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Chris Downing

MGMT-479

Dr. Miller

Grok: Action Intelligence for Fast Data

GROK, a company established by Jeff Hawkins, specializes in making IT analysis tools for

data management and intelligent data analytics. The most significant product of GROK is

Hierarchical Temporary Memory (HTM) application which is based on neuroscience

technology and enables a system to think and analyze like a human brain. The software inputs

fast data and forecasts the demands, trends, and other issues related to data in real time

(Arthaud-Day and Rothaermel, 2014). The system also has the capability to model the data

and enhance its capability through learning. Through its innovation and remarkable R&D,

GROK’s market value is thriving. Among many resources and core competencies, which are

mentioned in this paper ahead, patents which GROK has for its software applications and the

talented and skilled employees are the ones that are the reason behind the competitive

advantage the company enjoys (Arthaud-Day and Rothaermel, 2014).

The core competencies of the company can be increased further due to the reason that

GROK’s location is saturated with highly qualified and trained IT professionals. The

company provides IT solutions for a number of fields of market including finance,

management, and energy sector. The company provides both security and connectivity

solutions to enterprises so that they could integrate their systems (cloud networks) with

GROK’s technology and get the most accurate results and forecasts from their large scale

data. It provides safety against the attacks that are carried out by cyber-intruders on cloud

systems of enterprises to manipulate/breach their data. The precise sense engine technology

enables the software applications of GROK to mitigate false alarms and detect any potential
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failures which might damage the system or data. The company also uses techniques like

REST APIs in order to connect with external devices and systems to analyze them properly

(Arthaud-Day and Rothaermel, 2014).

GROK’s Business Strategy

Many big organization, which work with smartphones, tablets, and laptops etc. use GROK

technologies to analyze their fast data and make future predictions in order to resolve any

potential threat to integrity of their data. The current business strategy of the company

revolves around innovation of the existing technology and spread the extent of the business

all around the world. GROK knows that in today’s dynamic and highly technological

business environment, it is very important to manage and secure the data of organization as

well as of its customers in order to ensure sustainability. Unlike mainstream machine learning

technology used by many data analytics tools and companies, GROK makes use of efficient

and intelligent algorithms which readily get connected with the cloud systems without any

human assistance and learns the system to make intelligent decisions about the presented data

(Arthaud-Day and Rothaermel, 2014).

GROK is aware that that in the modern market, time and cost efficiency are the most critical

factors on which organizational success depends. Therefore GROK provides the technology

that cuts operational time and costs due to its autonomous property and system adaptability,

so that companies could deploy those efforts and costs in other departments. The HTM

technology developed by GROK is able to predict a cyber-attack prior to the actual attack by

detecting glitches (even smaller ones) in the cloud networks. This provides a competitive

edge to the company, as the response time of most of the malware detecting software

applications is quite big as compared to GROK’s application. Most of the mainstream cyber-

attack detection systems alert the user after the attack has done enough damage to the

network integrity (Ahmad and Hawkins, 2015).

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Resources

 Patents for software applications

 Toolkit program development through Grok’s partnership with Vitamin D Company

 Palm Pilot Production through the ownership of Grok by 3COM and US Robotics

 HTM Technology developed by the company which is used by many notable

companies like EnerNOC Inc.

Capabilities

 Smartphone and tablet software for public usage.

 Continuous innovation in the existing software for phones and tablets that have been

built by the company.

 Initiated flexible usage of firewall as well as cloud solutions.

 The two easy to access interfaces: User Interface (UI) and Application Programming

Interface (API) have been developed by the company for usage in personal

computers, laptops, tablets, and smartphones.

 In order to integrate different database tools like CEP, ETL, and SQL databases, the

company has also upgraded their existing Application Programming Interface (API).

 The company has developed software to provide an easy access of libraries (on

various computing systems) to different software programs including Python, Java,

and JavaScript.

Core Competencies

 The company created its own program that was able to emulate human brain

regarding pattern recognition and intelligent solutions for big data.

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 A program for GRiDTask laptop of GRiD Company was also developed by Grok’s

founder Jeff Hawkins.

 Minimum response time of HTM software applications

Business Functional Areas

Management

GROK made an alliance with Donna Dubinsky in order to establish an enterprise named

Handsprings through which enough revenue was generated for the production of Handspring

Visor. On the other hand, the employee turnover rate of GROK is considerably high which

may affect the overall revenue generation of the company

Recommendation

The invention of Handspring Visor reveals that GROK’s management strategies for making

alliances and partnerships to introduce new products in market is remarkable. This explains

how GROK has made its way through many challenges and competition offered by market

rivals. Despite of the various successful features of GROK’s management, it’s financial and

employee management is still at risk which can affect the overall market position of the

company in a negative way. The main challenge lies in recruiting professionals that have

exemplary talent and knowhow of technological environment and needs of IT market.

Employee commitment should be the main focus of GROK as the absence of this factor

triggers employee turnover.

Of course, not every turnover incident imparts a negative effect on company’s reputation and

revenue. This is an effective approach to get rid of unproductive employees as they could

affect the progress speed of the enterprise. However, when a trained and intelligent

professional leaves a company, it may directly affect many organizational operations. GROK
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needs to earn employee commitment through employee satisfaction. Employee satisfaction

can be earned through incentives, flexible corporate environment, and learning opportunities.

GROK must introduce policies for all the employees which contain the goals and action plan

for all the employees. The key to reduce the turnover rate and reducing costs is to develop a

skillful management team that is able to resolve organizational problems. GROK’s field of

business requires highly professional officials and this business model may turn into

increased expenses. However, providing its employees with an acceptable and flexible

environment may reduce the expenses of employee turnover. Moreover, GROK should also

focus on hiring newer and fresher talent as young engineers and IT specialists have the

potential to explore new avenues of IT and software. The company can also train these young

specialists according to its business model so that corporate commitment and reduced

turnover could be achieved.

Marketing

The marketing aspect of GROK is strong at least as far as its major product HTM is

concerned. The company’s founder always explains that HTM is better than Artificial

Intelligence and Machine Learning due to the fact that HTM has the capability to think like

human brain and enhance its capability according to the provided data. HTM has the

capability to analyze fast data with more accuracy than AI (Arthaud-Day and Rothaermel,

2014). The HTM technology developed by GROK is used by various companies from various

sectors such as banking, health care, engineering, and defense (Ahmad and Hawkins, 2015).

Recommendation

Along with other organizational functions, marketing also plays a key role in ensuring

success and growth for a company especially in todays’ competitive environment.

Technology is evolving day by day which requires continuous innovation from entrepreneurs
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as well. GROK must also focus on aligning its marketing and sales strategy according to the

demand of the market. The market of IT management and data analytics is becoming

saturated as more talented minds are pooling in their efforts and resources to start a business

of their own. This may pose a threat to the demand of HTM in market and therefore it is

strongly recommended for GROK to develop strong advertisement strategies and enhance

their customer services in order to maintain their customer database.

Effective advertisement can be done through various platforms. Today, social media is

becoming a widely known and preferred platform for endorsement through which effective

communication among a company and its customers can be maintained. As GROK’s

customers are mostly other enterprises, it must endorse its products effectively through social

media and electronic media platforms, so that maximum companies could know its products

(Chang, 2016). Moreover, GROK should also keep track of its products when they are

dispatched to their customers. By doing so, the company will be able to notice any

shortcomings in the device/application while it is in use by the customer. These strategies can

help GROK to enhance its reliability and to increase customer’s trust in the company.

Finance and Accounting

GROK was sold to US Robotics in the year 1995, due to the shortage of resources while

launching Palm Pilot’s. The company was sold for 44 million dollars due to the very reason

of limited financial resources and ineffective financial accounting. The lack of finance for

product commercialization might result into the loss of competitive edge and the core

competencies of the company.

Recommendation
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GROK needs to focus on its finance and accounting department along with its production and

marketing department. The company needs to cut down its additional and unnecessary

expenses and must develop strategies through which resources are allocated according to the

priority of a task. As it has been mentioned earlier, staff recruitment is a challenging task for

the company as highly trained officials are required for building/managing sophisticated data

analytics software and applications. Moreover, the turnover percentage of employees is also

high in GROK which is an alarming situation and may affect its overall financial revenue.

GROK should train its employees and officials so that any shortcomings and gaps in effective

accounting and resource allocation can be mitigated (Chang, 2016).

The company, through its collaboration with Vitamin D, has developed a cost effective

toolkit which can work with webcams of computers and without any expensive technological

device. These strategies have enabled GROK to develop cost effective products and to earn a

respectable place in market. However, the company needs to be dependent on its own

resources so that a long term success could be achieved. There is a dire need of collaboration

among different departments within the company. Through collaborative efforts and an

environment in which information is shared and mutual decision are made, it becomes easy

for the finance and accounting department to analyze the resources being used and the exact

amount of financial resources that will be required in the future. Jeff Hawkins has always

made valuable partnerships and collaborations with different companies in order to build high

level software applications. By doing so, he made sure that the shortage of revenue and

resources don’t hold him back and he continues to develop newer and innovative projects

having a cutting edge market value. For a long-term sustainable financial status, the company

must finance its business through funds and loans. This requires risk adjusted strategies so

that threat of financial losses is minimized and capital for the firm could be raised to an

acceptable and required level (Chang, 2016).

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Business Ethics

Regarding the use of HTM software application, two patents are held by GROK: (a)

Hierarchical Computing and (b) Hierarchical-based system for identifying objects using

spatial and temporal patterns. The first pattern was granted in November 17, 2009 while the

second on November 24, 2009.

Recommendation

As it has been stated before, patents enjoyed by GROK are its most significant resources

which also make it unique from other software development companies. However, a

company must be aware of the long-term effects of its products (from an ethical point of

view) on the general public (Chang, 2016). Apart from limiting the use of HTM technology

to particular users, it is also very important for GROK to handle the data confidentiality of its

own customer base (enterprises using HTM). This will increase the reliability of the company

and more customers would want to select HTM over other intelligent data analytics and

network security systems.

It is the responsibility of GROK to make sure that the company buying their technology has

good intentions of deploying the technology and the company fulfills the standard code of

ethics for business. Within GROK as well, there must be a transparent environment among all

stakeholders and information must be shared with complete honesty. The company must

analyze its projects for their potential effects on networks as well as on society prior to the

launch. This strategy will help GROK to avoid any negative effects that their products might

impart because of rushing the new product in the market without proper analysis. An internal

code of ethics for GROK’s business is required which covers all important aspects of

business ethics such as openness, confidence, confidentiality, focus, and quality assurance

etc.
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Works Cited

Ahmad, Subutai, and Jeff Hawkins. "Properties of sparse distributed representations and their

application to hierarchical temporal memory." arXiv preprint arXiv:1503.07469 (2015).

Arthaud-Day, Marne L., and Frank T. Rothaermel. Grok (In 2013): Action Intelligence For

Fast Data. Harvard Business Publishing, 2014. Print.

Chang, James F. Business process management systems: strategy and implementation.

Auerbach Publications, 2016.