My thoughts after AU2017 keynote by Andrew Anagnost – Data driven single button

Many years ago, I had a customer who asked me to develop “one button” data management application. I made a demo of the prototype I was working on and customer told me with a directness you can only hear in Israel during customer meetings – I want to have “one button application”. I looked sadly at the program we just demonstrated full of buttons and menus and asked him – how do you want me to put all these functions in a single button? The answer was very simple – you need to figure it out. That conversation had a very profound impact on many things I did after in my life. It made me think how to simplify things. And this is hard..

Yesterday AU2017 keynote by Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost, reminded me that conversation.

My special attention was caught by this “push button” on the screen.

I think, this simple button has long way going impact on everything we do. One of the things that change everything we do is data. We create data everywhere. Data is produced by people, software and physical products. We can collect data about different aspects of our world and use this data to automate products and decision making.

Two Autodesk customers co-presented with Andrew Anagnost during the same keynote session presented interesting use cases about how data is changing the world around us.

Van Wijnen talking how a construction site in an open air factory and their journey to learn from manufacturing and developed a modular approach to housing construction. The following photos can give you an idea. What is fascinating to see is data driven decision applied in design and construction process.

Another example is from Bosch. More and better with less” How Bosch Mondeville supports successful companies in bringing innovative products on the market in 50% less time and efforts. You can see two pictures showing assembly line yesterday and today. Fully automated manufacturing line connected to suppliers, contractors and customers, supporting mass customization and optimizing manufacturing cost is the future.

And the last point from Andrew Anagnost’s keynote is about people and skills. It is common to think that automation and intelligence will bring scarce of jobs. Here are a great example how new technology increased amount of jobs in design for the last few decades.

…and also created new businesses nobody was able to imagine and predict.

So, in the future we are going to see a scarce of skills and not scarce of jobs.

What is my conclusion? New technologies are creating new opportunities and demand for new skills. We live in data-driven world. Look around us and you will see how the most successful companies are using data to improve everything we do. It started in digital world with Google collecting online information and continued with the rest of the world around us which is becoming digital much faster than we think. Manufacturing and construction companies will become data driven sooner then later. And tools that can create this intelligence by aggregating and processing information will have high demand in the future. Data skills will be in high demand in the future. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of OpenBOM developing cloud based bill of materials and inventory management tool for manufacturing companies, hardware startups and supply chain. My opinion can be unintentionally biased.