New computing capabilities are changing the world, Stephen Kruger IBM Master Inventor, speaking at FutureScope

By @SimonCocking, interesting interview with Stephen Kruger, who has been a Cloud Architect with IBM for the past 10 years. Over 25 years experience in research and development, he is a technical staff member, and an IBM Master Inventor. He has a strong social and collaboration background, and has led development across many of the IBM cloud offerings. You can see him speaking at FutureScope on May 10th, and you can buy tickets here.

1 min pitch for what you are doing now?

I am currently working on an IBM Smarter Workforce component called Employee Voice, assisting enterprises to gain insights, identify opportunities, risks, and hot spots with real-time employee surveys and cognitive analytics.

What are your plans for 2017?

I plan to arrange my top ten used software skills, and consciously abandon half of them for new tooling. After 6 months I compare the newly mastered skill with the older skill, and decide which one to keep. It’s my Darwinian approach to keep my skills relevant.

What will you be talking about at this event?

There are some surprising outcomes of how recently acquired computing capabilities are changing the world. I’d like to touch on a few unexpected outcomes of how traditional industries such as insurance, finance, transport, education, and healthcare are being challenged by the new world of cognitive computing.

What inspired you to attend FutureScope 2017?

The diversity of speakers provides an interesting cross-section of opinions on the impact technology has across a broad range of sectors. It’s understanding these differing points of view that stimulates my creative processes.

How was  the last 12 months, what worked well, what didn’t move as quickly as you would have liked?

It’s nice to see some convergence in cloud deployment strategies, but we still have a long way to go with application level deployments of complex configurations. The meta-configuration of cloud deployments is still a wild-west of approaches. I’m also concerned about the lack of oversight on core technologies such as Node JS, which whilst adopted quickly, have absolutely dismal package management strategies. We’ve learnt nothing from the years of solving the same problems, and now end up with megabytes of Guy Fieri images in our business applications. We are doomed to re-invent solutions to solved problems.

Which influencers and websites do you follow to keep up to date with the latest developments?

I have a very spartan set of people I follow in Twitter, so my feed there is generally of quite high quality. I also stay away from mainstream new aggregators like Reddit, and prefer some older communities such as Slashdot which have an incredible collective wisdom.

How can people find out more about what you are working on?

All my public activity is channelled through through Twitter, and to a lesser extent LinkedIn.

What is a rabbit eating unicorn? Learn more at FutureScope? May 10th

If you would like to have your company featured in the Irish Tech News Business Showcase, get in contact with us at Simon@IrishTechNews.ie or on Twitter: @SimonCocking