Nigel King’s Post

DTX Manchester Conference Report Having been to DTX in London, I thought I would take a look at DTX in Manchester. Manchester is a bit of a Tech hub itself.  This conference is at Manchester Central that I assume to be a converted Railway station. The conference company seems to try and bring overlapping technical communities together: Digital Transformation, Customer Experience, Cyber Security. It was as ever interesting to see who is speaking, who is sponsoring and what themes are dominant. Maybe no surprise that the AI theme was dominant, although ethical AI might have been the stronger subcurrent. Please check out my full report here. https://lnkd.in/eYpfJ-uY #digitaltransformation #artificialIntelligence # #DTXM24

Happy Returns A Good Example of Technology Rollout in Public Sector We recently submitted our first VAT return under the Making Tax Digital umbrella in the UK. I think it stands out as an excellent example of how technology roll out should work. It is a lesson to us all.  Firstly, my thanks to Jackson's, our accountants, for alerting us to crossing the VAT registration threshold.  HMRC has just mandated electronic VAT returns. This could have been chaos. This could have been a bonanza for companies feeding off the fear and uncertainty, essentially becoming a Tax on business in and of itself. Instead, it seems to have been really well thought through. HMRC has advertised all of the accounting systems that it certifies. The process of getting your account with the tax authority was fairly painless.  HMRC ran a webinar with live Q&A. The creation of the VAT return in the accounting software was quite obvious.  HMRC sent me a receipt immediately. I feel my company can fulfil its obligations and make its contribution without it being a bureaucratic ordeal.  #publicSector #smallbusiness #vat #tax

Spring Book Report Artificial Intelligence, A guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell I just finished reading the above book.  It stands out in my recent readings in the area of artificial intelligence as being more skeptical of progress in AI.  She points out that while there has been undoubted progress in the past 60 years, there remains a gulf between what humans are good at and what machines are good at.  The ability to cross domains remains elusive for machines. She points out that much of what we think of as limitations in the biological architecture may in fact be the key to our abilities.  The fact that we might not be able to remember high school calculus does not prevent us from catching a ball.  There is a wonderful quote at the end of the book from Pedro Domingos about computers getting too smart, “...the real problem is that they are too stupid and they’ve already overtaken the world”.   I think I subscribe to this view.  Not that they are stupid.  They are what they are, but they are not us, and they already drive a great deal of decision making. Please check out the full book report here https://lnkd.in/eJ7YsS3F #artificialIntelligence

Energy Analytics I was fortunate in this last year to climb Mt Killimanjaro. I joined a group of 12 other climbers. I knew 1 other, Adil Khan, CEO of SafePaas. He was climbing with his son Kasim Khan, whom I had not seen for some 15 years. Everyone on the climb was wonderful, but I learned a lot from talking to Kasim. Some of what I learned was just the different perspective from someone of a different generation. But some of what I learned was very relevant to my work at NHS Supply Chain, and Kasim was gracious enough to share it with my colleagues. Kasim works for a company called Wood Mackenzie. They provide consulting services to the energy sector. NHS Supply Chain in general and the Analytics and Data Science community in particular would like to extend their gratitude to Kasim for sharing his expertise. Check out the full article here https://lnkd.in/eW9jQRkq #analytics #healthcare

Conference Report from Oracle CloudWorld 2024 Another great conference crammed with expertise and direction. I was fortunate to be invited on the Analytics for Breakfast panel discussing our journey with Fusion Analytics with Craig Oxby, Alan Petrie from Heathrow and Andrew Frater from Dunnhumby. I managed to catch up with old colleagues, most notable among them being Jennifer Basco, MBA whom I had not seen since working on Activision Blizzard in Santa Monica. I caught up with Steve Miranda's applications directions and took in lots of analytics sessions led by Rich Clayton. Please check out my full report here https://lnkd.in/eyRnFqvB #oracle #oraclecloudworld #oraclecloudworldtour

A fantastic start to a great day at Cloudworld. I learned so much and connected with some great people.

Data Mesh vs Data Warehouse Part of my work at NHS Supply Chain has been helping them decide how to build their data hub.  They are convinced that the data they create and have access to, can be mined to bring value to suppliers, NHS Trusts, NHS Supply Chain and help improve patient outcomes.  There are real specializations in how you buy the medical supplies and those experts had historically been sat in separate organizations, with many of their own tools looking at their own universe of data.  There has been a central data warehouse that has served up data that many of these buying communities have an interest in, but they bring that data into their own orbit.  There is mistrust regarding the provenance of data that bounces around between systems. Recently, there has been a change in operating model to bring the buying experts back inhouse and to unify systems.  The view of unifying systems could be: a)  to build a common data dictionary and move data into a canonical model at transactional level.  A canonical provides efficiencies in integration and consistency in analytics. b) To nominate a set of applications in a target architecture and deprecate legacy or redundant applications. This may give an option to utilize the pipelines and transformations supplied by the vendor to create your data warehouse. You can review the full article here https://lnkd.in/dBqyaiHN #analytics #dataanalytics #architecture

Analytics for Breakfast at Oracle CloudWorld Tour London. I am delighted to be speaking at CloudWorld London at the ExCel center. , March 14th. I am looking forward to discussing the Fusion Analytics journey at NHS Supply Chain. #oraclecloud #oraclefusioncloud #oracleanalytics #oraclefusion

Data Engineering in Automotive Part of my role in NHS Supply Chain is making sure we are constantly learning from outside the organization. In our external speaker series this week we were delighted to welcome  Garrett Whalin, Data Engineering Consultant at Illumination Works. He has a wealth of experience in data engineering in automotive. We were excited to be able to find parallels in the healthcare world and validate our own vision of healthcare supply chain analytics. If you would like to see the full write up https://lnkd.in/gvui-XGU