Collective Intelligence: We Are the Cloud

Pulling information and recognising the importance of it has been critical for strategists for thousands of years. Over 2,500 years ago, Chinese military general Sun Tzu nailed it on the head when he proclaimed: “Know your enemy and know yourself, and in 100 battles you will never be in peril.”

Fast forward to today, and we see people making huge businesses out of collecting and collating all kinds of information. For example, Facebook has a market cap of $175 billion against a current revenue of less than $9 billion, while Google has a market cap of $400 billion against a revenue of around $38 billion. Those numbers would place the two combined companies close to the top 20 largest countries in the world based on estimated GDP.

The reason that companies like Facebook and Google that have such vast amounts of information in the cloud are so valuable is because they are using demographic and behavioural data to help other businesses find, target and acquire customers. This data is becoming increasingly important to businesses of all kinds, and these companies seem to have all the answers.

To better understand the importance of this data, let’s look at a real-life example: the direction I travel to work is important to road planners right now. But what I’m doing in my car on the way to work — listening to the radio or my own music, listening to text to voice emails, holding teleconferences, talking to friends or family about this weekend — really isn’t important to anyone. But will it be at some point? Will the people designing cars, roads and transport in general want to know these things? What about retailers? How can businesses use this information to determine the best way to hit me with relevant ads?

This is where the whole big data thing comes into play. Because, in order to collect, store, make sense of and run predictive analysis around all those bits of information, you need to collect a lot of data. The amount needs to be so high to account for a margin of error: if someone has only done something once and next time they do it differently, it really means very little in predicting their future behaviour.

By using what is now seemingly meaningless data, we can begin to predict behaviour to certain stimuli. When we collect everything that someone does and add dimensional variables such as time, location and even weather and traffic conditions (you can see where this could get to), we can then start to “direct” behaviour. It’s all about the aggregation of data: data you have internally, data you can capture from new sources and making sense of all of that. That’s what salesforce.com was doing when it was talking about the Internet of Customers at Dreamforce.

Directing behaviours can be done on an individual, corporate or even political level if enough information is available. So then the question has to be asked: “Is all the information that’s collected about us being used in our interest, or is our interest being directed by the aggregation of this data and played back to us?”

You might remember that scene from the Tom Cruise movie “Minority Report” in which everything was tracked and stored. The billboards then talk to him directly as he’s walking down the street. In the future, as people become more willing to share behavioural information about themselves, we might see something similar to what happened in the movie. And these individually targeted offers can add value to both the business making the offer and the customer receiving it.

Today, we source and extract information from the cloud and then run external analytics to aid in decision making processes. Ultimately, all of this information amounts to a “collective intelligence” coming from events created by people.

There will come a time when everything we do, think and say will all be collected, manipulated and fed back without intervention. External variables will create potential scenarios for us based not only on our individual experiences, but also on the collective experiences. People, themselves, will become “the cloud.” This is the real future of cloud computing.