Lesley Gavin is BT's first female futurologist. She has recently been shortlisted for a national First Woman award in the 'Technology' category. The winners of the awards, which recognise ground-breaking British business women, will be announced June.
Lesley joined BT in 2004 following an accomplished career as an architect and then after establishing, and selling, her own successful technology business. Here she outlines her role as a futurologist at BT.
I'm part of a team of five which includes Ian Pearson. My job is split into two. Half of my time is spent on futurology and the other half is looking at specific industry sectors. I spend a lot of my time working closely with all sorts of companies from different sectors advising them on where their particular sector might go next and how technology can help them to achieve their business goals.
They frequently ask for technology timelines - the key things that will happen to their industry over the next 15 years and, specifically, when those things will happen. Explaining to them what technologies will emerge is fairly easy. The hard part is telling them when technologies and applications will make a big impact. The timing of the impact of a technology often depends on the development of new business models and social acceptability - or otherwise - of the concept. Disruption happens in an industry when a new technology is applied in a different way.
Yes if we look at broadcasting and the phenomona of reality TV shows. BT was involved in projects with Channel 4 in 1998 where viewers could log on to a 3d virtual world (like 'Second Life today) and have avatars interact with people in a real world environment. This was a lovely mixture of reality TV and multi user online gaming. We knew that both reality TV and multi user online worlds were going to be big, but it didn't really take off back then. This was partly due to the lack of broadband (dial-up made the 3D online environment a little difficult), but mostly down to the fact that the business model wasn't obvious until Big Brother began charging for text messages.. Future programmes will eventually mix the 3D worlds with the reality shows.
I talk about a number of themes around convergence. One of the more interesting is that everything is becoming increasingly automated. Machine to machine learning will change the way businesses operate in the future. It is starting to take place in areas like global finance markets where 'alogorithmic trading' is taking place. This is where the programmes are given a set of rules and automatically trade the market. The next stage is when the programmes not only have set rules, but develop new rules depending on the dynamics of the market. We expect this type of artificial intelligence development to grow exponentially and become ubiquitous.
Other trends include increased personalisation. People, or customers, are expecting better and more personally tailored product and services. This means companies have to understand their customers much better, and use their data much more efficiently, in order to do this in a cost effective way.
Well, it's clear that the work place is changing. Companies, departments even teams are increasingly using highly-skilled individuals in an ad hoc manner. They are often distributed around the world, they often have different cultures, different ways of communicating and all within one organisation.
These communications should be encouraged and recognised as a knowledge bank to build on.
All of the technological aspects of convergence are important given that they inter-depend on each other. Wwe work and communicate in a number of different environments and in a number of different ways - talking, writing, drawing etc. We can embed sensors in our environments to collect the knowledge we produce. Once we have all that data we need to store it somewhere, this could be on devices or backed up centrally, then we need to understand it. By far the greatest change in business practice will be when semantic knowledge management tools become effective. Then, businesses will be able to manage and understand all their data better, therefore becoming much more effective and innovative. These developments will also pave the way for real machine-machine learning as mentioned above.
Finally we need to deliver the information back to the right people in the right place at the right time and in the right format. Devices are likely to change dramatically in order to be able to accommodate this.
Online banking has allowed us to be more in control of our money. Remember the not so distant past when banks were these large austere buildings deliberately designed to make you feel small and remind you that the bank manager had power? Well now the internet has allowed us to take control. That trend will continue but perhaps the devices will change, you will be able to do your banking via all sorts of devices. Perhaps it will be through 'wearables' like 3D VR glasses, perhaps it will be through your PDA, data device, or TV. You might even want to bank from your own virtual reality room in your house.