What the Data?!?

WHAT THE DATA??? - FashTech Summit April 2016

Tagged as an interactive presentation from a Technical Evangelist from Microsoft - I bet the FashTech audience were thinking "oh goodness, what on earth is going to happen at 12:20" :)

So I jumped straight in - Data and Analytics are my passion and I want to talk to you about why you want to get passionate about it as well.

THE WORLDS DATA

Let's start way back … even before I was born (showing my age!). Data was mostly analogue; books, tapes, records and paper documents. But during the 1990's I had the opportunity to start moving from analogue to digital. Granted I had a few tapes but then came the CD's, home computers and DVDs; and this digital data started to overtake the analogue.

From the mid-1990's some of this data became connected, that is internet connected - this data now had an IP address.

Now … the majority of the worlds data is digital, and a lot of this data is from the web and in the cloud.

The future, what is in store? By 2020 its estimated we will have around 50 Zettabytes of data - 50 million petabytes!! This is likely to come from the internet of things, from applications in the cloud and mobile experiences.

The vast majority of this data is predicted to be sitting in internet connected data centres, so we know it as the cloud. The planets data, information and intelligence will reside here and this transformation will be a revolution in every industry.

Whether it’s the fashion and retail industry or a very different space like the agriculture industry - every company is now a data company!

Fashion and Retail - the extremely innovative Von Bismark, a start-up supported by Microsoft to produce a virtual dressing room that now sits as an app on the Xbox One platform using the Kinect sensor to allow you to virtually try on clothing.

Or all the way over to the Agriculture industry - with the connected cow story. A story with all the buzz words of today, internet of things, machine learning and data. From a single dairy farmers curiosity to understand how to more accurately detect oestrus - to cows wearing pedometers and now the farmers ability to control the production of his herd better: check out the fantastic connected cow story here.

EVERY COMPANY IS NOW A DATA COMPANY

BOLD INTERCONNECTED AMBITIONS

With Microsoft's mission to empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more comes 3 bold interconnected ambitions

- Reinventing Productivity and Business Processes
- Create More Personal Computing
- Building the Intelligent Cloud

I would like to focus on 'Building the Intelligent Cloud' in this blog post, however all of the things I talk about come with a point of making your applications 'think' and act intelligently with the data they see - this often then leads to the next step in design: how your users/customers interact with your applications in a more human way, a more personal way. That is how these ambitions become very closely related.

BUILDING THE INTELLIGENT CLOUD Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform, offering services from IaaS, to PaaS, to SaaS. With a whole wealth of core services to allow you to build your solutions in the cloud and take advantage of elastic scalability, only pay for what you use; and move from app idea to production in a much shorter time.

Very recently at BUILD, Microsoft' annual developer conference, we announced Cortana Intelligence - a suite of services dedicated to transforming your data into intelligent action. The ability to bring data from many inputs into the cloud, use a vast array of services from information management to advanced analytics and machine learning, but not forgetting that all this data should be stored in data stores that suit the type, size and velocity of your data.

Cortana Intelligence suits a wide range of audiences and organisations at different stages of their intelligence vision. Whether its initially understanding and visualising your line of business application data, maybe through Power BI dash-boarding. Or all the way to an end-to-end big data and analytics pipeline taking advantage of both 'data at rest' and 'data in motion' within your business or application; therefore resulting in that ACTION statement below.

DATA TO INTELLIGENT TO ACTION

So examples always make this type of information easier to digest and starts to initiate ideas.

Businesses are gaining better visibility into their organisation and making better predictions

• In manufacturing, this can involve using remote monitoring to know exactly what’s going on with equipment at customer sites or in remote locations
• In retail, people are optimizing demand forecasting to better predict what customer demand will look like next season, or next year.

Businesses are using advanced analytics to ensure materials, parts and products are optimally distributed to the right places at the right times

• Better optimization of the marketing mix – using advanced analytics and intelligence to ensure the right product is in the right place, at the right price and being seen by customers who are more likely to buy.
• Across industries, getting the right items to the right places contributes to operational efficiency objectives

Offering customers what they want, when they want it, understanding your customers and delivering personalised experiences

• In manufacturing, this may involve tracking a customer’s use of a particular product, identifying 'wear and tear', offering advice on how to make the product last longer, and offering targeted promotions on replacement parts.
• In financial services, this might involve making more tailored product recommendations based on customer information from across channels - from detailed demographics to social media interactions.
• Across industries, using data, advanced analytics and intelligence capabilities can support more successful new product introduction. With these technologies, you can reduce the likelihood of introducing products that don't sell well, by informing product development with data and analytics.

 

An example I built, along with others in the team, was a Twitter Sentiment Analyser - called the Orb of Intelligence. This used a variety of services from Cortana Intelligence including Event Hubs, Stream Analytics, Cognitive Services and a Web App front end.

Check out the initial blog post I wrote about this project here: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/amykatenicho/2015/09/07/the-current-level-of-reasonsto-happiness/
And watch me demo it in a video and show the aggregation of Twitter sentiment every 10 seconds:
https://bit.ly/1QpQzjU
With all of these types of solutions, different parts of the Cortana Intelligence suite can be stitched together to suit your needs, so you have full flexibility to create a bespoke end to end pipeline. On the other hand, Cortana Intelligence also offers out-of-the box functionality with Cognitive services as well as framework support when working with conversations as a platform, where natural language becomes and new UI and the bot framework can help support with the design of your intelligent bots. This is making the barrier to entry for 'getting into' data significantly lower. Don't worry about the infrastructure, it's your time to focus on the ideas, it's your time to think on how you can differentiate your business or application.

 

The best way to get into Cortana Intelligence is to use the resources below and start building, follow handy tutorials and then design the framework for your projects!

 

Links to Cortana Analytics Learning Path: https://aka.ms/cortanaintelligencelearningpath
Link to Cognitive Services: https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services
Link to the Bot Framework: https://dev.botframework.com/
Start building your bot: https://docs.botframework.com/builder/node/overview/
Please do go and check out these links and resources and keep in touch, let me know what you build @AmyKateNicho
And a huge thanks to @FashTechLDN for inviting me to speak at their Fash Tech Summit 2016, it was a fantastic event!