Today, Jeff Jonas charts the big vision for the IBM Entity Analytic Solutions group, but through his career he has charted a course across the information management and identity analytics landscape that this industry would be well served to follow. He will share his vision in a keynote address at the Billing & OSS World Conference & Expo in April in Las Vegas.
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| IBM's Jeff Jonas |
Jeff Jonas is a distinguished engineer and chief scientist at IBM (IBM), but it only starts there. He also is a member of the Markle Foundation Task Force on National Security in the Information Age. He’s a senior associate for the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a contributor to leading think tanks, advocacy groups and policy research organizations on matters of privacy, technology and homeland security.
These are his credentials, but his ideas are here on his blog where you may find yourself sharing what he calls his absolute fascination with this space. Only someone who is so fascinated can build systems as diverse as an inventory system for fish in the Mirage Casino aquarium or a genealogy system for the North American Llama Society and as businesslike as the order fulfillment distribution system for Netscape and the 150 to 200 other systems his company, Systems Research & Development (SRD), built before it was acquired by IBM in 2005. He got famous for helping casinos catch cheaters, but today he’s all about information management and promoting the responsible use of this amazing yet potentially invasive technology. Here, he speaks to B/OSS editor Tim McElligott on privacy, civil liberties and the imperative for companies to achieve sense making in real time.
How did you become so fascinated with data analytics?
It was an accident. My company, SRD, was a custom software company. Organizations would come to us and ask us to build systems for all kinds of things. So the position I have been in for most of my life is [figuring out] how to take the information an organization has and harness it to make it more useful. It is not so much analytics as it is information management. Within information management there are a lot of pieces, one of which is analytics.
What is your role with IBM today?
I play a number of roles. I chart the big vision about where to take the technology. I also help determine how to solve certain problems. We have a highly competent group, but sometimes I get involved in deciding should we turn right or left. That is 10 percent of what I do.
I am quite active in the privacy and civil liberties conversation. I am a technologist, so I don’t pretend to be a privacy advocate, but I have come to realize that if people like myself and my team build powerful systems that are smart, [it’s important] to make sure they get implemented with the correct level of privacy and civil liberties protection. I find myself in a lot of conversations with people in the privacy community and I actively encourage more technologists to spend more time with people in the privacy advocacy field. I think that is good for America. I think it is good for the world.
I also think transparency is good. Certainly there are elements of transparency that exist today like with the Freedom of Information Act, and I think things like Facebook allow people to show more transparency. I can’t speak to absolute transparency, but more transparency is good.
