by Gary Mintchell | Dec 17, 2015 | Internet of Things, Operations Management
Dell’s Jason Shepherd, Director of IoT Strategy and Partnerships, recently discussed his ideas for 2016 predictions in Internet of Things with me.
I’ve never been one for year-end recaps or a “listicle” prediction piece that merely is a blatant attempt for page views. This page gets plenty of views through providing thoughtful information.
But we had a great conversation about what’s happening in the space I like to call the “Industrial Internet of Things Ecosystem.” Following are some thoughts we tossed back and forth.
Edge analytics
Our control systems architecture has been moving from centralized control to control at the edge (slowly) for many years. Meanwhile enterprise information architecture has been figuring out how to tap into all that information locked in the control system. However, much information can mean large bandwidth.
Both problems are solved through edge analytics. Let’s just place intelligent devices out on the edge. If they are required for control, great. But they have information crucial to today’s applications driving real-time decision-making. Let’s use intelligence at the edge to filter through the data and just send important information through the network to the enterprise or plant services bus.
Edge analytics–a key benefit accruing from the Internet of Things ecosystem.
Standards
There are no general or predominant standards, but there do exist a number of standards that contribute to the overall ecosystem. Some are official standards and others are de facto, but if they are in general use, then it moves the application along.
Jason mentioned the Open Interconnect Consortium and the Industrial Internet Consortium, which is running several IIoT test beds. I mentioned the Open Fog Consortium earlier this week.
A couple of standards within production and manufacturing that will bear fruit this year which we did not discuss include OPC UA, which is a data movement enabling technology, and MIMOSA, which will become more widely known as a center for standards for interoperability from design to construction to operations & maintenance.
One problem remains that there are hundreds of IoT platforms which could be likened to “death by 1,000 paper cuts.”
2016 IoT Predictions
These are Jason’s 2016 predictions. I’ve been watching trends and would have to agree with them for the most part.
- Enterprise will become the largest market for IoT adoption—While the Internet of Things hype reached its peak in the consumer markets this past year, 2016 will be the year of IoT in the enterprise market. Currently, we are seeing a slump in sales for the once buzzworthy, consumer IoT devices, such as fitness trackers, whereas just the opposite is happening for commercial IoT products. As companies begin understanding the value of IoT (return on investments, efficiency, productivity, etc.), commercial IoT solutions will gain traction and the enterprise will emerge as the largest market for IoT adoption.
- Standardization and interoperability of IoT technology will become a focal point—As IoT solutions become a mainstay for enterprises and consumers alike, the industry will face growing pressure for standardization and interoperability. As a result, an increasing number of industry players will begin uniting under the common goal of establishing a set of standards for IoT. These standards bodies and consortiums will make solid progress in 2016 but it is unlikely they will decide upon a finalized set of standards in the coming year. Rather, 2016 will be a year for critical industry-wide conversation that will help to drive the awareness of and need for standardization and interoperability.
- Massive amounts of big data will drive the need for edge analytics—Gartner recently forecasted that there will be 6.4 billion connected things used worldwide in 2016. This explosion of connected devices also means an equally explosive amount of Big Data that needs to be collected, analyzed and stored. While an increased amount of data drove the need for edge analytics in 2015, next year we will begin to see stream analytics come into play and new players emerge in an effort to manage the rapidly expanding amounts of data.
- Security threats will rise, creating a larger need to identify and implement strong security practices—As the amount of connected devices rises, so too will the potential for security threats and breaches. To ensure that organizations receive the strongest security practices possible, we will see the emergence of security models based on use cases and new technologies to address the key challenges at the edge. Unlike the trend with consumer IoT, which stresses quick time-to-market over security measures, organizations providing commercial IoT solutions will need to find a balance that offers solutions that are both easy to adopt without sacrificing security.
- Companies will witness the emergence of a new role – the Chief IoT Officer—Similar to how the alignment of the CIO and CMO helped manage the crossover between IT and marketing, in 2016 companies will experience growing pressure to bridge the gap between Operations and IT sides of its organization. To respond to this pressure, organizations will witness the emergence of a new role – the Chief IoT Officer. With the conception of this new role, companies will be able to realize the full potential of IoT. As IoT hits full stride in 2016, organizations that embrace IoT will thrive and those that do not will be left behind.
by Gary Mintchell | Dec 16, 2015 | Operations Management
Two of my favorite thought leaders in the operations management space have been thinking about enterprise applications, ISA 95, and management. Of course I’m referring to Tim Sowell and Stan Devries of Schneider Electric Software (Wonderware).
It’s interesting that these thoughts come when the email reflector for the ISA 95 committee is really heating up with some of the best discussion I’ve seen in years.
Sowell nails the ultimate problem:
For the last couple of weeks Stan and I have been working with a number of leading companies in Oil and Gas, Mining, and F & B around their Operational Landscape or experience of the future.
Too often the conversations start off from a technology point, and we spend the initial couple of days trying to swing the conversation to the way in which they need to operate in the future and what their plans are around operations.
It becomes clear very quickly that there is a lot of good intent, but real thought into how they need to operate in order to meet production expectations both in products and margin has not been worked through.
Thinking about and discussing technology only leads only to futile intellectual exercise (unless you are a technology developer), to quote another smart person, “Full of sound and fury, yet signifying nothing.”
Devries had begun the discussion showing how using ISA-95 and TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework) together becomes a powerful model for understanding operations.
TOGAF Model
ISA-95 is the strongest standard for operations management interoperability, and its focus is on data and its metadata. ISA-95 continues to evolve, and recent enhancements address the needs of interoperability among many applications, especially at Level 3 (between process control and enterprise software systems). One way to summarize ISA-95’s focus is on business and information architectures.
TOGAF is the strongest standard for enterprise architecture. One way to summarize TOGAF’s focus is on business architecture, information architecture, systems/application architecture and technology architectures. When considered with this perspective, ISA-95 becomes the best expression of the data architecture within TOGAF, and ISA-95 becomes the best expression of portions of the business architecture. Central to the TOGAF standard is an architecture development method (ADM), which encourages stakeholders and architects to consider the users and their interactions with the architecture before considering the required data.
To drive this thinking toward action, Sowell notes, “Over and over again we see the need for faster decisions, in a changing agile world, and this requires an ‘understanding of the future’ this maybe only 1/2 hour. It is clear that modeling of future is not just something for the planner, it is will become a native part of all operational systems.”
Does this issue require forecasting or predicting? Devries answers:
- At this stage, we propose a definition of “forecasting”: a future trend which is a series of pairs of information, where the pairs include a value and a time. The accuracy of the values will be poorer as the time increases, but the direction of the trend (trending down or up, or cycling) and the values in the near future are sufficiently useful.
- In contrast, “predicting” is an estimate that a recognized event will likely happen in the future, but the timing is uncertain. This is useful for understanding “imminent” failures.
People tell me that the most important application for the Industrial Internet of Things is predictive maintenance. GE sells that with its jet engines. Companies whose production requires huge, expensive assets are seriously implementing it.
Sowell and Devries take us the step beyond into operations management as well as maintenance.
This is important for manufacturers and producers to digest.
by Gary Mintchell | Dec 14, 2015 | Productivity
Personal productivity isn’t the focus of my writing. It’s industrial technology and strategies, of course. But finding and using personal productivity tips and processes underlie how I can accomplish so much in my life–from writing two blogs, leading a church ministry, leading a number of soccer referee tasks, do marketing for an investment I’ve made, and probably more.
I cannot remember how I met Hassan Osman of Cisco, but we correspond occasionally. He has written a great little e-book, ““.
Updated Information
From Hassan:
It’s listed at the lowest possible price ($0.99), and I’m donating ALL profits for sales through Friday Dec 18 to charity. I’m super excited because I’ve never done a launch like this before. The charity I chose is “Save the Children,” an international NGO that helps children all around the world, including the US. My company (Cisco Systems) is matching my donation dollar for dollar, which is awesome.
The amount of money I make per book is not much (my cut is 35%, which means for every book I sell, I only make around 35 cents). However, every cent counts for a child in need. Also, “design A” won for the book cover (thanks to all who voted), so I went with that. Click on one of the following links to check out the book: USA, UK, Canada, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Netherlands, Japan, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, and India.
This is a valuable little book. I highly recommend it both for productivity and for getting along with people. Of course, the “reply all” is one of my pet peeves. “Email chains” drive me freaking crazy. That could have been emphasized more. I think he hit in #9 (Tactic #9: Present Options Instead of Asking Open -Ended Questions). The first 5 would be my first 5. I’ve used the saved draft as a template for several tasks over the years. Then the time zone thing is crucial. I live in western Ohio. East coast people think I’m in Central time zone. West coast people haven’t a clue. (I’m Eastern) I am forever re-confirming teleconference times. Buy it, digest it, use it to enhance your email experience.
No TL;DR helps personal productivity
In #3, he addresses TL;DR–too long, didn’t read. I see this in emails and also blog posts. Paragraphs are too long. There’s too much unbroken text. This is a tip for better personal productivity for both sender and recipient.
Email is not going away. But I propose thinking of it much like texting rather than report writing. Attach reports. Just stick to basic facts or information in the body of the email.
Oh, and remind me to do the same.
by Gary Mintchell | Dec 14, 2015 | Automation, Workforce
John Bernaden recently retired as Director of Corporate Communications at Rockwell Automation and vice-chairman of the Smart Manufacturing Leadership Coalition. He’s still keeping his mind active in the manufacturing space. Here is a piece on LinkedIn on automation and jobs and robots with a whimsical title. Check out the comments (one by me).
Add your comments there or here.
I have written a few pieces on this topic myself: here, here, and here.
John tends to like Andrew McAfee, whom he got to speak at a session once. McAfee is OK, but he gets pessimistic and then the only way he can see out of his box is to start talking something akin to socialism–government hiring or something.
Demographic trends favor robots
Other things I have bee reading and listening to suggest that we are coming to a shortage of workers (check demographic trends) and the need to care for an increasingly elderly population–therefore we’ll really need robots and other automation.
I also believe that the human spirit is one of endeavor. We will make work. There could be an entirely different economy coming–maybe more knowledge work on one end and more craft work on the other. Even now we have a need for craftsmen in a variety of trades.
by Gary Mintchell | Dec 11, 2015 | Automation, Internet of Things, Networking, Operations Management, Software, Technology
National Instruments is a company started by technologists and continues to this day as a company full of technologists–many studying industrial networking and engineering software. They really watch new technologies and watch for trends. The past couple of years the company has been issuing a “Trend Watch” document.
Two items in the 2016 Trend Watch piqued my interest, so I was able to talk with Jeffrey Phillips, Section Manager, Software Platform Marketing, and Nick Butler, Sr. Group Manager, Embedded Systems Product Marketing, to flesh out the two trends and what they mean in the area I cover–Consumerization of Software and Standardization of Networks for Internet of Things.
Consumerization of Software
The idea behind the “consumerization of software” trend is an expansion of things we’ve seen building for years–new engineers are coming into the marketplace with far different experiences interacting with technology than us old guys. I still like text. I started out with BASIC, C, scripts, Java–text things. Ladder Diagram is a visual “language” and I found it arcane and difficult to work with.
Think about toda
y’s engineers. We pretty much learned one language at a time and specialized. Today, graduates move fluidly among several language. But their experience is with touch and graphic interfaces.
So?
NI Software Trend Description
Engineering software users of the past typically graduated from a university with an understanding of one programming language. Some were even experienced users who demanded exposure to the darkest corners of programming, with custom memory calls, from-scratch multithreading commands, and hand-optimized performance demands. Software was hard and unapproachable to those who dared to enter without proper training and previous exposure.
And just like that, things started to change. First, graduating engineers were required to have a broad skillset of programming languages to tackle the challenges handed to them in the workplace. Like a trained warrior switching from sword to axe to bow, today’s engineer can jump in and out of Python, C#, HTML, JavaScript, LabVIEW, and Swift. This puts an unprecedented demand on approachability and removes the expectation of expertise. Today’s engineer expects to use multiple tools for any given application.
Secondly, the cost of accessing and acquiring data has rapidly decreased while the need for data has risen. And as technology has become more connected, the cost of processors has declined. According to DataBeans, the price of a processor decreased over 30 percent between 2011 and 2015. This has accelerated the need for highly approachable software by introducing more “nontraditional” programmers to the worlds of robotics, home automation, and even general data acquisition and analysis. Likewise, cultural trends like the Maker Movement and the emergence of consumer product start-ups being acquired for unreal amounts of money further illustrate this shift.
An Inevitable Convergence
For engineers, who are defined by the pride of conquering complex challenges, this confluence of usability and technical sophistication couldn’t come at a better time. No longer tethered and bogged down by the intricate details of multiple languages, tools, and approaches (like writing an actor framework), they can now refocus on engineering’s most grand and impactful challenges (like 5G research and the IoT). In this new tightly integrated future, engineers can find better, faster ways from point A to point B instead of spending their time making better maps.
Likewise, this convergence means that engineers can embrace a future in which they aren’t sole proprietors of innovation. With software that is (gasp) easy to use, the rest of the world is catching up. And by acknowledging the prevalence of simplicity and beauty in software of all stripes, more and more smart people will play meaningful roles in major problem solving.
Standardized industrial networking for IoT
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) promises a world of smarter, hyper-connected devices and infrastructure where electrical grids, manufacturing machines, and transportation systems are outfitted with embedded sensing, processing, control, and analysis capabilities.
NI technologists are evaluating (and working on the standard) a new standard for Ethernet networking. Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) will evolve Ethernet to provide reliable, remote, and secure access to smart edge devices. One key aspect is the development of edge devices that can combine local control and information filtering such that only important data are transmitted rather than the flood of all data.
From the Trend Watch paper an explanation of TSN:
TSN: The Time is Now
Industrial suppliers, IT vendors, and silicon providers are collaborating within IEEE 802 and the recently formed AVnu Alliance to update standard Ethernet protocols and provide bounded, low-latency data transfer for time-critical data in IIoT applications.
The AVnu Alliance, working with companies such as Broadcom, Cisco, Intel, and NI, will drive the creation of an interoperable ecosystem through certification, similar to how the Wi-Fi Alliance certifies products and devices to be compatible with the IEEE 802.11 standard. The new TSN standard will provide numerous benefits, including the following:
Bandwidth—Large data sets from advanced sensing applications such as machine vision, 3D scanning, and power analysis can put a strain on network bandwidth. Proprietary Ethernet derivatives commonly used for industrial control today are limited to 100 Mb of bandwidth and half-duplex communication. TSN will embrace standard Ethernet rates and support full-duplex communication.
Security—TSN protects critical control traffic and incorporates top-tier IT security provisions, while segmentation, performance protection, and temporal composability can add multiple levels of defense to the security framework.
Interoperability—By using standard Ethernet components, TSN can integrate with existing brownfield applications and standard IT traffic to improve ease of use. TSN inherits many features of existing Ethernet, such as HTTP interfaces and web services, which enable the remote diagnostics, visualization, and repair features common in IIoT systems. As an added benefit, leveraging standard Ethernet chipsets drives component cost down by virtue of high-volume, commercial silicon.
Latency and Synchronization—TSN prioritizes the low-latency communication required for fast system response and closed-loop control applications. It can achieve deterministic transfer times on the order of tens of microseconds and time synchronization between nodes down to tens of nanoseconds. To ensure reliable delivery of this time-critical traffic, TSN provides automated configurations for high-reliability data paths, where packets are duplicated and merged to provide lossless path redundancy.
