--- /dev/null
+#+date: 2019-06-11 20:46:22 +0800
+#+filetags: analytics leadership military fintech
+#+title: Different spin to competing on analytics.
+
+The May/June 2019 issue of Foreign Affairs contains an article by
+Christian Brose, titled [[https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2019-04-16/new-revolution-military-affairs]["The New Revolution in Military Affairs"]].
+
+What struck me while reading the article is how much of an analogy can
+be drawn between what is happening to businesses worldwide, and what the
+author writes about the future in military technology and its trailing
+adoption in the United States of America's military.
+
+The transformation he describes is about the core process concerning
+militaries, the so called "kill chain". Thanks to technological
+advances, including artificial intelligence, that process can be
+rapdidly accelerated, offering a competitive advantage to the owner of
+the technology.
+
+Following quotes struck me in particular:
+
+#+begin_quote
+Instead of thinking systematically about buying faster, more effective
+kill chains that could be built now, Washington poured money into newer
+versions of old military platforms and prayed for technological miracles
+to come.
+
+#+end_quote
+
+#+begin_quote
+The question, accordingly, is not how new technologies can improve the
+U.S. military's ability to do what it already does but how they can
+enable it to operate in new ways.
+
+#+end_quote
+
+#+begin_quote
+A military made up of small numbers of large, expensive, heavily manned,
+and hard-to-replace systems will not survive on future battlefields,
+where swarms of intelligent machines will deliver violence at a greater
+volume and higher velocity than ever before. Success will require a
+different kind of military, one built around large numbers of small,
+inexpensive, expendable, and highly autonomous systems.
+
+#+end_quote
+
+The same could be written about so many companies that haven't taken up
+the strategy of competing on analytics.
+
+Replacing the U.S. military with banking sector for instance, formerly
+very profitable and seemingly unbeatable big banks have over the past
+decade found their banking software to be too rigid. Instead of
+investing in new products and services, they continued to rely on what
+they had been doing for the prior hundred years. They invested in
+upgrading their core systems, often with little payoff. While they were
+doing that, small fintech firms appeared, excelling at just a small
+fraction of what a bank considered its playing field. In those areas,
+these new players innovated much more quickly, resulting in far more
+efficient and effective service delivery.
+
+At the core of many of these innovations lies data. The author likes
+China's stockpiling of data as to that of oil, but the following quote
+was particularly relevant in how it describes the use of that stockpile
+of data to inform decisioning.
+
+#+begin_quote
+Every autonomous system will be able to process and make sense of the
+information it gathers on its own, without relying on a command hub.
+
+#+end_quote
+
+The analogy is clear - for years, organisations have been trying to
+ensure they knew the "single source of truth". Tightly coupling all
+business functions to a central ERP system was usually the answer. Just
+like in the military, it can now often be better to have many small
+functions be performed on the perifery of a company's systems, accepting
+some duplication of data and directional accuracy to deliver quicker,
+more cost-effective results - using expendable solutions. The challenges
+to communicate effectively between these semi-autonomous systems are
+noted.
+
+Not insignificantly, the author poses "future militaries will be
+distinguished by the quality of their software, especially their
+artificial intelligence" - i.e. countries are competing on analytics,
+also in the military sphere.
+
+The article ends with some advise to government leadership - make the
+transormation a priority, drive the change forward, recast cultures and
+ensure correct incentives are in place.