Society - Written Tuesday, April 6, 2010 by Jeff DeChambeau - 6 Comments

The retail experience of tomorrow: the same but very different

The last couple of month’s I’ve been looking at an area called “process mining”– it’s similar to reality mining, but with the goal of figuring out how structured processes, performed by humans, can be tracked and measured by machines. In broad terms, the argument I’ve been working on is that in order to automate and measure the processes in our day to day lives (going somewhere, buying sometime, finding your way around a store), we’ve needed to add in technology to the event/process, and use that technology to generate data (respectively: gps tracking, point of sale systems that log time and purchase, and online stores that track each and every mouse click you make).

These approaches give us new data, but require that we change how we go about doing things, usually making everything transaction based–where the transaction is constructed in such a way that a computer or sensor can understand what’s going on. This doesn’t really need to be the case anymore–computers are getting to the point where they’re smart enough to start understanding what we’re doing without being with us all the time. Continue…