Follow that Car!
Has anyone noticed that things are speeding up?
A week or so back, I visited London for a conference. I’d not been there for a few years, and noticed a new system of bicycle lanes throughout the city. Great for the cyclists, but a real congestion headache for car traffic and cab drivers.
Norman, my driver from the airport, was a talkative old curmudgeon who knew the streets like the back of his hand. He'd been driving cabs for the last 3 decades and bicycles were featured prominently in his list of complaints. I was amazed with his knowledge of the London labyrinth and the way he was able to intuitively duck and weave in all directions as soon he spotted traffic or other obstructions while keeping the conversation going the whole time.
Back in 1979, a year many of my colleagues now refer to as “the olden days”, I remember watching a TV movie called “The Knowledge” with Nigel Hawthorne, a personal favorite. “The Knowledge” told the story of a fledgling cab driver who had to prepare for a notoriously difficult exam to get his cab license. This test required instant recall on addresses, streets, points of interest and directions between all. Every cab driver had to meet that standard and invest as much as two years of study to qualify, with the aid of several volumes of (paper) reading materials.
“If you’re a genius it might take you a year. On the other hand it might take you two, or even or ten. And if it looks like it’s going to take you longer than that I should chuck it in and take up ballet dancing instead.”
-Mr. Burgess, The Knowledge
In the mid ‘80’s I worked in Australia for a large public utility. One of the teams I collaborated closely with was the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) group. Over several years they developed a platform and digital map of Sydney. This was used to plot the addresses for the 1.3 million customers they had at the time, as well as define the location of the city water supply system and waste-water systems. The GIS data was populated through a number of proprietary sources and their engineers and was used by us to calculate the shortest possible distances one would have to walk to read all the meters in a neighborhood. Many other uses of this system were possible, including impact analysis for construction of new water mains, maintenance, emergency services and more. It was a great example of digital transformation in the ‘80s. However, this was a significant investment, one that few organizations could afford at the time.
Looking Forward
My long trip back from the UK to the US (picture a T-Rex typing on an iPad) gave me a chance to reflect on where we’ve been, and maybe what’s coming just around the corner.
Norman, with his “Knowledge”, is something of an oddity these days. He was the only cab driver on my trip who seemed able to navigate without the aid of Apple or Google Maps, which, incidentally, also powers Uber. “The Knowledge” seems inconceivable to most of us now, as much as floppy disks or stage coaches seem to my kids.
We have democratized maps to a large degree (digital divide notwithstanding), and made location services free, though with catches. We’ve taken “The Knowledge” from our own data centers (heads) and moved it to a cloud provider.
New developments across all sectors of technology can now be woven together in a fabric of services that can then be combined to enable new business models and new consumer experiences. These advances provide us with a radical set of possibilities that Norman (or we ourselves) could never have imagined back in the “olden” days.