Petabyte Prognostications

Computerworld - Jeff Wacker's job as Electronic Data Systems Corp.'s futurist is to develop companywide initiatives that will shape the future of EDS. He recently told Computerworld's Gary H. Anthes why mobile workers, unstructured information and communications infrastructures are worthy of special attention in the coming years.

Is there an information explosion coming? Yes, and it's based on two major factors. First, there's all this sensor and RFID information that's starting to flow into corporations, and it will only accelerate; Wal-Mart is looking at 5TB to 7TB a day. The other factor is that unstructured information makes up 80% to 90% of the average corporation's information content. It's not in a form computers can readily use, such as e-mail. We are using context-sensitive text mining as a tool for structuring that content. When you do that, all that information becomes a corporate asset.

How might that new asset be used? Most of the new information that allows you to predict the future is nontraditional corporate information -- what we call indicator information. You have transactions, which are past; you have events, which are current; and you have indicators, which are not traditionally used in business. You can put that information in a data mine and after the fact try to figure out what you should have done. Or you can feed it into a cause-and-effect model ... and use pattern-recognition technology. [That gives you] the ability to understand patterns of business activity that are going to repeat and say, "What do I want the outcome to be?"

Can you give a couple of examples? Weather predictions for a warmer-than-usual winter in New England change the model's probability of selling x fruitcakes to y. That, coupled with a colder-than-normal forecast for the mid-Atlantic states, drives a directive to channel the fruitcake to those states.

EDS futurist Jeff Wacker sees toys as an analogy for rapid change, since "kids turn toys at an astonishing rate." This one is made from old IT components, demonstrating "that we create the future on the bones of the past—but different from the past."