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|In: Strategy and Tactics|Last Updated:

Announcing the Great KJR 2016 Election Real-time Fact Checking Challenge!

But first an assurance: This won’t be a political column. And a disclaimer: What follows is probably a pipedream. Still …

A confession: I’m addicted to fact-checking websites. The granddaddy of them all is, to the best of my knowledge, factcheck.org, and it’s arguably the most thorough. The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler runs its Fact Checker blog, which Kessler livens up by summarizing each fact-check with a rating that runs from Gepetto (completely accurate) through 4 Pinocchio’s.

My favorite is PolitiFact, with a rating scale of True, Mostly True, Half True, Mostly False, False, and for truly egregious falsehoods, Pants on Fire.

What I most appreciate about all of these is that they are (1) entirely non-partisan (or, more accurately, they’re partisans for accuracy and against fictional accounts of events, not for a political party or philosophy); and (2) sufficiently explanatory that their scoring rationales are clear and clearly reliable.

But … their value suffers from a limitation familiar to IT professionals, namely, data latency. In the world of IT, data latency is the result of overnight batch processing. That is, transactions come in throughout the course of a day, but the information available from the databases they post to isn’t an accurate reflection of the state of things until the next morning.

In the case of the fact-checking sites, politicians and pundits make speeches or debate one day, but the fact checkers don’t catch up until the next morning at best. Even worse, many of those who listen to the speeches aren’t addicted to fact-checking sites as I am, and so, like managers who trust their guts so much they don’t bother reading computer-generated reports, they won’t ever read the fact checkers’ findings.

Which is why I’m announcing the Great KJR 2016 Election Real-Time Fact Checking Challenge.

What it will take — the winning entrant will listen to political speech, and, in near-real-time:

  • Recognize statements of purported fact (as opposed to opinions, which will not be scored).
  • Evaluate them using criteria similar to what human fact-checkers use.
  • Evaluate quickly enough to flash the phrase in question along with a red, yellow, or green indicator before the speaker is too far into the next subject.
  • Pass an accuracy test by matching or improving on the judgment of the current crop of human fact checkers, with “improving on” defined as the fact checkers reading the machine’s explanation and saying, “Gee, I never thought of that.”

I figure this isn’t all that different or more difficult than what it took for Watson to learn to play Jeopardy, let alone its having read and assimilated the meaning of ream upon ream of medical literature so as to become a premiere diagnostician.

Which means IBM is one logical entrant for our little contest. Meanwhile, Google is the undisputed master of Internet search, and has invested heavily in machine learning technology besides, so Google is another logical entrant.

Who else? Beats me. I don’t see Siri, Cortana, or Echo reaching this level any time soon, but I’m sure there are other potential entrants that would jump at the opportunity.

And while I’d be happy to adjudicate, KJR’s involvement isn’t really necessary. Any company that could win, place, or show in the Great KJR 2016 Election Real-Time Fact Checking Challenge could more easily market the result directly to whichever networks will carry the pre-election debates between (unless something seriously unexpected happens) Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

What network wouldn’t want to include this feature, especially if all the others did?

Regrettably, while everyone reading these words can see the inevitability of this capability becoming reality, it probably won’t be in time for this presidential election. The next one, though, is likely, and if not then certainly the one after that.

When it is available, real-time fact-checking will be a complete game changer for electioneering. Even if some news networks prove so partisan that they create their own phony fact checking AIs, dual-screening is increasingly prevalent, so many voters would bring up an independent fact checking AI on their tablet or mobile device while watching a speech or debate.

Okay, fun’s fun. Imagining candidates who know that the moment they utter a false statement it would immediately be flagged Pants on Fire for all to see is a lovely day dream.

The larger point is that unlike previous tries at commercializing artificial intelligence technologies, which have proven useful but not transformational, we’re on the verge of capabilities whose impact will be nothing short of dramatic.

It isn’t too soon to start your strategic planning engines, to figure out how the new wave of artificial intelligence might affect your company’s marketplace, and its competitive position in it.

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|In: Cognitive Enterprise|Last Updated:

Dialog from Blazing Saddles:

Gabby Johnson: I wash born here, an I wash raished here, and dad gum it, I am gonna die here, an no sidewindin’ bushwackin’, hornswagglin’ cracker croaker is gonna rouin me bishen cutter.

Olson Johnson: I’m particularly glad that these lovely children were here today to hear that speech. Not only was it authentic frontier gibberish, it expressed a courage little seen in this day and age.

And so it is that some of my colleagues and I have added the acronym “AFG” to our vocabulary, for “authentic frontier gibberish.” There are skeptics who might want to apply the AFG seal of disapproval to some of the more vague and less useful discussions about Digital and why it matters to modern businesses.AFG

The AFG is unfortunate, because the Digital business model fits nicely into a list of about twenty we developed some years back at my old consulting company, IT Catalysts (credit where it’s due — our starting point was Michel Roberts’s excellent Strategy Pure and Simple (1993)).

At the time we called the business model in question the Technology/Competency model. The idea: Take something your business is already good at and find new, marketable uses for it. In The Cognitive Enterprise Scott Lee and I made it the third part of our Customers/Communities/Capabilities formulation, “capability” being our now-preferred term for “competency.”

And companies that adopt this business model don’t stop with taking advantage of the capabilities they’ve already mastered. They take the next step, making strategic decisions about what new capabilities to build, and for that matter which existing ones are declining in importance and should therefore be sunsetted.

Enter Digital strategy. Shorn of the AFG, adopting a Digital business strategy means using newly emerging or under-exploited technologies to build new business capabilities, which, once mastered, can be used to bring new products and services to market quickly, because so much of what’s needed to bring them to market is already in place.

Simple example: As a consultant, I’ve developed a decent bag o’ tricks for meeting facilitation. I’ve also developed a reasonably good set of techniques for taking strategic intent and turning it into a program of action.

These are, I think, two of my Capabilities, and if you disagree please don’t disabuse me of my conceit.

The point is that with these two Capabilities in hand (and some others, but the point here isn’t to extol my numerous virtues) … where was I? With these existing capabilities I’m in a position to develop consulting services for a variety of specific topics as the need arises and their potential catches my attention.

Digital, for example.

So … if Digital business strategy is a subset of the broader-based technology/capability-driven business model, which is the big deal, Digital, or capability-driven business models in general?

I’d vote for capability-driven business models, with this proviso: There aren’t many new business capabilities to develop that don’t require the use of new and interesting technologies.

But still, what matters (I think) are the capabilities more than the Digital technologies that enable them. The reason goes back to the ongoing, even accelerating trend of business temporal compression (AFG?). While it depends on what your business sells and who it sells it to, in many cases marketplaces are changing fast enough that traditional approaches to strategic planning just can’t keep pace.

As a general rule, the value of a capability will last longer than specific products, product lines, or even product categories. And so, building strategic plans around capabilities makes the most sense for many and perhaps most businesses today.

Take smart products and the Internet of Things (IoT if you want to be cool). Imagine IoT isn’t one of your capabilities, but a competitor has mastered it.

We in IT have become accustomed to products capable of detecting and reporting defects before they cause overt outages.

Imagine consumers start to expect all their major purchases to do this. This isn’t unlikely — customers might not be sophisticated about technology in all its gory detail, but they’ve become pretty savvy about what technology can do.

If you’ve mastered the IoT, you can add this feature to all your products fairly easily. If not, good luck — you’ll have missed a major marketplace shift.

Building a business that’s adept at detecting marketplace shifts early and adapting to them quickly will prove to be the path to sustainable success.

My guess is that Digital will part of the mix, because Digital technologies are what will give businesses the new capabilities they’ll need to adapt at the speed of customer expectations.

* * *

On an entirely different subject: I gave a speech last November at PhreakNIC in Nashville, about the Embedded Technology Generation and its implications. It isn’t exactly TED talk material, but if you’re interested, you’ll find it here.

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