Datadoodle

You are here: Home / Archives for Bill Schmarzo

Bill Schmarzo

“Dean of Big Data” Bill Schmarzo: “smart” takes a community

by

“I love civic tech,” says the data industry’s “Dean of Big Data” Bill Schmarzo, longtime VP at Dell and now CTO IoT and analytics at Hitachi Vantara. He loves it, but he also has ideas about how to make it work. It takes more than love to bear fruit.

Civic tech is the stuff I’ve written about before — and is possibly the most exciting aspect of “smart cities” today. Think of it: Cities want the technology to make them work better, but they have no money. What’s slightly more plentiful are talented young and not so young coders willing to help. Many of them are millennials, and they see a world that needs fixing. It’s their world that oceans may soon flood. It’s their democracy that post-Trump leaders will have to restore. It’s their food shortages, their privacy, their AI-displaced workers who’re hungry for work or just plain hungry. Many have already stepped up with their new coding skills to help.

They can build apps that use public data to help ease traffic, coax transit systems to flow, or to help the homeless with resources and comfort.

OpenTransit

One good example is the OpenTransit app I wrote about recently. When released to the public, it will help coax the San Francisco’s transit system, “Muni,” into a more usable system.

That’s good for San Francisco, but what about other cities? Nearby Stockton and Modesto have their own transit districts but similar problems. Quick translation from one city to another would need a common layer of abstraction, a language that data from any city understands. Though the data may not be reusable across cities, the models certainly are, says Schmarzo. “There’s no reason cities can’t collaborate to share the models.”

But most city leaders don’t think about borrowing another city’s models. Why not? “These cities are for the most part not competing with each other,” says Schmarzo. “There’s no reason they can’t collaborate.” You may not be able to share the data, he says, but you can share the model.

Yet sharing models and other methods seems like a second language for many cities. “We saw these proposals for smart city initiatives all the time,” says Schmarzo, who served a one-year term on the City of San Jose tech advisory board. “The lack of collaboration between cities is disappointing.They really miss the multiplier effect.”

Where’s the leadership to come from?

Where’s the leadership going to come from? It won’t come from corporations, he says. “They see [smart cities] as a money grab. They’re not thinking broadly.” But leadership could come from universities, where there is strong leadership already.

What would it take to make city-college collaboration the norm? The spark to start that fire would have to come from a higher level than the city. Perhaps the federal government could give money to states, who would bang the gavel to get it started. It might take someone like the governor of California Gavin Newsom to lead it.

Such collaboration would give students a ready-made sandbox. “To me that’s such a huge win-win. You need just one strong leader.”

While cities, regions, ands states work that out, the civic tech contributors can forge ahead, too. The OpenTransit group, for one, should hope that the app they build for San Francisco Municipal Railway can be easily reused in Stockton, San Diego, Sacramento, and other cities around the state and all over. They’d do that with a common platform, says BS, so that the rewiring for reuse in a new city would be easy. Make common layer of abstraction. Plug it in and let it go. You’ve got to have common language. “The people who build apps I’d think would be elated that their app is reused across 450 cities across the country.”

“Tech plays an important role,” Schmarzo says. “But it’s really about how you create a community.”

Try out the OpenTransit alpha here.

Public sector CIOs have a tough job

by

Public sector CIOs have a tough job / San Jose’s winding road toward “smart” / Bill Schmarzo

It’s hard to get things done in the public sector, says the data industry’s “Dean of Big Data,” Bill Schmarzo. That’s one big lesson he’s learned in his first six months on a Silicon Valley tech advisory board. What do you do when your city wants to be “smart” but your budget doesn’t add up?

Smart strategy

San Jose, California is on the long road to becoming a “smart city.” The city is already pretty smart in the old sense of “smart.” For one thing, it’s got within it a bounty of tech-industry pros, such as Schmarzo. Early this year, the city recruited him to serve on its seven-member Innovation and Technology Advisory Board. San Jose also got some of the best educational institutions in the world within a few minutes’ drive. The San Jose State University computer engineering department, for example, is a seven minute walk from the San Jose city hall.

But getting to the new kind of smart, where sensors inform decisions, from the mundane to the sweeping, is tough. “You don’t have the kind of budget you need for these projects,” says Schmarzo.

He comes from the private sector. There, he explains, you can usually get money for worthy projects much more easily. He’s spent 36 years in senior-level tech-industry positions and is now CTO of Dell EMC Services.

The creative CIO

In the public-sector, the CIO has to be creative. Where a private sector CIO just goes out and hires a team, the public sector CIO has to think hard how a paltry budget will meet obligations. One popular strategy among U.S. cities is to enlist a computer science department at a nearby college. Many up-and-coming data scientists like to dive into public-sector projects.

That hasn’t always worked out so well, Schmarzo says. The work tends to be undirected, and worse, those clever students move on. Public sector CIOs realize quickly that it’s not data science they need first, it’s project management and a collaborative framework. Only with that can one group of students hand off their work to the next.

One especially creative public sector CIO, says Schmarzo, is San Jose’s, Rob Lloyd. As tight as Lloyd’s budget started out in 2014, his progress on an open-data platform soon faced an extraordinary challenge when a major flood hit the city. The crisis was expensive and not budgeted. Every one of the city’s departments had to contribute much of their budgets.

Datadoodle hopes to hear much more about that from Lloyd.

Schmarzo: An over-infatuation with data

by

The “Dean of Big Data,” Bill Schmarzo, said what I think few of his peers would say on the record: “We have an over-infatuation with data.”

Yet there it was, in the Marriott lobby adjoining last week’s Strata+Hadoop conference in San Jose, CA.

Before you can decide on your data, he insists, you have to decide on your decisions. He said, “That is clearly the biggest challenge in the ‘smart’ conversation,” such as in establishing a “smart city.”

Schmarzo, who is by day Dell EMC CTO, jumped into the “smart city” conversation recently when he joined the San Jose, CA Innovation Advisory Board. His first question was to the airport CTO: what decisions do you face? From there, they could choose data. Must they spot beacons over the terminals, for example, or to use the cheaper and readily available MAC addresses? Such choices could make a difference to that CTO and any tax-starved cities on their way to “smart.”

I asked how people react when he suggests easing up on collecting data willy nilly, consuming it like junk food binges? He paused. “So far, the vast majority are relieved,” he said. “They don’t know what to do with all the data.”

“We over-complicate things, and data vendors are the most guilty,” he said. “They talk about smart this and smart that. And they say ‘You gotta have this technology and these gateways.’ But what will you do with that?”

There’s still one more thing to do: explain the decisions. How can you make the data be made interesting not only for the mayor but the citizens, too? “What I don’t know how to do,” he said, “is how to tell a story around it.”