Scan Monthly No. 020October 2004 |
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Signals of Change
Customizing Medicine for the Masses
SoC073
Although the business press continues to tout the advent of personalized medicine, realists are recommending caution. The process of bringing truly personalized medicine to the public at large faces significant hurdles, at least for the foreseeable future. But the process of customizing medicine for groups of consumers or segments of the population is proceeding apace and seeing some success.
Not-So-Open Information Access
SoC074
The openness and availability of information on the World Wide Web and the increasing ubiquity of access that cell phones and wireless technologies provide have created an anytime, anywhere, always-on information-access capability that is starting to run into objections. Some objections involve the safety and proper functioning of hospital equipment. Others involve etiquette, manners, and common courtesy. Still others involve privacy and security concerns. Whatever the reasons, new technologies, services, and products are emerging to limit or restrict information access in various contexts.
Transparency Technologies
SoC075
Monitoring technologies generally have the reputation of constituting a threat to the privacy of citizens or consumers. But that reputation assumes that the government or corporations are the parties wielding the technologies and that the consumer is the subject of the monitoring. What happens if the public employs monitoring technologies on the government? Several experiments with implanting microchips, government-data monitoring and aggregation, and Web-based information on political contributions all demonstrate interesting new approaches that use technologies to bring transparency to government processes.
Market Research: Behind the Times
SoC076
Market research used to be much easier when communications technologies were primarily broadcast in nature and markets were typically mass in scope. But both have changed, are continuing to change, and will change even more rapidly in the future. The advent and rise of interactivity, digital media, scores of new channels, and synergistic interactions among them all have complicated marketing dynamics beyond recognition. Market-research techniques are having trouble keeping up with the pace of change.
Insights
| Challenges in Nanoelectronics Development | View summary |
| D04-2490 | Download this Insight |
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Nanoelectronics enables scientists to manipulate matter on a scale of less than 100 nanometers (nm) to create structures with useful electronic properties. Though commercialization of nanoelectronics has already begun and the conventional integrated-circuit industry will soon achieve 100-nm feature sizes, another realm of nanoelectronics lies ahead that embraces novel nanophotonic devices and true quantum-effect electronic components. Though nanoelectronics will have an impact on almost every industry, most of the early impact will be in the information-technology and consumer-electronics industries through enhanced storage and display devices, with nanoelectronics having the potential to revolutionize portable devices and provide ubiquitous computing. In turn, nanoelectronics will lead to ultrasensitive sensors for use in medicine, automobiles, and defense, and new nanostructured solar cells could radically alter the economics of solar power. Despite the dramatic potential of nanoelectronics, conventional electronic-device manufacture is well established and resistant to change, and the business to supply equipment to this sector is worth some $50 billion annually. Thus, a hybrid approach to nanomanufacturing will likely be the pragmatic route at first, enabling nanoelectronics to take advantage of the existing infrastructure. Author: Robert Thomas. 13 pages. |
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| Federating Digital Identity | View summary |
| D04-2491 | Download this Insight |
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Companies providing online services to consumers or attempting to outsource services or that simply wish to integrate applications across an enterprise face significant friction and inefficiencies when trying to manage digital identities centrally. Attempting to manage employee, business partner, and customer identities together is costly because every one of the changes of relationship between any of these individuals and the enterprise requires changes to the digital-identity database. Federated identity is able to achieve the benefits of a centralized approach without its associated inefficiencies and costs. Federated identity reduces the costs of digital-identity management in any enterprise by avoiding duplication of efforts within any given federation. Only one trusted organization is necessary to authenticate an individual's identity. That organization can then provide security assurances of various sorts to its partner organizations, allowing the authenticated individual access to their sites without necessarily gaining access to the individual's identity data. This study examines the opportunities and challenges associated with digital-identity federation. Author: Thomas M. McKenna. 9 pages. |
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| Artificial Intelligence for Autonomous Vehicles | View summary |
| D04-2492 | Download this Insight |
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The March 2004 DARPA (U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Grand Challenge was to be a dramatic demonstration of artificial intelligence in action. Entrants in the challenge, a number of autonomous vehicles, were to race, without drivers, for 150 miles in the Mojave Desert. In the end, the best competitor, Carnegie Mellon University's Sandstorms vehicle, completed only 7.5 miles of travel before crashing into a boulder. Although this highly advertised event showcased the limitations of autonomous vehicles driving in unknown, unstructured environments, the event did not represent very well the myriad advances that researchers have recently made toward semiautonomous and fully autonomous vehicles, particularly in semistructured environments. A number of researchers and engineers working at leading academic and manufacturing organizations are making significant progress in designing autonomous passenger vehicles, trucks, buses, and various utility vehicles. This study examines some of the initiatives that are implementing artificial intelligence in industrial, military, and consumer vehicles in the slow but steady progression toward increasingly autonomous vehicles. Author: Marcelo Hoffmann. 8 pages. |
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| Maximizing Use and Value of CRM through eLearning | View summary |
| D04-2493 | Download this Insight |
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Having good customer intelligence and processes can enable organizations to understand customers' current and future needs and help serve these needs better. The result can be improved customer experience, higher customer value, and stronger customer loyalty. This customer perspective is an important dimension of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) framework that has gained significant adoption across the globe as the "new management system" that many organizations use in their business planning and strategy-execution management. In this BSC context, customer-relationship management (CRM) can yield new customer insights that can accelerate learning and growth (for individuals, groups, and the organization as a whole) and can help catalyze new and more effective processes that meet customer needs better. Together, the result of these linkages and impacts can be a significant and positive impact on organizations' financial performance. CRM systems, therefore, can potentially bring great value to an organization, which explains why the number of implementations keeps growing despite many customers' reporting poor results or even total failure of their CRM implementations. Many of these problems are partly related to poorly designed or executed learning and training for the users of these systems. This study—which SRI Consulting Business Intelligence's Learning-on-Demand program produced in collaboration with Scan—discusses a number of issues related to these problems and steps that companies should take to resolve them. Author: Eilif Trondsen. 18 pages. |
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Calendar
Scan™ Abstract Meetings
Scan abstract meetings (in which SRIC-BI [now SBI] staff participate in a free-form discussion of current Scan abstracts) are open for client observation/participation on:
- 26 January 2005 at 9:00 am
- 23 March 2005 at 9:00 am
- 18 May 2005 at 9:00 am
- 20 July 2005 at 9:00 am
- 21 September 2005 at 9:00 am
- 19 October 2005 at 9:00 am.
Watch List
The Scan program's scanning and research processes identify areas on the periphery of your organizations's focus that constitute potential opportunities or threats. The areas that we decide bear watching go on Scan's watch list of defining forces that are transforming the business environment. Current watch-list topics include:
