Within our present business, we are being many ‘transforming’ questions around technology. For instance, the cloud asks a lot of questions for us to determine and decide what ‘resides’ where, what stays inside, what can be dispersed out. Decisions we make will alter our performance ability and how we compete, how we connect and interact.
Are we smarter, can we download the software seamlessly, can we determine what data stays where? What is valuable, what is not, can we layer on increasingly complexity but at the same time strip away unnecessary activities or analytics?
Each of us is making tough technology-related decisions that will determine our abilities to evolve or simply fade away due to this set of evolutionary questions we are all facing.
Will a machine take over a certain role and who or what determines what is firstly valuable, to be sent to the cloud for deeper insight and ‘collective’ knowledge, what needs to remain local, what needs to be archived for those “just in case” (inevitable) moments? What and where does all the data reside?
We are required increasingly to collect ongoing, real-time data from all the extreme edges of our industrial world. From vehicles, ships, factory floors, machines, roadways, railways, hospitals and have back the ability to act in less than a second.
This means thousands and millions of connected devices across a global network all required to generate data to have to send back the ‘essential’ data to make a decision. The analysis of such data will be huge.
Now I am all for greater awareness and having a greater response to events if they reduce disasters or helps in downtime issues but to increase our agility, to respond at ever-increasing levels we do need all the artificial intelligence we can muster in this connected world, otherwise, our heads will explode, not simply stay in this fog.
Is this “managing in the cloud” such a new paradigm we must follow (like lemmings) I am wondering about. Somebody help me, push me over the edge or tell me to hold back. Seemingly we are all caught in some critical decisions for our future business.
Fogging, Clouds, and Connected devices.
As we fill our lives with more sensors are we being sensible or just ensure we are shifting complexity yet again. I really think the business case, not the business ‘hype’ should be evaluated a whole lot harder, knowing what data needs to reside where.
Will the data all reside in some far off cloud and should it? Or caught up in some local fogging solution and then perhaps we do not have this utopian world of all our devices exchanging data across connected industry or society as we stay caught up in limited bandwidth and data communication protocol constraints.
Managing the reality, battling the hype.
I like the sound of an open, connected world. I like the concept of platforms and ecosystems that are all combining into the new alternative so we can explore and exchange so we achieve greater innovation, but is the rhetoric so far ahead of the reality?
We do face these tough choices and they are actually ‘life-threatening’ to a business. Are we that aware of what this all means or do the majority just leave these decisions to ‘the few’ blissfully unaware of what these decisions actually mean. We all need to raise our game in technology understanding, it is becoming a very extreme sport full of those edges that you need to overcome to emerge a future winner.
