Florian Ramseger, economist, data scientist, and futurist

      Source: Florian Ramseger

Florian is an economist turned data scientist with wide-ranging work experience in different countries and in different fields — the private sector, the public sector, and NGOs and international organizations. In his current role as senior product specialist he helps Salesforce customers from different industries implement their data projects. Prior to Salesforce, he was with the International Red Cross, the World Economic Forum, and the WU Vienna business school. Florian has a BSc in economics and geography from University College London and an MSc in economics and economic history from the London School of Economics. Currently based in Frankfurt, Germany, he has spoken and written about how the digital transformation affects organizations and societies, based on his experience with implementing IT projects of various shapes and sizes and drawing on his background as a trained economist.

      Alexander: We have talked about the digital transformation of society on several occasions; how do you think about digitalization and how does it change our lives?

      Florian: The digital transformation over the last few decades can be broken down into three stages, and each stage comes with its own benefits. When a process has become “digitalized” we notice it, either because the input form is now digital or because the end product is presented in a digital format. Capturing and presenting information in digital form started some 40 years ago with the widespread adoption of the personal computer.

      The decreasing costs of all sorts of sensors and the rise of the Internet of Things, as well as advances in machine vision, voice recognition, and natural language processing, mean that we digitize increasingly more analog content. The value associated with this first stage of the digital transformation, sometimes referred to as digitization, was traditionally seen in the savings in physical or human resources, but nowadays digital content is also the building block for the other transformations that we are seeing.

With the advent of network computing, the Internet, and later smartphones, we moved to the second stage of the digital transformation, which allows more people to access the digitized information. The value here lies in how information flows faster from A to B. This can eliminate small inconveniences in life, such as having to call for a taxi, by using a service like Uber instead, or it can help with providing lifesaving real-time information, as in the case of natural catastrophe warning apps. It also means that information can be fed back in real time, as when Google Maps uses the travel speed of smartphones to estimate traffic flow on streets. 5G and the proliferation of blockchain technology will further accelerate this stage.

      Another reason that digital information can make our lives better, and this is the third stage, is that we can generate additional insights from the stored and shared information. This has been around for a while in the form of business intelligence (BI) — basically ever since we had databases. But several factors, including the rise of cloud computing and the general increase in computing power, have led to the impressive developments in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) that we have seen over recent years. With quantum computing, which is on the horizon to become widely available, this stage will explode.

While these different technologies emerged more or less sequentially, which is why I call them stages (see Figure 5.1), we are now in a situation where technological advances are happening at each level. Further, as already mentioned, innovation in AI and in different network technologies leads to ever more content becoming digitized, which in turn can be accessed and mined for new information, meaning that we see self-reinforcing loops between the different building blocks. This explains the rapid acceleration of the digital transformation that we are currently witnessing.

      Alexander: What role does Big Data play in this transformation, or is that just a buzzword?

      Florian: Big Data is a real paradigm shift. Whereas in the past we had to rely on small samples to make inferences about the wider population, in the statistical sense of the word, in many cases we now have data points about every single unit in the population. This could be individual shoppers who frequent an online store. Or it could be the fuel consumption of the vehicles in the fleet of a delivery company. This brings with it two advantages.