Tech Chat – February 2020
Finger or face
This week, we discuss how technology should best be used to automate the unglamourous.
I recently discovered the flaws of facial recognition when I questioned my 81-year-old Dad on why he always left his new iPhone X unlocked. It turns out he doesn’t. His phone sees the similarities I’ve denied for years and opens for me, defeating the 1 in 1,000,000 odds and believing me to be him – and yes, work has taken its toll on me, but I didn’t think I’d aged quite that much. Actually, I’d never really stopped to notice before how good-looking he is, which is now very obvious to all of us, clearly (humour me).
The logic, though, of facial recognition, makes life easier for those who have an iPhone X and above. The ease of non password log on is indisputable – even though as with the most serious of crimes it is those closest to you who are most likely to perpetrate them. Dad doesn’t keep his will on his phone, so no chance of “adapting” it, although I’ve already “bagsied” the nice car. We all know passwords, without 2 factor authentication (2FA) such as biometrics, are flawed, but we are stuck with old habits like being told to change passwords every 40 days or so – meaning you are much more likely to resort to easily memorable ones, and even write them down and leave it by your desk. In the end it’s all about convenience and considering what is the best approach given we are dealing with emotional humans.
The IT industry sometimes forgets it’s a servant of business not the master, and overlooks the human element. Separate passwords for multiple applications, resetting on different days, is a surefire way to a gaping, human provoked, IT hole. When a cybersecurity friend of mine had to hack a County HQ police station, he simply visited it and hung around the staff entrance on a Monday lunchtime, helped a support staff member with her shopping and followed her in – donned a yellow surveyors jacket then found his way to the chief constable’s office, and his unlocked PC, gaining full access, theoretically, to the most secure of databases…. Humans spoil basic systems in the name of convenience.
That is precisely where success can be found in investment: where IT knows its place, in automating the unglamorous and leaving humans to undertake subjective or emotional decisions. Replacement of old systems is eventually inevitable but very costly – and what we need is something which can sit as an aggregating app across the top of a combination of old systems, and without breaking or replacing the old, make it useful by processing and using the data we have, but often can’t use. This app can also be re-applied when a new system is finally put in place – and the end-user won’t get emotional or confused.
Low-code represents exactly that solution. Where Blue Prism took re-keying of data and jazzed it up in the name of “Robotic Process Automation”, Netcall’s Low-code (Liberty Create) takes existing systems and combines them to look like a new one, and with greater functionality. Even better, its simplicity allows the users to influence or even create the app (after a two-day course), quickly, and easily – compared with an overworked IT department developer who is not in that business line so automatically disadvantaged from the necessary human knowledge, emotion, and evolving purpose of the app – while also trying to juggle myriad priorities. There are fleets of gleaming Low-code examples and opportunities, Patient Hub being the classic to aid our understanding of just how convenience can be created and efficiency put on steroids. Patient Hub takes a plethora of famously disjointed and disaggregated healthcare data sources and unifies it into dashboards for practitioners and patients, a single source for information and interaction.
Netcall reports on Thursday next week – worth a look at exactly how supremely logical its solutions are to the “automation of the unglamorous” mantra we preach. As the development of recurring revenue and industry presence strives towards critical mass, the eventual rating of Blue Prism is waiting on Netcall’s inevitable scale and momentum.
With the Mobile World Congress cancelled next week, human interaction can clearly have its costs but that’s an exception and certainly not the rule. Dad’s phone has tried to automate the recognition of beauty and clearly got it right, but beyond that let’s leave our IT to make life easier for us by making the most of so much objective data, for us humans to apply to our best advantage.
Happy Friday