I had an an editor speak to me this week about “the shift to
Multi Plant view across the industrial landscape, then he mentioned cloud is a
dream in Industry”. Quickly correcting him that it should not be a shift to
multi plant view versus an expansion on top of the existing local/ remote
operational view, and “cloud” is truly real especially with virtual teams, and
multi site. This confusion is common at the moment with some vendors and consultants
pushing the Enterprise Historian view that really focuses on only one
perpective in operations, that of the analyst performance team. That does not
mean there is a swing to a new architecture, the architecture must support at
least the two communities of interest with different views:
- Operational day to day teams:
requiring a view focused on limited time span e.g.| 7 days and view one
process or plant
- Planning, Management,
Performance / optimization teams and expert support teams : wants to look at
broader view across sites, and broader time span of months and years
usually offline for analysis, and strategic thinking.
The expansion to holistic view will also push the debate of
the industrial architecture, to a combination of:
- On Premise computing: The local
plants with real time needs and short time spans will often have the
required information and capability local on premise. This can apply also
apply in a remote operational center infrastructure which is still local
to the remote site, or on the site and just virtualized to the center.
- Off Premise computing: The shifting
of data, analysis, and actions to an off premise computing, either
specialised data center, or “cloud” etc, private or public, freeing up the
local operational day to day infrastructure from this heavily lifting. Providing
also the ideal opportunity merge and consolidate a view and capability
across the industrial landscape of a company, this will involve storage,
but also realtime model of the production, and operational awareness
activities across the different teams.
In the blog on 2020 the following characteristics were
expected:
· One in three
employees will be working casual, part-time or project base vs career in a
company.
· The average
tenure in a job / role will be 2.4 years
· One in four
workers will be working remotely and virtually.
The ability to see information and data in a near realtime,
view according to my focus is key no matter what current device or location being
used. The ability to connect, collaborate and share advice is key to decisions
in the now and the ability share knowledge when the average experience in a
role will be less than 2 years The holistic view will drive many parts of the architecture
“off premise” into a managed service.
Three times in a week one in mining two in food, from
companies across the world, I was asked to comment on an “End to End” view of
information, and especially state. One for operational effectiveness and
agility, the other for reduction in delayed time in achieving a “positive
release” of products to customers. In both cases the company IT and thought
leaders raised both “cloud” and “big data “ techniques. As I mentioned last
week, the acceleration in acceptance of these technologies is astounding in the
last 6 months.
The mixed reaction to last week blog many agreeing, many
debating the reality, but for the second camp, I think they unaware of cost,
technology updates, and the expectation of the new generation for doing things
fast. Also, there is a shift to be able to buy this holistic capability as services vs total up front.
I fundamentally believe that, within 2, years, we
will laugh at this debate of “on premise” vs “off premise” in the industrial
landscape, the modern aligned and agile business will have an industrial/ operational architecture that
naturally applies both On and Off premise computing. “On premise” computing
reducing to “only required data/ computing to satisfy the limited operational time
span, e.g.| 7days even shorter” everything else will be “off premise”. The
landscapes will enable users to view content device independent and across the
landscape, but drilling to a plant and process, collaborating across the
virtual team from site to corporate to worldwide experts.
Certainly
over the next 2 years the expansion in Invensys’s portfolio capability spanning local to enterprise landscape, and
include both “on premise” and “off premise” as well as managed services as not
a specialty but a natural way to grow value from your systems.