From the course: Cognitive Technologies: The Real Opportunities for Business

The three Vs framework

- In this lecture, we're going to look at how to decide whether and where to apply cognitive technologies in your organization. We've seen how companies are putting these technologies to work, but cognitive technologies are not the solution to every problem. Your organization needs to do its own evaluation of the business case. We've developed a framework called the three V's framework that can help you assess your own opportunities for deploying these technologies. It requires looking at your business processes, your products, your customers, and your markets to determine where the use of these technologies may be viable, where it's valuable, and where it may even be vital. By viable, we mean where these technologies actually work. We've seen a lot of cases where cognitive technologies can be used. They can be applied to perceptual tasks, such as those involving vision or speech or handwriting. It could include data entry or first-tier customer service. It can be applied to analytical classification and predictive tasks. Tasks ranging from forecasting to document review and summarization are examples of these. It can be applied to decision-making tasks, especially where knowledge or expertise can be expressed as rules or where data drives a lot of the decisions. They can be applied to planning and optimization tasks, such as scheduling. The second V stands for valuable, and by this, we mean where it's worth applying cognitive technologies. Just because something can be done doesn't mean it's valuable to do it. Valuable applications may have the following characteristics. They could involve business processes where labor is costly, where you have highly trained professionals, for instance, involved. They could involve applications where expertise is scarce, such as specialists in rare cancers or drilling engineers in oil or gas. They could involve applications where the value of improving performance is high, such as in medical decision-making or financial decision-making, and finally, they could involve applications where you have the potential to deliver features or experiences that your customers care about. In our lecture on product applications, we saw that consumer products can provide ease of use, simplicity, instill confidence, and provide emotional benefits through the application of cognitive technologies, and in professional applications, these same benefits can apply. The final V stands for vital, and by this, we mean where cognitive technologies may actually be required in certain business problems. We see this because industry-standard levels of performance may not be available through any other means with online retail product recommendations, for example, spam filtering, or fraud detection. There are no techniques better than those provided by cognitive technologies, or with scalability of processes, such as processing large volumes of handwritten or printed forms or analyzing large amounts of social media text or other kinds of text. In these applications, it's really necessary or vital to use cognitive technologies. The point is, in a growing number of areas, the use of cognitive technologies will become mandatory. It will become mainstream. Organizations are going to encounter many opportunities to apply cognitive technologies, and the three V's framework can help your thinking about whether and where to apply them. First, look at whether they're viable, whether they're valuable, and whether they might even be vital, and you can do this analysis by analyzing across your business processes, your products, your customers, and your markets and applying the three V's framework.

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