Blockchain, messaging and AI will be the backbone of discrete analysis + decision making

The word communiqué means an “official statement or announcement” and has been in use in legal circles for a long time. Ages ago rulers used to send communiqués to others with requests, orders or even agreements. Nowadays governments use communiqués all the time especially when it is not part of an internal workflow system. Communiques have been used to disperse information, send notices, exchange secrets, transmit authentic orders, etc. Traditionally communiqués are hierarchically downwards and always have been one way. Communiques are the bridge between two different worlds and hence incorporate more complex authorizations than traditional messages. Communiques are not mere messages but rather are an entire docket of messages that are related, incorporate user responses and control their distribution. Messaging systems are the backbone of every community today and it is not surprising that every single digital asset today is represented in a specific messaging system.

Messaging systems are of many types today:

• Peer to Peer like Whatsapp or Slack
• Message walls like Facebook, Yammer, etc.
• Message groups similar to Usenet
• Real time feeds like IRC or even Steemit’s Discord
• Asynchronous mechanisms like email
• Pure Pub/Sub networks a la Google Alerts

The world today is submerged amongst three orthogonal messaging paradigms.

1. One is email which is well suited for exchanging information with companies virtually storing most of their information as part of email attachments. Email has an entire ecosystem replete with hardware, systems, delivery, analytics, storage and distribution lists
2. The second messaging paradigm is the social networking platform which is perfect for rapid accumulation of unstructured information. Such platforms also focus on delivery, persistence, collaboration, user control and contextual linkages
3. The third platform is instant messaging which is used extensively by many users including companies. It evolved as a web delivery mechanism before gravitating to the mobile phone and comes equipped with easy ways to transfer messages, videos and audios. These three platforms today rule the roost and are widely used since every other content source integrates itself into one of these paradigms.

But none of them fit the communiqué paradigm. The largest gap in any of the messaging systems discussed above is one of closure. All messaging systems are open ended requiring further analysis as well as decision making in order to achieve closure. The simplest closure can be a “yes/no” and that itself cannot be analyzed today. This was done by design since most decision making was done outside of the system to start with and further interpretation was required to coerce a decision. Complex decision making systems were conjured up that mined enormous amounts of data from these messaging systems and arrived at complex decisions. Typically these decisions were about reacting to surveillance, marketing, process control, etc

There have been some seismic shifts in the internet landscape which are forcing companies as well as consumers to start looking at decision making solutions in an accelerated manner. Consider the following:

• Digital proximity between the business and its consumer is reducing at an alarming rate
• Decisions are being made in real time
• Smart decisions are ones that constantly monitor and change themselves based on a wide spectrum of crowd sourced inputs
• Communications are getting more personalized and are being driven by interactive media
• Targeted communications based on recipient profiles are increasing in advertising, recruiting, marketing, healthcare, etc
• Referral marketing is on the rise and looks to play a major role in buying patterns going forward
• B2B reach-out through advertising and solicitation is on the rise with both horizontal as well as vertical focus

The writing is clearly on the wall and we don’t mean FaceBook! In the internet of everything, all users are consumers one way or the other. Today, consumers are driving decisions of all kinds and their communications are short, swift and decisive. Any company or individual who taps into communications as a universal decision flow mechanism is making the right call. We will list a few interesting cases in our pursuit of communiqué.

The world of advertising is about finding the right person and to target him/her with the right enticements. The decision point is always the purchase of a service or a product. Consumers either are either inadvertently targeted or they are automatically signed up based on 3rd party preferences. Advertisements are always delivered as part of the usage platform (email, social networking, mobile apps, web sites, etc).

A pharmaceutical company wants to send qualified information to retailers and doctors worldwide and also gain valuable feedback. A hospital wants to do the same about its accomplishments. These are typically sent as digital content via email, web or even as hard copies. The goal of the exercise is to educate the recipient, get adequate feedback and actually influence decision making.

A corporation wants to communicate amongst its geographically separated stakeholders including board of directors. In doing so it wants to record the communication as evidence of decision(s) taken at the stakeholders meeting and later on use it when presenting the communication process as a digital asset.

Let us suppose that a legal department wants to create a digital asset for all legal decisions taken on behalf of the company. It wants to send a set of documents to another entity (consumer, business unit or business) and it needs to know that the recipient received all the documents. It also wants to ensure that the recipient must sign to access documents. This may be an aggregative or collaborative effort with much iteration. At the end of the process or workflow, the document sets are stored as digital transactions and can be later on used as corroborative proof. We know that there are custom applications that do this.

source: physioguru
Imagine if you will a communication based decision support system wherein decisions are taken on the basis of analysis of communication flow, targets reached and responses correlated. Typically outreach activities are done by marketing firms, branding agencies, recruiting companies, human resources, sales organizations, customer support, etc. Most of these activities involve targeting an initial set of recipients, calculating the feedback, re-targeting a subset of recipients and after further analysis is done a course of action is pursued. A classic example would be a typical field support activity for an automobile manufacturing company that would have come to know that its customers are unhappy. It wants to find out more and hence sends out a communication to which all of its service stations report back identifying pain points. After first level analysis is done, a reduced set of service stations are targeted with more specific questions. This iterative process using intermediate decisions involves sending communication, gathering responses, analyzing and reducing recipients is done until a definitive answer is discovered.

Consider several aspects of corporate communication that deals with both internal and external messaging. It is hierarchical as well as distributive in nature. It is cyclic as well as reactive. Corporate communication is all about ensuring that the recipient has understood the message clearly and that responses are monitored adequately. Messages take a very intricate path with several levels of acceptability being tested before it is sent to a mass audience. It also embodies organizational structure since a communication meant for a VP may not be the same as the one meant for members subordinate to him/her. Reality often intrudes and several different communications will be produced with the exact same intent but with differential content that is selective and targeted. So in other words a CEO might broadcast a set of messages which are first fielded by his inner circle and then forwarded on with additional/altered content to the second circle and so on.

We have all seen multi level marketing firms like Amway, HerbalLife, etc. These are basically pyramid schemes that rely on person to person messaging. Typically each person dispatches downwards a list of schemes/offers/catalogs/discounts to all the people under him/her in the pyramid. Each recipient sends down an altered list downwards and this process continues until the base of the pyramid is reached. This community is highly driven by phones and messaging apps but the real workflow, order booking, etc. has to be done by hand. Each time a dispatch is sent downwards, it may either be automatically modified due to the importance of the recipient or based on some internal algorithm that the forwarder is aware of. There is at any time a diverse set of dispatches sent downwards and an even more diverse aggregated set coming back up.

As an outreach program, a digital newspaper is second to none. It is the very apex of information dissemination. News is getting highly localized and people want to be a part of the news rather than just receive it. A community of people (based on residence or geography), want to run a modern newspaper which will be digital, allow advertisements, showcase the community, enable interactive discussions, etc. Honesty and probity have to be enforced. News snippets need to be verified and collected from a vast set of people who may or may not be connected. Each such snippet needs to be democratically validated. Aggregated news will be published after editing, curation and collation which are again a community activity.

What do the use cases sorely lack to work better?

1. Decentralized trust is key to make data collection safe, secure and valid
2. Every stage in a decision making process is actually a transaction
3. In many cases the input-decide-output sequence is a contract between the publisher and the consumer
4. Crowd sourcing is embedded into these models
5. Every feedback collection or closure step needs artificial intelligence at scale
6. Every use case is built on messaging and resting on a backend of business intelligence as well decision support systems
7. Communications have to be captured for eternity and are actually transaction inputs/outputs
8. It is immediately clear that existing solutions are not transaction based, do not control distribution and does not have transparency. Everyone equipped with an internet enabled mobile device is a consumer. A corporation is itself a large scale aggregation of focused
9. Every digital asset created is actually an entry in a ledger of the community
10. Decisions need to be agreed upon by the community. Feedback has to be integrated and fed into successive responses so that communication drives to a decision
11. Incentives need to be given to collect data at every step. Some may be financial and others may be based on aspiration. Incentives have to be given to speed up decision making
12. In many cases money may be transferred on the basis of decision making
13. The ability to see all decisions taken are required in some cases
14. Most cases are discrete analysis based on collected set of data without involved business intelligence

Clearly blockchain, AI and messaging will come together to address these requirements. How will they do it? What alterations will happen in the industry? I will leave this for an entirely different day but the key point is blockchain will change decision making forever with transparency, recorded collaboration and incentivized agreements.

Blockchain + AI + Messaging is the ultimate communique