My speech on “How to create value from data”
I was recently tasked to give a short speech at the NTNU IE faculty day in Trondheim on the 15th june. They assigned three of us the topic on how to create value from data. The session contained a five-minute speech from three faculty members, including myself, but from different fields and perspectives. I scoped my talk on opportunity, building SaaS and scalable services.
After the talks, the audience had 20 minutes to submit questions for a panel debate. The conference had by far the biggest stage I have been on and it was an interesting experience.
My speech
I couldn’t just give a speech on cybersecurity, so, I tried to generalize my experience from these last years building a scalable SaaS application. Here is my five minute speech:
“Friends! Colleagues! Thank you for this opportunity! And let me say that thank you to [NN] for volunteering me to this session. I have traveled all the way from Gjøvik to give this five-minute speech, so, don’t be alarmed if I use six minutes.
Sometimes it takes years from you hear somebody say something smart, until you realize the depth and wisdom of what was said. The Internet became a common good in Norway while I was about nine years old, but despite many saying how great an invention it is, it has taken me 30 years to understand the depth and reach of this invention. And I think that my personal understanding is just scratching the surface.
Before the internet, you would be lucky if you could gather 20 people at a sales meeting and tell them about your product. Now, I can write a tweet, or a Facebook message about my product, research, teaching, or whatever random thoughts come to mind and see them effortlessly reach thousands of people worldwide. The internet amplifies messages around the world, and now even into space. This understanding is nothing new, however, the impact of the internet is so vast that is hard to understand the wealth of opportunity it creates. Opportunities are everywhere, but you must train yourself to see and utilize them.
There is an army of robots out there called the cloud that is awaiting your command. The machines are your cheap labor. And, If done right, this army will help you amplify your message, gather your data, or sell your product. You can live in Norway and sell your product in New Zealand during nighttime. Your robot army will do your work for you while you sleep.
Scalable services, which we teach many of our students at the IE-faculty, are amazing. Scalable means that it adjusts dynamically to the computing power needs generated by the customer base. More traffic equals higher need for computing power, and it must adjust automatically.
To build a really good scalable service you need expertise in your technology platform, but you also need data, information, knowledge, experience, and customer dialogue. Trust me, as a semi-introverted scientist, it is too easy to neglect customer dialogue, as it is the business version of peer review.
However, we need this knowledge to generate an idea that can manifest into a product, a service, or whatever you want to create. It is great when you can fill the customer’s need with a tech innovation, like we are trying to do in my company, where we recognized that everybody hates doing cyber risk assessments, so, we are making a service to ease their burden. However, it is even better when you make something that they did not know they needed, but really improves their life.
How much data do you really need to create value? In most cases, I think that the answer is “a lot less than you think”.
When conducting risk assessments of IT systems, I often ask “does your system store sensitive personal data, such as health information?” If the answer is “yes”, I can already infer many things about risk: I know that the dreaded GDPR is within the risk picture. And I already know the primary causes of most GDPR violations. I also know how to mitigate these causes. I know the size of the fines and how to avoid them. All from one datapoint. A simple yes or no-question allows me, the human analyst, to make several inferences that creates value and saves time for the customer.
The extension of this is how do we standardize this realization, apply technology, and make it into a product to create value?
Because, think about all of the inferences that we can make from combining datapoints, some are known and some are unknown. Some with high certainty, some with low certainty. But there are many. Once we have our research and models in place, we need to answer how we can automate the decision-making and then serve the value back to the end-user for real world application.
And once you have that in place comes the time to engage the robot army to build our application on a scalable infrastructure. Make use of your robots and automate as much as possible, automate sales, automate user management, automate billing, automate calculations and analysis. Collect data from your system and users to improve. Data provides value to everyone, but it must be the right data.
But this by itself is not enough, to quote a hero to many academics, namely Arnold Schwarzenegger; “You need to work hard and advertise”. Meaning that you need to be more than just a builder to succeed, so advertise your service and amplify your message into space.
And, finally, build cybersecurity into the foundations of everything you do, because it is the one risk that topple everything.
It is up to you to realize opportunities for value creation that lie at your fingertips.
Thank you.”
Hope you enjoyed this post!
Check out our cyber risk management solution at https://www.diri.ai
