Decoding Tomorrow:
Futurism and Foresights Today

 Specifically, what I want to address with you here today is a question that's emerged in many of the emails I've been receiving from clients and from some of the viewers from around the world about Big Data and what the future of this much hyped concept is. Let me bring it back to something concrete, to a couple of areas where I like to spend time, and companies who are innovating in the use of Big Data and how they turn data into information, into insights, analytics, and better decisions and execution. Those two things, of course, being movies and football - or soccer as some people in the Anglo-Saxon world like to refer to it as.

Let me begin with football, that perhaps most analog of codes that sort of raises so much analog irrational emotion. I had the opportunity and the privilege to spend some time in Rio de Janeiro for the quarterfinals at the 2014 football World Cup. One of the things that was evident when I watched the German national team play was that something massive has happened. I grew up in Sweden in the 1980s, and the best team at the time, and one of the first World Cups that I had the privilege of viewing via analog television, was of course the 1990 soccer World Cup in Italy, 'ciao ciao Italia' as we refer to it as in Sweden. That was a great tournament, and it was won by great Germans wearing fantastic haircuts. And the likes of Lothar Matthäus, Bodo Illgner, or Guido Buchwald won the World Cup for Germany playing a very sort of Germanic, tactical, strategic, extremely well disciplined style of football.

It took another 24 years before Germany would win the World Cup again, and they did that in 2014. And the reason why was one that is called Big Data. Many of you have been asking questions about Big Data and where it's being applied. Well, football is one field where Big Data is being applied. The German firm S.A.P. did some analytics on the 2010 World Cup that happened in South Africa, and they found that, on average, the German players would have the ball at their feet for 4.3 seconds apiece on average across the whole World Cup. We know that they didn't win it in 2010. Spain did. Based on the analytics, the Big Data, the precision maps, the heat maps, and statistically based insights, S.A.P. was able to advise the German national team on how to effectively reduce the amount of time that each player had the ball and how they could pass it more quickly amongst each other to thus get to the opposite goal faster. In 2014, the results were remarkable. From 4.3 seconds per player on average, the average went down to 1.1 seconds.

The Big Data analytics post the World Cup show that even the German goal keeper, Manuel Neuer, great goal keeper by the way, hit more effective successful passes to a common or to a team mate than even the likes of Lionel Messi. You could argue that even for a goal keeper, it's a little bit simpler to hit an effective successful pass because there's not as much pressure on the defenders as for someone like Lionel Messi. But, the fact that the average possession time went down from 4.3 seconds to 1.1 seconds signifies why this German team, of course filled with competence, was able to get past all the other teams and of course even beat the Brazilian national team so convincingly in the semi final to then claim the World Cup.

Big Data plays a massive role in business and the business that is football. The second area where Big Data is being applied very, very effectively today is in cinema, movies, or even more importantly, what's maybe replaced movies, and that is, of course, the new sort of HBO or Netflix style videos and video series. For any of you that are familiar with Netflix, what you may not know about this formerly just mere distributor of digital content when it comes to TV series is that now they're also using Big Data to shape everything about their series.

Two Netflix initiated and curated and designed series of late, both 'MacBeth' as well as 'House of Cards,' are uniquely retrofitted, or you could even say reverse engineered, based on the Big Data insights about your and my viewing habits. If you look at the two covers, for example of 'MacBeth' as well as 'House of Cards,' you'll notice that they have some similarities, and this is not a coincidence. This is because Netflix has so much rich user data about your and my user habits, how we view, what colors appeal to us, the cast, the story line that we really like. And based upon all of those insights, they basically reverse engineered these two series for us.

'MacBeth,' of course, has a Middle Age gentleman on the front cover. The colors, black, red, and sort of very, very emotive colors, are on the front cover, same as, of course, Kevin Spacey's front cover of the 'House of Cards.' This is all based on rich color analysis of what posters would most appeal to the consumers' hearts and to their minds. Based upon Big Data insights about their customers, Netflix is able to reverse engineer a series that's sort of almost genetically manipulated to ensure that it's beautifully designed to appeal to the most effective and to the most effective use and cut through to our clients. This is something Netflix does where it uses Big Data insights to turn data into information into analytics.

So, ask yourself when you're thinking about Big Data and all the data that you capture about your customers, your processes, your logistics, are you making as much use of your data sets as the likes of the German national team, Die Mannschaft or Netflix. Are you getting closer to your customers just like Netflix and designing by way of reverse engineering a product that you know, based on Big Data insights, is going to appeal to their hearts and minds? Do you use data like Die Mannschaft, the national team of Germany, in a way where you're really debriefing and using data insights about the way you play, your amount of possession, and the way you can effectively increase your productivity on the field to get better results, or even like they did, win the World Cup as a result?

Big Data is here to stay. The question is, are you turning that data into information, analytics, insights, and executable decision making ?