2013 will see another leap in the amount of people, and different roles, accessing industrial data, and there will be another quantum leap in the amount of data people accessing. The concept of Self Reliance and Self Servicing of the user to empower himself will be key!
“Self-service BI is the idea that any business user can analyze the data they need to make a better decision. Self-reliance is the coming of age of that concept: it means business users have access to the right data that the data is in a place and format that they can use and that they have solutions that enable self-service analytics. When all this happens, people become self-reliant with their business questions and IT can focus on providing the secure data and solutions to get them there.”
“Source Top 10 Business Intelligence Trend for 2013” Tableau software
I have spent a number of hours this week discussing this concept and determining in the industrial sector how to make this a reality as we believe it is key to unlocking the full potential of the industrial landscape.
“Self service is the practice of serving oneself, usually when purchasing items, examples self service gas stations, and ATMs which have transformed banking.” Wikipedia
Self Reliance is a concept from the 1830s
“To accomplish one’s assigned task in an independent, resourceful, self-sufficient manner; to do one’s job without making a fuss. Reliance on one's own capabilities, judgment, or resources; independence.”Wikipedia
Both these concepts align with the “what If and “why not” culture where information is presented to ask questions, make decisions. Key is trusted information that is effective for decisions. No longer can people request a report, they must have the ability to access, browse and navigate an information model that abstracts the industrial data source landscape, ask questions as they see fit, answers returned in a format that can be review for further analysis.
So in the industrial/operational world we will see a significant shift towards “operational” analysis, the ability to ask and search answers by asking questions like in “google” but with graphical/ process analysis feedback in narrower time span of interest. This is different to a printable report or dashboard due to the requirement for discovery, investigation mode. Users understand the basic relationships, but are looking for patterns. The plant data landscape is a “lake of unstructured, related data” that needs to be in context, and trusted, often abstracted from the traditional data source like a historian, alarm DB, or batch database. More and more tools will be introduced to help in determining “pattern recognition” through the use of complex event analysis, and “Big Data” tools and concepts will be adopted. Already tools like the “Overview” capability in the latest Release of Wonderware Information Server (released dec 2012) provides a new paradigm in process analysis out of the box across multiple data sources.
Why is operational information relevant vs reporting, it comes down to 2 factors:·
· More people needing access to real time data to make decisions and the majority of these people do not understand the automation layer, naming and model.
· The Dynamic, and speed of decisions is critical to success time analysis and the decision is shorter while the breadth of information and responsibility increases.
The day of requesting and waiting for reports is over, the role of reports is reducing significantly. We are use to the internet, using “Search”, “Wikipedia” to ask and investigate, so why not for the Industrial information, it can no longer be isolated and difficult!
No comments:
Post a Comment