Rick Delgado at Smart Data Collective contributed insights about potential hurdles for the Internet of Things.

Two ideas crossed my mind while reading this piece. First, Delgado makes the obvious-but-equally-important point that being able to take advantage of the wealth of the Internet of Things requires something we take for granted: access to the Internet. I’m not going to belabor a rural electrification analogy. Many do not have Internet connectivity, including in the developed world and the United States. It gets worse as ignorance abounds. Delgado writes:

While businesses may talk excitedly about the Internet of Things, consumers are largely unaware of it. In a recent survey of 2,000 people, 87% of consumers said they had never even heard of the IoT. While hearing about the Internet of Things doesn’t necessarily signify a consumer would not use an item connected to the IoT, the survey results show a lack of awareness and understanding about what can be gained from it. If this lack of knowledge about the IoT leads to lack of interest, a major driving force for widespread adoption will be missing.

In one of the worst tech predictions of all time, IBM President Thomas Watson stated in 1943: “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” Talk about punching in the mouth the possibility of disruptive innovation at IBM. Watson was misguided and incorrect, but hardly dumb. Whether we wish to believe it, Mr. Watson, I suggest, knew far more about his industry at the time than today’s experts know about the Internet of Things, which is in its infancy but growing fast. According to Gartner, there will be approximately 25+ billion sensors in the world by 2020. It’s not surprising that a whopping 87% of consumers are unaware of the billions of sensors around the world. What would (I would hope) be surprising is if we don’t follow in Google’s footprints to widen Internet connection worldwide. That would be a Tragedy of the Commons with a mean twist. We’re not depleting a resource. On the contrary, it grows daily because we feed it. Our “just” not sharing precludes a global race to the top of technology, which I’ll restrict here for the sake of argument to non-military uses. Now that’s a race we should all want to enter.

Tracey Wallace over at the Umbel blog (Truth in Data) writes about data-driven cities and the Internet of Things .

Wallace describes how each city is turning itself into a data treasure trove and using new technologies. Let’s look at a few:

• Turning old phone booths into WiFi hot spots (NYC);
• All household waste is sucked directly from individual kitchens through a vast underground network of tunnels, to waste processing centers, where it is automatically sorted, deodorized and treated. (Songdo, South Korea);
• Wi-Fi provides city communities with hot spots that promote city services such as water meters, leak sensors, parking meter and other city services to operate on the same secure government network. (Dallas); and
• There are no light switches or water taps in the city; movement sensors control lighting and water to cut electricity and water consumption by 51 and 55% respectively. (Masdar, UAE).

These initiatives are amazing. Think about what Masdar is doing. It’s like an automatic, energy-saving Clapper (“clap on, clap off”). Consider their savings and what it would mean for energy consumption if such a program were implemented to the extent possible around the world. Wow. There's certain to be an enterprise wrapped around this as we speak.  So . . . which of you will be the first to sit on a bench at the edge of a park and use a nearby phone booth across the street as your hot spot? That’s pretty cool.

Richard Boire at the Smart Data Collective poses the following question: The Demise of the Data Scientist: Heresy or Fact? The CEO of Williams-Sonoma certainly has an opinion. 

Boire comments on an article by an “IT leader of a well-respected U.S. organization” whom he doesn’t name. Boire writes of this apparition:

[The author] hypothesized that data scientists will in the future become like switchboard operators: obsolete. The primary reason for this declining demand according to the author was that increased automation and operationalization of business processes will not require the technical skills of the data scientist.

Boire takes the contrary position:

With Big Data and big data analytics, the need for analytics and more customized type solutions is experiencing exponential growth. Methods and approaches in employing analytics need to be quicker and more flexible which require IT support for more operationalization and automation. This does not replace the data scientist.

We can leave  the automatization debate primarily to the Quants. But I do think they ignore the fact that data science is also an inherently human endeavor. Thomas Davenport, for example, argues that both creativity and instinct are essential to interpreting data. This is especially true when an executive’s intuition may display a lack of data science understanding. He writes in Keeping Up With The Quants: “The goal, then, is to make analytical decisions while preserving the role of the executive’s gut.” That battle-tested gut can be critical to evaluating even a data-driving initiative. There’s more great, related content: The September issue of Harvard Business Review has an article by Laura Alber, CEO of Williams-Sonoma for the past four years. (The article is gated.) She describes the creativity found in Williams-Sonoma’s headquarters in San Francisco, as well the “data analysts crunching numbers, building models, and analyzing reports.” She continues: