The Institute for the Future (IFTF) published an interesting report on Future Work Skills 2020. Instead of dropping into micro-level jobs, the report identifies 10 key skills that will be required to meet these 6 key drivers of change:
- Extreme longevity
- Rise of smart machines and systems
- Computational world
- New media ecology
- Superstructured organizations
- Globally connected world
Given my interest in active information -- my term for accelerating data into value -- the trend that (most) caught my attention was #3 Computational World:
"The diffusion of sensors, communications, and processing power into everyday objects and environments will unleash an unprecedented torrent of data and the opportunity to see patterns and design systems on a scale never before possible. Every object, every interaction, everything we come into contact with will be converted into data. Once we decode the world around us and start seeing it through the lens of data, we will increasingly focus on manipulating the data to achieve desired outcomes. Thus we will usher in an era of “everything is programmable”—an era of thinking about the world in computational, programmable, designable terms.
The collection of enormous quantities of data will enable modeling of social systems at extreme scales, both micro and macro, helping uncover new patterns and relationships that were previously invisible. Agencies will increasingly model macro-level phenomena such as global pandemics to stop their spread across the globe. At a micro level, individuals will be able to simulate things such as their route to the office to avoid traffic congestion based on real-time traffic data. Micro and macro-scale models will mesh to create models that are unprecedented in their complexity and completeness.
As a result, whether it is running a business or managing individual health, our work and personal lives will increasingly demand abilities to interact with data, see patterns in data, make data-based decisions, and use data to design for desired outcomes."
The good news in the computational world scenario is that we'll have an abundance of data to turn into value. The bad news in the computational world scenario is that we'll have an abundance of data to churn through.
To take advantage of the computational world, or the nearer term internet of things, we need to infuse smarts throughout our data collection networks. We need to employ up-front and intermediate filters, traffic cops, aggregators, pattern detectors, and intelligent agents. We need to get over being data hoarders, and have the astuteness to leave data behind.
Luckily, this isn't a new concept. Financial markets have been employing streaming data processing and event processing for years. And more recently, these techniques have been adopted by marketers and social media. So, there are people, products and patterns available.
For example, in his Big Data predictions for 2012 post, Edd Dumbill calls out a couple of real-time frameworks worth exploration:
"Over the next few years we'll see the adoption of scalable frameworks and platforms for handling streaming, or near real-time, analysis and processing. In the same way that Hadoop has been borne out of large-scale web applications, these platforms will be driven by the needs of large-scale location-aware mobile, social and sensor use.
For some applications, there just isn't enough storage in the world to store every piece of data your business might receive: at some point you need to make a decision to throw things away. Having streaming computation abilities enables you to analyze data or make decisions about discarding it without having to go through the store-compute loop of map/reduce.
Emerging contenders in the real-time framework category include Storm, from Twitter, and S4, from Yahoo."
To get an idea of infusing smarts into an information network, check out the building block section of Event Processing in Action.
And to get a jumpstart on 2020 skill building, check out the IFTF report.
