Customer Reviews

Inescapable Data: Harnessing the Power of Convergence

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Do you ever look at our changing technology and wonder where we are all going and what the world will be like when we get there? This book does a good job of trying to answer these questions. The authors interviewed 50 technology leaders in a wide variety of industries as well as drawing on their own experiece, and distilled the information into a book that is very informative without requiring the reader to have a PhD. The book considers each industry or area of interest in turn, explaining what's going on now and what is likely to develop in the next few years. Some of the areas they consider are: warfare, security, home life, medicine, work, manufacturing, sports, entertainment, retail sales, data storage, supercomputers, and networking. You may view the technological future with the glee of a technophile or with anxiety about the world we're creating -- the authors are unabashed technophiles-- but whatever your views, this book will give you a good education about what's going on. I recommend it highly. [...]

This book provides fantastic insight into the power of data to make the lives of consumers better by improving the quality and appropriateness of their experiences as well as the level of customer service they encounter. At the same time, it recalls Scott McNealy's (Chairman and CEO of Sun Microsystems) famous statement, "Privacy is dead. Get over it." Fortunately, as the book indicates, there are still ways to protect yourself from harm, if not from wide awareness.

The real life examples and numerous interviews with experts really make INESCAPABLE DATA come alive. It's a must read for those of us in the information industry and for those who are curious about how information is transforming our world.

Chris Stakutis and John Webster can see the future. We are already immersed in an ocean inhabited by millions of species of data. For each of us some of these data organisms could be essential to our success in life. Even greater benefit can flow to individuals or systems from gaining insight in how to synthesize and analyze seemingly disparate data in new combinations to gain unique insights. These two clear thinking men are data cosmologists who have peered deeply into the far reaches of data space and found a new path to harness power to information. A valuable handbook for our data future.

Stakutis and Webster have written a gem. Instead of the usual convergence hype, they offer us fresh news of real-world implementations. Recognizing the multiplier created by the combination of wireless communications and self-describing XML data was brilliant insight. They follow that up with a road map of how these inescapable changes will reshape our lives and our businesses. If the future matters to you, this book is a must read.

Although the title of this book may seem a bit abstract, here is a work that can be appreciated by most anyone, from the most techno savvy industry guru to the mildly technology curious among us. The authors present an insightful, somewhat provocative view of the wireless age we now live in, and how both our personal and professional lives will be affected by certain key evolving technologies.

An interesting perspective taken by Stakutis and Webster focuses upon massive amounts of data being communicated via wireless devices throughout a pervasive intelligent network, and ultimately having the information processing power to manage and correlate this data in such a way as to flush out hidden associations (from seemingly unrelated data) never before imaginable. The authors discuss the role of wireless devices such as cell phones, PDAs, RFID tags, and pervasive network interfaces built into everything from your sneakers to the refrigerator, all "talking" to one another intelligently through self-describing XML.

That said, this book is an easy, enjoyable read. Pick up this book and you'll find yourself thinking of it whenever you reach for your PIM, snap a picture with your cell phone, or possibly even when opening the refrigerator! As a technologist, I consider myself quite knowledgeable of many topics covered within this book, but I also found it to be an enjoyable learning experience as well. Even my wife, who is throughly technologically challenged, found interesting the chapters related to Inescapable Data as it applies to the retail industry and in the home. This book is chocked full of real-world examples and the role Inescapable Data will play in our everyday lives.

The final chapter makes some interesting predictions as to where Inescapable Data will lead us within the next 3 - 5 years. The vision presented will require government, industry, and the average citizen to embrace the march toward a truly Inescapable Data world, but the process has been set into motion, and it does, in fact, seem Inescapable. Give this book a read and you may find yourself rethinking the future and your role in it.

If you use a hybrid PDA, employ "virtual office" groupware tools and rely on ubiqitous WiFi service, you will love Inescapable Data. Or if you have not yet graduated to a cordless home phone and still hand-write messages to your kids, you too will find new doors opening through Inescapable Data. This book has something for everyone.

Authors Chris Stakutis and John Webster, both data innovators, have written a book that separates communications reality from science fiction. Imagine a world where corporals are as well connected as generals, where machines provide faster and better translations than the best interpreter, and where your cell phone can convert an appliance from a refrigerator to an oven producing hot, just cooked right right when you get home. Actually, you don't have to imagine that world. It's already here.

For manufacturers, the opportunity that stems from the coming convergence of data is efficiency. The result is streamlined operations and drastically reduced time to market, often with goals of up to 85% reductions in waste and error, causing many large, traditionally structures companies to outsource basic operations to a minimized number of nimble suppliers.

Who are these suppliers that have found ways to reduce costs for their global customers by 80-85%? They are the ones who have "learned to see" -- who have assembled and analyzed all their data, and found ways to eliminate all the costs that their people used the data to identify as unnecessary. To most companies, 85% improvement in a few years seems impossible. Yet there are major companies today that have improved inventory turns from 10 times a year to 1800. They did it by employing many of the information technologies explained in Inescapable Data.

As the authors point out, "In the Inescapable Data world, the need to compress product creation time, reduce line operating gcosts, tease out Muda (the Japanese, lean manufacturing term for waste) and increase product personalization combines to create even higher joint value made possible by pervasive networks, data collection, data exchange and most importantly, a willingness to tear down business walls, to achieve manufacturing in real time."

In addition to using the techniques of Inescapable Data to vastly improve the costs and timeliness of new products, manufacturers also are using this information to accurately foretell consumer demand and product utility. The "shopping experience" has moved from the stores and catalogs to truly interactive eCommerce. The successful suppliers of the future will be manufacturers who use data to anticipate the needs of their customers' customers, and lead their own customers to meet these needs.

Finally, those of us involved in manufacturing should heed the prediction of the authors, "Improvement throughout manufacturing will be so significant that by 2010, it will no longer be more efficient to manufacture high volume products offshore (editor's note, that's like -- tomorrow!)," regardless of location. Data technology, wisely used, will enable affordable, real-time customized manufacturing in most parts of the world. The drive to eliminate Muda will bring manufacturing home to where the market is, enhanced by Inescapable Data.

I just finished reading an outstanding book that examines the world of "Inescapable Data"... Chris Stakutis and John Webster's Inescapable Data - Harnessing the Power of Convergence.

Contents: The Inescapable Data Vision; The Connectivity Divide; Inescapable Data Fundamentals; From Warfare to Government, Connectivity Is Vitality; Pervading the Home; Connecting Medicine; Work Life - Oxymoron No Longer; Real-Time Manufacturing; Sports and Entertainment - Energizing Our Involvement; Connecting to Retail; Computer Storage Impacted by Inescapable Data; Super Computers, Visualization, and Networks; Inescapable Data in Perspective; Index

The authors explore how technology is allowing more and more devices to broadcast and interact with each other to create linkages that haven't even begun to be explored. What if your refrigerators could broadcast to your PDA when you're at the store to let you know what's in there? With RFID tags, it's a possibility. What if you could have access to the same telemetry data that pit crews have when you go to an racing event? Could your tennis racquet transmit force and angle information to a system that could analyze your game and help you become a better player? All of these things are technically possible, and the rapid advance of processing and storage power makes it much more likely to come to pass at an affordable price point. Besides talking about possibilities, they also explore how technology has to change in order to deal with this constant onslaught of data. Companies like Wal-mart generate terabytes of data from RFID every few days. What do you save? How do you analyze it? Where does it reside and for how long? And with data being stored in XML format, how likely is it that ordinary computer users will be able to write their own tools to analyze their data? Good chance it'll happen...

Probably the only thing they didn't cover in a lot of depth was the personal privacy issue. If retailers are tracking you via tags, sensors, and cameras from the time you walk in the door until you leave, you're passing a lot of information that will be stored about you. While there might be financial benefits to allowing that to happen, that benefit comes at a cost to personal privacy. The issue is acknowledged, but much more space is devoted to the potential benefits than to the potential abuses. Still, this is a book that will open your eyes to possibilities that seemed like science fiction not that very long ago.

Well worth reading to expand your vision...

Stakutis and Webster have penned a very readable, thought provoking book that makes you stop and think hard about how much technology has changed our lives and what we might expect in the future. I can't wait to re-read this in 10 years and see how much of the future Inescapable Data predicts comes true. What is especially nice about this book is that it has enough depth for the technically literate yet reads well (in a Po Bronson way) for the layman. It is "inescapable".

About two weeks ago, I received a copy of Inescapable Data from the publisher (probably because I had agreed to review the manuscript, although I never actually did so). I was going to thank the authors immediately and put it on the shelf, but with a few minutes to spare, I began to read it, and found myself really getting into it.

I just finished my reading yesterday. I'm pretty impressed with the book's structure and organization, but what's really unique about this book is the approach to the subject matter. When I started reading, I was expecting a book about digital data and storage as we in the industry commonly think of them--terabytes and bandwidth. Instead, I found myself reading a kind of latter-day Future Shock--a scenario of how our lives are already starting to change, and will continue to change in the future because of data that's cheap and easy to collect, store, and communicate. Webster and Stakutis present a scenario that is all the more believable because all the basic technology pieces that make it work are already known to us.

From medicine to manufacturing, from public safety to personal convenience, the authors explore what it will mean for data on all kinds of seemingly trivial events to be collected, and more important, communicated, integrated, and analyzed to enhance the quality of our lives. This is not a book about technology. This is a book about the kinds of behaviorial and societal changes that are essentially inevitable (in the authors' view) because digital data about absolutely everything is readily and inexpensively obtainable.

I've recommended Inescapable Data to everyone I know who is in a position of defining future strategies for technology companies, because I believe the book gives a user's eye view of radically new applications of contemporary technology that companies will have to develop in order to grow and prosper. Data storage people have far too long concentrated on "feeds and speeds;" it's time that they took a hard look at how digital data is going to affect our lives in the near future and began moving their developments in a direction that abets that vision.

If I have a criticism of Inescapable Data, it's that it is light on the public policy aspect of ubiquitous data--how do I really feel about every threshold I cross picking up my presence from the RFID tags in my shoes and reporting it to big brother for heaven knows what purposes? I mentioned this to John Webster, and his reply was that they wanted to get the inescapable data situation laid out clearly and thoroughly before they dealt with the societal issues surrounding it. Not only have they done so, but you gotta respect an author that sets himself up for a sequel right out of the box. ;-)

Paul Massiglia
Technical Director
VERITAS Software Corporation

I work in the RFID /supply chain/manufacturing technology space, and data volumes are exploding. "Inescapable" is not just a good read, it covers a critical topic of survival for anyone in the technology industry or business where data volumes are going up - so that's probably any modern industry. The thing I like most about Inescapable is that it's heavily *researched* - so it's a practical, not theoretical or just one person's dogmatic view of the world. Highly recommended.