When IBM Watson burst on the scene a few years ago by famously winning Jeopardy! people swooned. Here was a machine that seemed to live up to the promise of a science fiction future. IBM purported to show us all an artificial intelligence (AI) that could understand human language, sift through massive amounts of data, and provide answers to questions.
From a marketing standpoint this is a gold standard for enterprise software. Companies quickly signed on to the promise, looking to Watson for answers for everything from insights in their CRM data to finding a cure for disease.
Benedict Cumberbatch, star of the BBC series “Sherlock,” has a problem. Sherlock’s stream-of-consciousness deductive speeches must be delivered at warp speed— “100 miles an hour”—and that’s hard to pull off without mistakes.
But, of course, all that speed makes sense. Holmes observed, processed, and bang! Insight. That’s rapid time to value.
Time to Value: The Missing Ingredient
Organizations deploy cognitive search platforms to boost employee productivity, foster innovation, and gain greater insight from their data. But to achieve those goals, they often take on huge professional services from “mega vendors” that don’t deliver an effective cognitive solution.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1886 fictional “consulting detective,” Sherlock Holmes, was a great mind renowned for his highly advanced powers of observation and reasoning. He was often assisted by Dr Watson, who was unfailingly loyal, if noticeably less bright. At the end of each thrilling tale starring the duo, the anxious reader would always be delighted to hear Sherlock announce that he had solved the latest mind-bending riddle, inevitably characterizing the solution to his trusty helper as, “Elementary, my dear Watson!”
