What's New - 2 February 2017

​Center panel buttons: we’ve redesigned the center panel navigation buttons to allow for drop-downs leading to more interesting analyses. That has meant changing the button titles to better reflect their future purpose and to allow for new capabilities that we are already working on. It has also given us the opportunity to introduce a new ‘Help’ button that explains the benefits and uses of each menu item.

A new and separate ‘Export’ option within  ‘Filter’ now makes it quicker to create Excel files for offline purposes.

We have reintroduced the ‘Cloud’ visual having found a more stable replacement for the third-party app we used previously.

Expect to see new capabilities in the drop-downs in the next few months.

Glossary: by popular request, we have provided a high-level glossary of the key terms we use on every page.

Ask Athena; we want to thank all those of you who contributed to our initial ‘Ask Athena’ chatbot. This has given us the clues we need to determine your needs and introduce a far more sophisticated version.

Please try it out and help us to develop an even better, instant response to your queries.

Challenge Search Queries: we are grateful to  Maryln  Walton of Herman Miller for suggesting that the search query that generates the challenges should be shown as an Alt Tag to save time and improve knowledge.

Artificial Intelligence Policy: we make extensive use of Artificial Intelligence particularly using our custom-designed robot, Athena. We have now put in place our policies governing the use of robots and AI. You can read about these here.

Plan and Act: after 10 years of service we’ve retired our old faithfuls of the ‘Plan’ and ‘Act’ buttons. Instead, we have made it possible for members to go straight to the foresight methods in ‘Projects’, ‘Sources’ and ‘Members’ by clicking on the toolkit titles. This is simpler and makes our extensive toolkit more intuitive to use.

Assess Insights: We see our system as a human-machine collaboration. With this in mind, members and clients can now make their own manual assessments of Insights and have their inputs appear on the associated Snapshots.

This version allows the inputting of an ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival), Relevance, Impact, Likelihood and Impact plus Use cases.

More speed improvements to the editors' pages: we’ve made yet more improvements to editing efficiency in the last few weeks. It is now possible for us to finish editing before 6a.m. GMT most days thus bringing you the latest forecasts 8-12 hours earlier in your day.

Future developments: in December 2016 we announced some big developments in 2017 including:

A more powerful and better visualized, dynamic dashboard using our big data to identify change not visible to human only research.

Progress to date: This release delivered the underpinnings of this development.

Further developing Athena as a by-your-side teaching companion, digital assistant, and site guide.

Progress to date: This release increases the power of Ask Athena. Our next release due before March 12^th will begin making Athena a cognitive, by-your-side teaching companion, digital assistant, and site guide.

Working to reduce our editing time by giving Athena far greater self-learning capabilities and to make Shaping Tomorrow a fully automated service.

Progress to date: We’ve yet to start this effort, though we have the blueprint designed and agreed. The project is planned to start after March 12^th and continue through 2017.

Exciting times!