Sorry for missing last week, time seems short when on the
road with short flights.
As I fly the final leg home after a month on the road many
brainstorming multi day workshops around different strategic thinking, but
without a doubt the “Internet of Things’ applied in industrial/ manufacturing
space brought up many ideas and many questions.
Certainly the discussion of “Cloud” vs “Internet of things” is
it about getting to data from all types of devices and making that more
available? Certainly that is one case, but certainly it is not a compelling case.
The “Internet of things” is about self-configuring devices,
these could instruments, motors trucks, and mobile devices, fixed and roaming
devices. Too many of you the IOT definition I believed was clear, but the
workshops showed the confusion between taking and existing industrial
application to the “Cloud” connecting through safe but tradition device
integration paradigms, vs an interactive “self-configuring” environment of
devices and systems, that is a new device integration, management paradigm.
Also, it is important to note it is not just about gathering
data from devices to the cloud, and exposing it, the real opportunity comes in
the interaction between devices, that the environment make the devices “self-aware”
and able to interact. A natural example is that mobile devices of a roaming
user is interacting with the other devices in the immediate area. Enabling interacting,
and constant awareness and warnings of the current environment state, relative
to a stability, and safety. Combine this with ever increasing transformation to
managing Operational work vs monitoring, where the “work” or “activity” includes
the information, action in the context of “activity”.
The fact that a device is now “self-configuring”, so you can
from an IOT system “discover” the devices out there and configure the
co-ordination system in the cloud, making other systems aware of them. This is a
clear case for segments that are physically distributed such as cities,
airports, upstream gas fields, mining, pipelines etc. Where the cost of
aligning the devices has been too expensive, now with wireless but even more 4G
networks like we seeing in the remote “Pilbara” region on Western Australia, the
opportunity for plug and play devices that are “edge/ GPRS” enabled, and IOT
enabled can be discovered, configured and aligned. As devices are swapped in
and out no matter site the size, the configuration moves from an instrumentation
job to anyone. This frictionless experience is key in configuration/ and sustaining.
The increased speed of systems, decisions and agility required drives up
complexity of systems, but this cannot drive up lifecycle cost, and this can
only go away through Self Configuration, enablement of anyone to enable the
system to run, this become clear as the key requirement of the IOT.
The chart below shows the expected industry segments to
adopt, many are well engaged.
But
why is there a slow take up, mainly I believe to unawareness, lack of
understanding, and readiness? But this is changing, the IOT platforms are
coming on to the market that will drive down the cost of achieving IOT, but it
will still be a journey. The diagram below shows from one of the workshops the
key challenges in adoption, I expect these to fall away fast over the next 2 to
3 years. I cannot see how we going achieve the agility, with the dynamic
market, operational workforce at a sustainable cost that is reasonable without
this paradigm shift, to IOT as interactive landscape. In the many sessions I
held with end users, engineers and people across the company and industry, the
real initial opportunity is not in the big plants it is in the “collaborative Industrial
Landscape” of small plants and assets aligning with people and processes.
Certainly the interest, like cloud is growing, and the infrastructure is maturing that this will be reality in helping to addressing the modern industrial landscape challengers in a very different landscape than we had in 90s, 2000s, and 2010s, I will discuss more on this fundamental event next week.
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