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newsmaker In 2005, Singapore was the first country he'd ever visited outside the United States, apart from Canada and Mexico. Today, Jeff Jonas' passport is filled with so many stamps from the countries he has since visited, that he's had to add in new pages.
Jonas was the founder of Systems Research & Development (SRD), once staffed by all of 18 people. And while it was doing well, it certainly wasn't a multinational corporation. But the company grew to become 60 employee-strong, and was eventually acquired by IT giant IBM in 2005.
Jonas' biography reads like a soap opera: high school dropout at 19, once lived out of his car, declared a bankrupt after his first software business bombed, and was temporarily paralyzed from the neck down after a car accident.
Today, Jonas is not only walking tall, he has taken part in seven Ironman triathlons, though he's modest enough to admit a 14-year-old as well as a 70-year-old triathlon participant cruised past him during a race.
He's also quick to acknowledge that SRD would have remained a "really small" company based in Las Vegas, if he hadn't hired "a real CEO", John Slitz, and "demoted" himself to chief scientist.
Under Slitz's guidance, Jonas recalled how SRD grew rapidly and in January 2005, became part of IBM's Entity Analytics Group, a unit which was established based on the technologies he invented and developed at SRD.
Entity analytics software provides real-time business intelligence capabilities, by correlating relevant information even as the data changes. These tools have been used by casinos and government agencies in the United States to combat fraud and insider crime.
ZDNet Asia settles down for an interview with Jonas, who is currently an IBM Distinguished Engineer and chief scientist of entity analytics solutions. He describes his job as one of an evangelist, championing the technologies he invented and that are now part of IBM's technology pool, and discusses why organizations need entity analytics to cure "amnesia" and make better decisions.
Jonas also explains why there are some things even he would never want to invent.
Q: What do you do as an IBM Distinguished Engineer and chief scientist?
Jonas: There are some 300 Distinguished Engineers in IBM, and I acquired the title after my company was bought in January 2005. You're given the title because you've become a recognized expertise in the field you're in and my expertise is in data streaming identity.
My job is to invent next-generation technology, work on privacy protection, and evangelize what IBM bought when they bought my company, and inventions along with it.
Do your inventions center around a particular theme?
I think they center around helping organizations be more intelligent. Organizations have amnesia. They forget what they know. For example, we found a retailer that had many thousands of employees. And as it turned out, two out of every thousand employees were people who had already been arrested for stealing from the retailer. So we had a department who knows the company already had these people arrested in the past, but the same people are rehired over in another department in the company. That's amnesia. Your organization already learned this, but you forgot it when you rehired them. That's bad.
If you have enterprise amnesia, you make poor decisions. You hire the wrong people, you don't treat your customers right and you miss the obvious.
Every system in an organization has a database, and databases have perceptions. You need to bring these business perceptions and knowledge together so the organization can be smarter.
Sounds similar to business intelligence and datawarehousing tools.
Well, not exactly. What makes entity analytics different is that we're trying to notice things exactly as they happen. There's a lot of work out there about collecting information over time, and then you analyze it at the end of the month to see what it means. A lot of systems that are built today expect the user to ask the question. But you can't expect the user to ask a smart question, or the right question, every day.
What we're doing is this: with all these perceptions in your databases, and as fast as the data is changing, the system will notice if a new data changed something, and whether it needs to tell somebody that it changed.
For example, a casino discovers that one of their customers has been stealing money and that customer has been arrested. And, it's very obvious that the customer knew a lot about the inter-workings of the casino and that one of the casino's employees was involved in the crime. But the casino doesn't know which employee helped the customer
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