.
Consumers are now, more than ever, concerned with how a company is addressing these issues, particularly in the energy sector. “Customers are paying attention to what companies are doing […] in terms of sustainability,” said Dak Liyanearachchi, Head of Data and Technology at NRG Energy. He noted “the decarbonization of our economy” as a trend that stands out.
“It really doesn’t matter what you think about climate change and sustainability, you are going to deal with it,” said Edward Wagoner, CIO of Digital at JLL. For technology leaders, the focus is on how best to do it. To name one example, Edward noted opportunities organizations have to use IoT and sensor technology to measure water and energy usage and reduce waste.
Companies are pursuing other technology-led sustainability solutions. Earlier this year, Frank Cassulo, Chief Digital Officer at Chevron, discussed Chevron New Energies, a business unit launched late last year that aims to produce low-carbon solutions (e.g. hydrogen) and reduce carbon emissions for both customers and internal operations. “We’re really looking at where we have competitive advantages and how we can help accelerate that energy transition,” he said. “It’s exciting for us to both think about how we continuously improve delivering the products today, but also transitioning to a lower carbon future that we’re going to play a large part in.”
While the energy industry is put under the microscope when it comes to sustainability, it certainly isn’t the only industry that is looking at lowering carbon emissions. Avery Dennison CIO Nick Colisto has been the primary driver of sustainability both within IT and within the business. In his view, IT is uniquely positioned to be a driver of sustainability at a company. “We incorporated [sustainability] as one of our strategic priorities in IT,” Nick said. “It’s essentially about innovation in building products that satisfy recycling, composting, and reuse of single-use consumer packaging and apparel in our products and in our solutions.”
At Avery Dennison, a low-code technology system called AD Circular makes it easier for customers to recycle used paper and filmic label liners across Europe. The company also introduced atma.io, a cloud platform that uses connected-product technology to track products through the value chain.
In addition to the topics noted above, other trends show signs of gaining traction in 2023:
Stay tuned to Technovation in 2023 for more discussions about the transformative technologies driving organizations forward.
Gartner Inc. announced its top ten strategic technology trends for 2023 at their Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2022 in Orlando this week. The ten trends are broken into four themes: optimize, scale, pioneer, sustainability.
The top ten trends are:
Theme 1: Optimize
Digital Immune System
As CIOs increasingly take on revenue generating responsibilities, antiquated development and testing approaches are no longer sufficient for delivering robust and resilient business-critical solutions that also provide a superior user experience. A Digital Immune System (DIS) combines several software engineering strategies such as observability, automation, and extreme testing to enhance the customer experience by protecting against operational and security risks. By 2025, Gartner predicts that organizations that invest in building digital immunity will increase end-user satisfaction through applications that achieve greater uptime and deliver a stronger user experience.
Applied observability
The path to data-driven decision making includes a shift from monitoring and reacting to data to proactively applying that data in an orchestrated and integrated way across the enterprise. Doing so can shorten the time it takes to reach critical decisions while also facilitating faster, more accurate planning. Gartner notes observable data as an organization’s “most precious monetizable asset” and encourages leaders to seek use cases and business capabilities in which this data can deliver competitive advantage.
AI Trust, Risk and Security Management (AI TRiSM)
As artificial intelligence algorithms grow increasingly sophisticated and complex, leaders increasingly must bake governance, trustworthiness, fairness, reliability, efficacy and privacy into AI operations. AI TRiSM includes tools and processes that make AI models easier to interpret and explain while improving overall privacy and security. By 2026, companies that operationalize AI transparency, trust, and security will see AI models achieve 50% result improvement in terms of adoption, business goals and user acceptance, Gartner says.
Theme 2: Scale
Industry cloud platforms
Gartner predicts more organizations will use industry-specific cloud platforms to drive agility, speed to innovation and accelerated time to value. This includes incorporating cloud software, platform and infrastructure services traditionally purchased a la carte into pre-integrated yet flexible tools that are suited to meet the needs of specific industry verticals. The packaged capabilities can serve as building blocks on which organizations can build new and differentiating digital initiatives, Gartner says.
Platform Engineering
Modern software architectures are continuing to grow in complexity, and end-users are often asked to operate these services with a non-expert level knowledge. As a response to this growing friction, platform engineering has emerged between the service and the end-user to deliver a curated set of reusable self-service tools, capabilities, and processes, optimizing the developer experience and accelerating digital application delivery. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams with 75% of those including developer self-service portals.
Wireless-Value Realization
By 2025, Gartner expects 50% of enterprise wireless endpoints will use networking services that deliver additional capabilities beyond communication, up from less than 15%. Wireless-value realization refers to the expanding range of next-generation wireless protocols and technologies that will deliver value beyond connectivity, ranging from location tracking, to radar sensing, to ultra-low-power energy harvesting.
Theme 3: Pioneer
Superapps
In the age of smartphones and a digital-native generation, demand has grown for mobile-first experiences that provide a host of various services with a user-friendly interface. This demand has caused a trend of organizations embracing superapps, a composable application and architecture that provides end-users with a set of core features and access to independently created “miniapps” that allow for a consistent and personalized user experience within a single app. Gartner predicts that more than 50% of the global population will be daily active users of multiple superapps by 2027.
Adaptive AI
Adaptive artificial intelligence enables models that can self-adapt in production or change post-deployment using real-time feedback from past human and machine experiences. This is increasingly important as decision making is rapidly becoming more connected, contextual, and continuous. By 2026, Gartner predicts that enterprises that adopt AI engineering practices to build and manage adaptive AI systems will outperform their peers in the operationalizing AI models by at least 25%.
Metaverse
Gartner defines the metaverse as a combinatorial innovation, as opposed to a singular technology, that joins multiple trends in technology into a collective virtual environment where people can enhance the physical reality. This innovation transforms the physical world or extends it into a virtual world where organizations can improve employee engagement and collaboration. Although Gartner warns that the metaverse is still in its nascent stages and the viability of long-term investments are uncertain, it predicts that by 2027, over 40% of large organizations worldwide will be using Web3, spatial computing, and digital twins to increase revenue through metaverse-based projects.
Theme 4: Sustainability
Sustainable Technology
Sustainable technology is an area that has risen to the top of priority lists for many company executives and should be looked at as a framework of solutions that increase the energy and material efficiency of IT services, enable sustainability of both the enterprise and its customers, and drive environmental, social, and governance (ESG) outcomes. Through the use of technologies such as artificial intelligence, automation, advanced analytics, and shared cloud services, among others, companies can improve traceability, reduce environmental impact, and provide consumers and suppliers with the tools to track sustainability goals. By 2025, Gartner predicts that 50% of CIOs will have performance metrics tied to the sustainability of the IT organization.
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. He has written two bestselling books, and his third, Getting to Nimble, was recently released. He also moderates the Technovation podcast series and speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.
12/18/2018
By Peter High. Published in Forbes.
Matt Harris has been investing in FinTech companies since before the term was coined. He was initially drawn to the field partially due to the lack of attention it was getting 20 years ago. As he notes, “In the beginning, the incumbents ignored the startups because they thought they were insignificant, and then once the financial crisis hit, they ignored them because they had far bigger problems to deal with.” This was to his advantage.
Now, with a great number of winning investments to his credit, Harris has developed deep perspectives in and made investments to follow those insights into the core four segments of FinTech are payments, lending, investing, and insurance. He also argues in this this interview that real estate is worthy for consideration as a fifth segment. This interview is a remarkable overview of FinTech.
(To listen to an unabridged podcast version of this interview, please click this link. This is the 30th interview in the Tech Influencers series. To listen to past interviews with the likes of former Mexican President Vicente Fox, Sal Khan, Sebastian Thrun, Steve Case, Craig Newmark, Stewart Butterfield, and Meg Whitman, please visit this link. To read future articles in this series, please follow me on on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)
Peter High: You are a Managing Director at Bain Capital Ventures where your area of focus is Financial Technology [FinTech]. Could you define some of the discrete segments that have emerged in FinTech?
Matt Harris: While I had invested in FinTech companies since before the early 2000s, it did not become my sole focus until roughly 17 years ago. At the time, there were not many VC firms that were similarly focused exclusively on FinTech, so I saw an opportunity to get involved. Back then, FinTech was mostly around vendors and about companies’ ability to build technology and sell it to financial services organizations. I called the buyers the incumbents, which were the existing banks, broker-dealers, and insurance carriers. From my view, these companies typically preferred to buy technology from other large organizations, such as Fiserv, FIS, Jack Henry, Accenture, and IBM. Because of this, the opportunity to build new vendors to help the incumbents be more successful was not there.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
10/22/2018
By Peter High. Published on Forbes.
Nike’s Global CIO Jim Scholefield is leaving the company to join Merck as Chief Information and Digital Officer, effective Oct. 29.
Scholefield will be responsible for leading all aspects of information technology and digital strategy, including developing and implementing new and emerging technologies and capabilities to drive efficiencies, strengthen the security of the company’s infrastructure and support the company’s growth. He also will lead the development and innovation of digital strategy across the company to foster innovation.
Scholefield noted, “I’m honored and excited to have the opportunity to join Merck, a company that has made – and continues to make – a significant difference in the world. I look forward to contributing to the Executive Committee and to helping the company further succeed by driving industry-leading technology and digital capabilities across all aspects of the business.”
To read the full article, please visit Forbes.
4/9/11
By Peter High, published on Forbes
Late last year, David Bray became the first Executive Director of the People-Centered Internet (PCI), an organization that has a vision of creating projects that help improve people’s lives using the Internet. Vint Cerf, the co-creator of the Internet, is a co-founder of PCI.
Bray has a remarkable career in government prior to PCI. He began his career in government as a 15-year-old working at the Energy Department in the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility. Since then his experiences have included stints as an IT Chief for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response program, where he led the program’s technology response to 9/11 and the 2001 anthrax attacks, and as a Senior Strategist at the Institute for Defence Analysis (IDA) and a Defense Researcher at the Science and Technology Policy Institute (STPI), where he deployed to Afghanistan to help “think differently” on military and humanitarian issues. Bray spent the past several years at the Federal Communications Commission.
As he embarks on an entrepreneurial journey of sorts, I was curious how Bray’s government experience has helped prepare him for this role. He indicated that there are two advantages to government experience for an entrepreneur: first, it teaches one how to operate with resource constraints, and second, it provides experience in navigating across multiple constituencies.
Bray was once the most social CIO in the world, with hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. A new path forward, a growing family, and a perception of a lower returns on the investment in social media have him curtailing his efforts in that realm. His vision for the future of the Internet is as ambitious as ever.
Peter High: You recently joined the People-Centered Internet (PCI) as Executive Director. Can you talk about the mission of PCI and your role there?
David Bray: The People-Centered Internet is a coalition founded by Vint Cerf, one of the co-creators of the Internet, and Mei Lin Fung, who we say is the mother of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). The two of them came together with a vision of creating measurable demonstration projects that help improve people’s lives using the Internet. The idea is that if we are not careful, we may lose the hope and the enthusiasm the Internet had in the 1990s.
According to Pew, 20-somethings are less optimistic about the Internet than they used to be. They still say they cannot live without it, but they do not necessarily see it as a source of hope and freedom or as the uplifting force of people’s lives that we saw it as in the early ‘90s. If we can provide demonstration projects that measurably improve people’s lives using the Internet, these will serve as change agent case examples that local communities can then adopt, or policymakers can use. Even private corporations might be able to use these as a model going forward. It is easy to say, “This is not working,” or “This is bad,” and do the negative stories. The positive stories are harder, but we want to beat that and provide the support and expertise.
There is also the hope that we can espouse Doug Engelbart’s original vision. Doug Engelbart, who was the inventor of the mouse and graphical user interface [GUI], had the vision that technology was a way of bringing people together. If we think about our current lives, how many of us think the Internet is bringing people together versus polarizing and being divisive?
High: The emphasis on people is interesting because often when people think of the Internet they often leap to the technology behind it.
Bray: It is. Consider that just one presidential cycle ago, back in 2008, most people still had flip phones, not smartphones. Back in 2001, less than 2% of all households – meaning one family member in the household – had access to a mobile phone. Now, 98% of all households in the world have at least one family member with access to a mobile phone. That is a dramatic change in less than two decades. Not only is the pace of technology accelerating, but the adoption curves are shrinking. In some respects that is good because if something’s out there that can help uplift people and bring communities together, that is great.
However, there is also a challenge because technology is not neutral. It depends on how we use it, and it can be used for good or for bad. Vint and I often talk about how programmers and engineers rarely think about the second, third, and fourth order implications. In fact, it is not part of their training. Their expertise is making sure that devices do what they are supposed to do. Understanding the implications is another skill set, and it is partly a combination of vision, of artist, of sociology, and awareness of human history. We need to consider the unintended consequences that may occur.
To read the full interview, please visit Forbes