Via secure company-wide intranets that draw on Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI, to intelligent bot-enabled business functions and regulatory processes, ChatGPT and tools like it are going to transform the way entire organizations access, collate and distribute knowledge, and create new assets – and what they do with all of it. As a specialist in data and content management in regulated industries, fme is already on the case with strategic advice, roadmap development, and customer prototypes.

To say that artificial intelligence, and specifically Generative AI, is poised to transform IT delivery as well as a whole host of other corporate functions, is no exaggeration. It is already happening, and it is going to be at least as transformational and disruptive as the World Wide Web or the cloud – which means that corporate executive teams should actively investigate the possibilities sooner rather than later.
At fme, we’re already involved in a client pilot project which will transform that company’s knowledge distribution and access. By first scrutinizing and cleaning up, then migrating content to a secure, cloud-based intranet harnessing Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI, we’re working with the organization (an industrial manufacturer) to make all of its knowledge and content assets securely searchable and collatable – using GPT4 from Open AI as the main engine.

This will have a bearing on the way that new employees find answers to almost any query, while practically eliminating the time knowledge workers spend each day trying to locate the latest information or documents they need on almost any topic (limited only by role-related access rights/privacy settings). If staff need a summary of all the latest regulations they must adhere to for a given task, or need to pull together the latest findings on a particular topic, they can simply ask the question and let the technology do the legwork – presenting the information back to them in a meaningful, context-appropriate way.

Quickly, over time, the returned answers will improve too – because users will have the facility to rate them with a quick thumbs up, or thumbs down, as feedback on the accuracy, relevance and usefulness of the delivered search results/collated content.

Trust us: we’re tracking the latest developments

This is a glimpse into next-generation content and data management, and it’s at the forefront of fme’s vision – spanning our business/strategy consulting, and our integration, data cleansing/preparation/enrichment, and content migration services.
It’s all about taking the long-term view. For now, the immediate preoccupations for regulated organizations including Life Sciences companies, industrial manufacturers, and finance institutions might have more to do with reducing dependency on legacy systems; consolidating content following a merger; or becoming more responsive to regulatory changes.

Usually, however, these initiatives are ultimately about being better at information, content, and knowledge management. This has been the focus of my career – and of fme – for the last 25+ years. And in the not-too-distant future, transformed data, content, and knowledge management will involve Generative AI as both the enabler and the intuitive user interface.

Culture change requires long-term Board-level buy-in

Even a year ago, no one could have predicted how rapidly Generative AI would take hold and grow in its application. Accepting and fully embracing the implications is going to require significant culture change for companies, an organizational transformation that can take many, many years to see through – not to mention a considerable amount of blood, sweat and tears. Given that the typical tenure of a CEO is 4-5 years, organizations must now infuse the entire Board with a vision and appetite for Generative AI’s potential across their operations.
Beyond information and content management and analytics, we suggest that the next level of Generative AI application will be in transforming core processes – from HR, sales, creative marketing, and finance management, to IT development, and web site creation (think: “Please generate a web site that does X”). Then, as the technology matures, and trust builds, regulated areas such as Regulatory Information

Management will become a valid area of focus.

If there’s one message I want to get across, it’s that AI – and Generative AI specifically – is here to stay, and it will change the world. Its presence is already prominent, and its potential reach is all-pervasive.

The focus shouldn’t be about developing a separate AI strategy, or even updating the organization’s digital transformation strategy. It should be about weaving Generative AI, and indeed any other aspect of digital transformation, into an organization’s core business strategy – and establishing where the technology could and should be harnessed to help deliver this.

Human factors: everyone will benefit; no one will be unaffected

As to the impact of Generative AI on the role of humans, undoubtedly this will be significant. While human expertise will remain vital in checking, feeding back, refining and improving/embellishing AI’s findings, in time the size of IT/Web development teams, HR functions, finance teams, and so on will inevitably reduce. That’s as more of the groundwork is covered by intelligent technology.

It isn’t just the search and filter intelligence that’s transformative in all of this, after all. It’s the user experience. At fme, we are partnering with a design agency in Berlin for this, recognizing that the way individuals engage and interact with an application or tool is at least as importance as the clever things it can do. And we’re as serious about that whether it’s for our middleware or IT admin tools, or a more advanced stack of content enrichment and management capabilities.

There are all kinds of other trends affecting companies’ use of IT, of course – from continued remote and mobile working enablement, in the wake of Covid; to budget-friendly off- and near-shore resourcing to overcome local talent gaps; to reinforced security and resilience in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and renewed concerns about cyber-attacks bringing down IT services.

Our priority in all of this is to keep looking ahead and anticipating what it is that our clients not only require today, but also what they will ultimately need to do, in 3-5 years; and to keep innovating with optimized strategy consulting and specialist IT services that will deliver those priorities in plenty of time.

To find out more about any of our strategy consulting or IT services, or to discuss the potential of Generative AI in your organization’s knowledge management or core process transformation, contact us. We’d be happy to set up a time with you and our experts to determine how these new technologies can benefit your business.

Digitization – Digital Transformation

First of all, I notice that the term “digitization” is often referred to as “digital transformation”. In my opinion, this should be clearly separated from each other.

I see digitisation as the transition from analogue to digital. This is, for example, the replacement of paper documents (holiday request, material requisition, travel expense report, scanned invoice) by forms/dialogues on the intranet. The advantages compared to conventional in-house mail with only one analogue copy are clear: faster processing on the computer without waiting times. And other new technologies and applications (e. g. mobile devices, sensors, networking and apps, frameworks, cloud storage…) ensure that more and more areas are opened up for digitization by computer science/IT.

Although this is a change (transformation) it does not mean a great revolution, but rather an expected steady growth, as it is to be followed e. g. also with progressive motorization and automation. With the usual procedures “look for qualified employees and regularly train them further; adapt the product range to the latest technology, remain innovative in your own core business” you will continue to do well… or should we use the subjunctive “would”?

An important point is the progressing digitization as a basic building block for the real “Digital Transformation”: the digital twins! The images of the analog business objects of the real world are now digitally and cross-linked available.

A striking technology for this is the emerging Internet of Things. In my opinion, this is still very experimental at the moment with funny gadgets or questionable pseudo products… But also the first steam engines, airplanes, computers and mobile phones were smiled at.

Disruptive developments

Undoubtedly and very attentively to observe is the immensely increasing generated connected data volume. Today, the technology is also available to record these data volumes as Big Data. In addition, the methods of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have been added to the processing and use of this data. These data volumes can thus be controlled.

With these new and simultaneously occurring aspects, all the necessary ingredients for a disruptive development full of force and speed come together, as if the three aspects would unite as single waves to form a tsunami-like “monster wave”.
And it is precisely this wave, which is rolling towards established companies, that must be taken into account!

(Digital) transformation

This is because the processes, from customer requirements to product selection/purchase to service and support, are subject to constant change. With changing business models or completely new distribution channels, the importance of companies’ product know-how and the experience of employees towards a unique selling point can decrease. From my point of view, only these completely changed processes are the “digital transformation”.

Let’s get back to the paper documents mentioned above and their digitization in the Intranet/Internet. Is it possible to approve these documents automatically? Can an AI learn to handle the simple cases autonomously, send only complex cases to manual approvers for manual approval, and even discover hidden errors and irregularities using statistical means? I think so, yes. And only then do I see the processing transformed digitally.

And so, even established companies have to expect that their rigid sales/service routines will be replaced by completely different processes in the newly established competitors, that they will be overtaken by the competition, in a surprising way, so to speak, previously assumed to be unthinkable or unlawful. To put it vividly,”at excessive speed” or “on a forbidden track”… and that, in my opinion, is the real meaning of digital transformation: there are new players/competitors and the “cheat/trick” because they don’t adhere to the usual mechanisms and surprise everyone:

• … there is someone who runs the 100 meters at the World Cup with a short cut and wins – this is only unthinkable, not yet happened but not explicitly forbidden in the rules?
• …. or jumps under the crossbar and wins – there was something once? Right: > Dick Fosbury 1968 at the Olympic Games in Mexico.

The competitors of the > straddle style were unfortunately no longer satisfied with the tried and tested methods “sifting of the best talents, hiring the best trainers and organising the best training camps”.

The solution-invariant customer problem

The Fosbury-Flop has efficiency advantages, because the centre of gravity during the jump curve is always below the high jump batten to be crossed by the body. This corresponds to the “solution variants (customer) problem”.

This is exactly the view you as a company must have of customer problems. In other words, check your products, services and solutions in the digital environment to see whether similar (previously unthinkable) advantages in business processes can be made visible and usable in the future by networking, IoT, Big Data and KI/ML.

For example, are you a manufacturer of measuring instruments? Your customers don’t really want to buy or own any measuring devices. They only need them to check their production facilities and the quality of the manufactured products. Another process (for an exemplary simple case) could be to use the motion/vibration sensor of a mobile phone to record the resonances/oscillations of the production plant. The digitization would be accomplished and they would have the “digital twin” of the required data. These could now be compared with large quantities of known characteristic curves of intact and faulty plants (e. g. in the cloud at a service provider) of an AI. This would have involved a change from the acquisition/ownership of products to the results service.

There are similar ideas among the major automobile manufacturers who are pursuing a move away from the “owning a vehicle” model towards “mobility solutions”. It is only such changes of processes and business processes that I would like to call “digital transformation”.

Your Digital Transformation

Finally, I would like to point out the need for action in view of the possible disruptive developments. Examples such as Uber and AirBnB have shown that it is not enough to keep ahead of well-known competitors. You have to face completely new competitors and offers that can appear very fast, surprising and dominating.

Test your digital maturity level, make a workshop on new ideas/procedures and their implementation with your IT. Be ready for your own digital transformation and feel prepared for the new approaches of your competitors. We will be happy to support you!