Here is a brief excerpt from an article written by Bill Teuber for the Huffington Post. To read the complete article, c heck out others, and sign up for email alerts, please click here.
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Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, from MIT’s Center for Digital Business, have a new book out this week called, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies.
McAfee and Brynjolfsson came to our attention in October 2012 with their thoughtful piece on data driven decision-making that ran in the Harvard Business Review. At the time, the two of them struck many of us as ahead of the curve on the phenomenon of big data and its impact on business. Since then, my colleagues and I have only become more impressed by what they’ve written.
That’s why we invited McAfee to join EMC’s leadership team in Boston a couple of weeks ago to talk with us about how every business model in every industry is going to be redefined in some form by software. If the first machine age was about the automation of manual labor and horsepower, the second machine age is about the automation of knowledge work, thanks to the proliferation of real time, predictive data analytics, machine learning and the “Internet of Things” — an estimated 200 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2020, all of them generating unimaginable quantities of data.
McAfee and Brynjolfsson’s favorite example of automated work is Google’s self-driving car, a marvel of ingenuity enabled by technology’s ability to capture the data of so many moving variables and act on them instantly, free of human error. If a self-driving car seems far-fetched, how about software that grades students’ essays more objectively, consistently and quickly than humans? Or news articles on Forbes.com about corporate earnings previews — “all generated by algorithms without human involvement.”
We used to speak about how organizations had access to databases. Now, leading organizations are building “data lakes” — giant reservoirs of information in heterogeneous formats, to aid decision-making and to offer new services to customers. Mobile apps collect intelligence from vast networks of drivers on highways to direct us to the least congested routes between points A and B. “Massive online open courses” offer thousands of college level students access to the best lecturers halfway around the world — at a fraction of the cost.
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Here is a direct link to the complete article.
To check out McAfee and Brynjolfsson’s article for Harvard Business Review, “Big Data: The Management Revolution,” please click here.
Bill Teuber is Vice Chairman of global information technology giant, EMC Corporation. In this role, Teuber focuses on strategy and business development in emerging markets, assists with government relations and works closely with EMC’s Board of Directors. He sponsors EMC’s largest customer accounts and works closely with EMC Chairman and CEO Joe Tucci and EMC’s executive team to develop future leaders of the company. Prior to his appointment as Vice Chairman in 2006, Teuber held full responsibility for EMC Customer Operations, the company’s global sales and distribution organization, and operated as Chief Financial Officer. He joined EMC in 1995 from Coopers & Lybrand L.L.P. where he was a partner in the firm’s Audit and Financial Advisory Services practice.