Let’s face it, fad or not, companies are starting to ask themselves how they could possibly use machine learning and AI technologies in their organization. Many are being lured by the promise of profits by discovering winning patterns with algorithms that will enable solid predictions… The reality is that most technology and business professionals do not have sufficient understanding of how machine learning works and where it can be applied.  For a lot of firms, the focus still tends to be on small-scale changes instead of focusing on what really matters…tackling their approach to machine learning.

In the recent Wall Street Journal article, Machine Learning at Scale Remains Elusive for Many Firms, Steven Norton captures interesting comments from the industry’s data science experts. In the article, he quotes panelists from the MIT Digital Economy Conference in NYC, on businesses current practices with AI and machine learning. All agree on the fact that, for all the talk of Machine Learning and AI’s potential in the enterprise, many firms aren’t yet equipped to take advantage of it fully.

Panelist,  Michael Chui, partner at McKinsey Global Institute states that “If a company just mechanically says OK, I’ll automate this little activity here and this little activity there, rather than re-thinking the entire process and how it can be enabled by technology, they usually get very little value out of it. “Few companies have deployed these technologies in a core business process or at scale.”

Panelist, Hilary Mason, general manager at Cloudera Inc., had this to say, “With very few exceptions, every company we work with wants to start with a cost-savings application of automation.” “Most organizations are not set up to do this well.”

Communication is one of the main objectives that an organization needs to have in place to stay efficient and productive. A breakdown in accurate and efficient communication between departments at any point in the organization can result in conflict or loss of business.  Sadly, the efficiency between different departments in an organization becomes most evident when communication breaks down. As an example, David Grossman reported in “The Cost of Poor Communications” that a survey of 400 companies with 100,000 employees each cited an average loss per company of $62.4 million per year because of inadequate communication to and between employees.

With the dawning of the big-data era and the global competition that Machine Learning algorithms has sparked, it’s more vital than ever for companies of all sizes to prioritize departmental communication mishaps. Perhaps, today, as a result of the many emerging markets, the most essential of these connections are between IT and the business units. CMO’s and CIO’s are becoming natural partners in the sense that CMO’s, in order to capture revenue opportunities, are expected to master not just the art of strategy and creativity but also the science of analytics. The CIO, on the other hand, is accountable for using technical groundwork to enable and accelerate revenue growth. Since business and technology people speak very different languages, there’s a need on both sides to start sharing the vocabulary or understanding of what is expected in order to avoid gridlock.

In the McKinsey article, Getting the CMO and CIO to work as partners, the author speaks to five prerequisite steps that the CMO and the CIO can take in order to be successful in their new roles.

--- Be clear on decision governance
Teams should define when decisions are needed, what must be decided, and who is responsible for making them.

One of the most recent additions to the iPhone is the Photo Editor, directly in the iPhone. Added in the update that came from Apple over the summer, this new photo editor brings efficiency, and simplicity to photo editing, right in your phone. If you have a photo that you just took a moment ago of you with your friends, and you want to edit some features before posting it on a social networking site, it becomes simpler with this new addition, right in the Photos Application.

Open up the Photos application, and tap on a picture you would like to edit. Once your picture comes up, tap in the top right on the button named “Edit.” A user interface that deals with editing will show up, and you are ready to rock and roll. First off, many times we take pictures at weird angles, we take them sideways, upside down, to the right, to the left, and our phone doesn’t recognize them. In the bottom left, you will see an arrow that is pointing counter clockwise; this is the button that you want to press if you want to flip your picture around to the correct orientation. Keep in mind that this flips counter clockwise, and it doesn’t matter if you pass the orientation that you wanted. Just keep flipping!

Next up is the simple enhance tool. Sometimes colors get drowned out if we don’t have the right lighting in our pictures, and makes the photo look dull, and dreary. You don’t want your colors to look dull and dreary while you are celebrating your trip to New York and seeing Times Square! Tapping on the button that looks similar to a magic wand, your picture will begin to look brighter and fuller. With the tap of a button, the iPhone detects what points in the picture is, as we said earlier, “dull, and dreary” and enhances those colors to their predicted colors, if the light was in the correct intensity. However, if you are dissatisfied with the outcome of the enhance tool, if your picture is not handled well by the phone, you are able to tap on the wand again, and remove your auto enhance.

In the rare case of red eye in your picture, the new photo editor has a solution. Moreover, a one-tap solution. With a simple tap on the red eye correction tool, between the crop tool, and the auto-enhance tool, you bring up a screen where you are now able to tap anywhere on your photo where red eye exists, and remove it. As simple as that. Remember when you had to do crazy dragging, selection, and odd stunts to remove red eye? Not any more.

Structure Rule Language

To aid in the ease of rule authoring, Blaze Software, now Fair Isaac, created the proprietary Structure Rule Language (SRL), an object-oriented programming language designed to enable those with little or no background in software development to pen rules. Although the capabilities of this language are far too extensive to detail in this article, we can examine the basic rule syntax.

Rules in the SRL take the following form:

rule RuleName [at | priority M] is