Momenta I Digital Thread

Heather Engel is an experienced veteran of the cybersecurity space who has worked in the field for nearly 20 years. Heather currently serves as the Managing Partner of Strategic Cyber Partners, a firm which she founded. Working with both governmental and industry clients, Heather advises on several security areas including overall management and program development, risk, incident response, data, and executive support. Heather’s prior experience includes working with the United States’ Department of Defense.

In our conversation, Heather and I discussed an array of issues pertaining to enterprise cybersecurity. Topics explored include IT/OT, blockchain, the role of data, and more. We posited on the future of enterprise cybersecurity and Heather elaborated on how the space has changed over her career. We also looked at the make-up of strong organizational cybersecurity strategy in the age of digital transformation and as the threat landscape persistently evolves.

#76 Industrial Insight Transformations with Leif Eriksen, Insights Partner at Momenta by Momenta

Al Velosa has been following the Industrial IoT market as an analyst for many years, and our conversation covered a wide range of topics.  We discuss a number of the key use cases and best practices for success that he has seen, along with some of the key industries leading the way.  We discuss the challenges involved with integrating business outcomes, technology and organizational culture, and some of the obstacles still commonly faced in the market.  He shares his views on IoT platforms, AI and Machine Learning, Blockchain and the evolution of Digital Twins.  Lastly you shares his vision for the future where Digital Twins become integrative and anticipatory parts of business and daily life.

Jon Sobel is Co-founder and CEO of Sight Machine, a provider of software solutions that help manufacturing firms gain visibility and insights into their operations to drive efficiencies, cost savings and better outcomes.  Our conversation covered a range of topics including his experience working with open source at SourceForge, working around the energy industry in the early days of Tesla, and the experiences of visiting dozens of manufacturing plants at the genesis of Sight Machine.  He discusses the unique challenges that manufacturing data presents, along with some of the best practices and considerations for success.  He relates some of the organizational obstacles that impede adoption of analytic technologies in manufacturing and discusses the role that AI plays in next generation vision.

Usman Haque has used his training as an architect to inform an extensive career designing smart city projects.  His work at Umbrellium goes much farther than what is typically thought of as smart cities – he has applied a creative approach to create greater engagement of citizens in public spaces, anticipating changes and evolution to deliver a better quality of life.  We discuss the considerations involved in designing and implementing projects and the approach, the value of platforms and toolkits (along with the evolution of Pachube and the Urban Innovation Toolkit) as well as Thingful, the IoT data search engine.

#72 A Conversation with Nicolaj Siggelkow by Momenta

Flavia Tata Nardini is the CEO and Co-founder of Fleet.Space, a startup based in Adelaide, Australia focused on delivering satellite-powered communications networks that enable true IoT solutions across multiple industries – energy, agriculture, environmental and other areas.  She shares her experience working for the European Space Agency, and how the evolution of technologies relating to communications and low earth orbit satellites pave the way for a new generation of connectivity solutions.  She shares how Fleet is leveraging the LoRaWAN standard, nanosatellites and edge computing to enable a rapidly growing ecosystem of customers and partners to build out intelligent solutions that were previously cost prohibitive and impossible for non military or government users.  Finally she shares some of the challenges that the space industry faces near-term, along with the strategy for Fleet Space following its recent capital raise.

Francois Laborie is President of Cognite North America. Our conversation covered his background working in aerospace for EADS (now Airbus) and how his first hand experience working with supply chains, the assembly line and early iterations of augmented reality helped shape his views of how information analysis is critical to optimizing business processes.  We discuss some of the unique aspects of working with industrial data, and he highlights the work that Cognite is doing with key clients to help bridge disparate information systems and deliver relevant value add insights to users.

Dean Nelson is Chairman and Founder of Infrastructure Masons, with a 30 year career in technology working at companies including Sun Microsystems, Ebay and Uber Technologies. Our conversation explored the work that Infrastructure Masons is doing to help advance training, education, mentoring and internships to cultivate the next generation of talent need to design, build and manage the explosive growth of hyper-scale data centers, edge computing and other critical infrastructure for the information age. He shares the challenges facing the industry with the pending shortages of talent, the broad interdisciplinary skills in demand and the global nature of the industry. He also shares some of his own perspectives on the demands involved with souring and delivering the massive data center capacity required to support the explosive volumes of video and other applications today and in the future.  He also shares some of the implications of the “Jetsons”-like Uber Elevate service, which could transform cities as we know them.

Rita Gunther McGrath is a world-renowned business strategist, author and Professor at Columbia Business School who has dedicated her career to helping identify how to anticipate, plan for and manage disruptive change.  Our conversation covered a broad range of topics including the principles of Discovery-Driven planning, which she pioneered in the mid 1990s and was the first major management approach to embace the idea that change is a constant in business – and which led to development of the Lean Startup methodology.   She shares insights into how the nature of competitive advantage has changed, leaving businesses vulnerable and in need of fresh strategies to address the opportunities and risks of digital business.  We discuss a range of examples of successful leadership, and explore how the dynamics around Big Tech are different but in many ways similar to past monopolies. Finally she shares the ideas around her new book.