Lexpert Magazine

LEXPERT MAGAZINE | MARCH 2017 63 BY GEORGE TAKACH TECHNOLOGY Boards of directors and executive committees must be trained to shepherd their institutional digital capabilities Overseeing the New Technologies AS 2017 BEGINS to unfold, it is clear that a number of technology de- velopments will continue to affect the Canadian economy and public sector agencies in this country. So it's timely to highlight these, but then put them in the context of what your organiza- tion — whether in the private or pub- lic sector — should be doing to better manage them. SMAC AND MORE One acronym that captures four of the disruptive technologies is SMAC: Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud. Let's look at each in turn. Social media is working its way into ev- ery nook and cranny of the economy, and society. Marketing, for example, is being changed fundamentally by digital chan- nels such as Facebook. And when the final analysis of US President Donald Trump's victory is made, I'm sure the role of his Twitter account will loom large. e app economy, which is fueling the ubiquity of Mobile technology, is coming into its own. And it's not just Uber. Virtu- ally every aspect of human activity has an app (or several) that either enable the ac- tivity, or facilitate it, or support it in some meaningful manner. Especially for millen- nials and younger, the importance of the smartphone for commerce, entertainment, news, social cohesion, politics, health and much more cannot be overstated. From the perspective of business and government, Analytics is also coming into its own. Sometimes colloquially known as Big Data, corporations and public agen- cies are harnessing the reams of personal and other information they are collecting every nanosecond. As they say, the dough is in the data. And we are starting to see a proliferation of artificial intelligence ap- plications where the data is automatically mined, insights are garnered and specific actions are taken, all by means of com- puterized, automated processes. Picking stocks, healing the sick, predicting human behaviour, scheduling public and private transportation, predicting the weather, predicting wars, predicting buying habits, predicting elections (okay, that one is still not working well) and countless other ac- tivities will never be the same. Buttressing all these trends is the fact that the infrastructure of computing, and related telecommunications, has never been less expensive — and yet more pow- erful — because computer resources can now be fairly inexpensively produced in the "Cloud." Years ago a tech start-up would be looking at spending $5 million just to buy all the hardware and soware it needed to get started; now it can get the same com- puting power, or better, for a fraction of the cost (in the range of $500,000) in the Cloud. Where you once needed at least a garage to launch a start-up, now a table and chair at a coffee shop will do. is phenomenon is having a major im- pact on company creation and capital for- mation in Canada and around the world, and the implications for the innovation sector of the economy are enormous. Beyond the SMAC items noted above, keep an eye on the following tech developments that are also start- ing to come into their own. While it may not become mainstream in highly built-up urban settings, drone deliveries in suburban and rural envi- ronments are starting to roll out, and a few months ago an Amazon pilot project was launched to test them. Another product that may have once seemed the stuff of sci-fi is vir- tual reality, and augmented reality. In the financial services sphere, blockchain — a distributed database that maintains a continuously growing list of ordered re- cords called blocks — is being implement- ed by banks in its applications; look for some very intriguing applications coming online by 2018. SMAC ISSUES APLENTY e SMAC technology trends (and possi- bly some of the others noted above) are cer- tainly buffeting your organization already. And if they are not, it's just a question of time because their momentum is inexo- rable, whether you work in the private or public sector. Here's a short list of key issues that will be on your agenda courtesy of the SMAC rev- olution and the other novel tech-oriented offerings coming your way. First, your core products and services will be undergoing a major transformation, both in terms of how you organize your supply chains, and how you deal with your customers. Second, while SMAC and other novel technolo- gies present huge opportunities for you, they also present challenges such as cyber- security. erefore, applying risk-manage- ment principles to SMAC concerns will become essential to your organization, and PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK | COLUMNS |

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