Insight from the Innovation Symposium
at Harvard University on the Intelligent Enterprise.
The most forward leaning customers,
those that are leading the industry,
that are making the biggest, boldest moves first
are the ones that are going after targeted use cases.
Building those out end-to-end across that stack of sense, analyze, act.
Deploying that, getting return on investment from it,
then kind of boot strapping that investment back into the next solution that they deploy.
So, it's really not so much about infrastructure or capability IT infrastructure
required on premise or in the cloud for that matter.
It's more embracing the notion that workflows can be improved
if new data can be discovered.
And then just jumping with both feet to go and make that happen on a use case by use case basis.
You know I see more and more of this RFID technology really running a plant.
Not necessarily moving it, but moving the data.
You make decisions on data now,
you don't make decisions on data that happened yesterday.
What I see is IoT and IoT powered machine learning
actually making our jobs that much less stressful
so that the data we have actually matches our expectations and reality
or in the cases when our expectations don't match reality,
we have the information that can allow us to understand how to bridge the gap.
Data is an important characteristic,
but there's a layer above that which is knowledge.
Right? So it's not enough to become data driven,
we need to become knowledge driven, or science driven.
Whatever euphemism you want to use.
And so I think that these new technologies or approaches or methodologies
they are allowing us to get deeper into the problems
then we had been able to do just a few years ago.
The technology has been out there for years,
but getting the people to adapt, to use the technology, is the struggle.
But once we show it and have the proof concept, the proof that it works,
it's more quickly accepted and more people want to learn more about it.
So often I think in academia, and rightfully so,
we're very much focused on our problem and the technology
and less so concerned about the actual applications
or the value of this in a real-world context.
And I think our lab at least, Senseable City Lab,
we are very applied in what we do,
but we're still within that academic framework.
And so it was really nice to be able to talk to people from industry,
who just in a two minute conversation,
just had a completely different vision for what underworlds could be
and that was, I think for me, really valuable insight to have.
Amazon or FedEx is another classic example
of putting information in the hands of users.
Where is this package?
And turning an openness and exposure, not into a liability,
but turning out that being open and transparent generates a lot of trust
and an increase in business.
So relative to just twelve months ago,
you know we see an incredible pull.
And I've been saying this for awhile,
just over the last twelve to eighteen months
this has become much less of a push message around Intelligent Enterprise
and Enterprise Asset Intelligence and much more of customers saying
I need to run my operations in real-time, I need continuous flow of data,
I need to understand what's happening at the edge of my operations,
and I need to be able to use that information in an insightful way
to provide better experiences.
The area that's really hit me is the human element.
And whenever we look at these Internet of Things
kind of systems, the human element is key.
And one thing that came out, probably at the starting point is,
where is the vision for this technology,
could you get overwhelmed with the data and the sensors and the hardware and software?
But what are we really trying to accomplish?
What's the vision, what's really disruptive and changing
in the industries that we can apply this technology?
Our message, our thinking and our call to action
with our customers and here at the Innovation Symposium is to embrace that.
Think first about how you need to change your workflows in order to benefit from all the data
that the Intelligent Enterprise is going to provide to you.