IoT – the Information of Everything
For the first time in history, we are witnessing a massive disruption and the phenomenal adoption of getting everything connected and talking to each other, writes Subramanian Hariharan, a senior director at Mindtree.
This is increasingly becoming part of the Internet of Things (IoT) and resulting in a big bang effect; creating a massive digital fabric of things that is rapidly expanding. Every city, every business, every building, machine, people, processes etc., is rapidly emitting and communicating enormous amounts of data that are beyond human comprehension.
Using this Information of Everything from the past, present and the future, we need to get into the realm of adaptable digital algorithms, deep analytics, machine learning, cognitive computing, artificial intelligence, bots and robots, in order to unlock the data and identify meaningful contextual information that provides strategic value and business sense.
Over the last few decades, technology has enabled us to connect with physical things around us, collect data and made sense of it through custom built systems and software. From chip vendors, to sensor makers, to connectivity providers, machine manufacturers and beyond, different industries have tried to link together various interpretations and created their own individual marketplace siloes. In the process, we have created a plethora of methods and protocols for collecting data, and have gathered a vast majority of it that is stored across a number of different data centres, cloud, data lakes, as well as highlighting multiple copies that appear in more than one location, for disaster recovery purposes. This is an ongoing process as data is continuously being created in huge velocities and often with operational nightmares and management overheads.
The challenge is identifying how to connect all the data together, recognise relationships between it, generate insightful information and harness the potential of this information, which all ties in with knowing what data and information should be processed and stored or discarded. Addressing this will help various industries benefit from the real value of the Information of Everything and to make their operations more efficient, provide better customer experience, increase profits and also make them dynamically adapt to changing business environments.
To achieve the true potential, companies need to take a holistic view of the business landscape with their desired outcome in mind, ensuring they don’t limit their view with only one solution, tool or a technology platform. Narrowing them down to addressable groups, companies need to look at an ecosystems of solutions brought together from various scientific advancements from complex, embedded analytics not just factual data. It is also important to forecast for the short term based on past and presently available data sets, as well as predictive analysis for the longer term based on additional layers with predictive algorithms, which can be adapted based on different data sets and patterns.
In addition to analytics, which is an advancement from the data domain, there comes another area of advancement in science that looks to make a system or machine learning from the behaviour of its operation, as well as build a dynamic mathematical model that constantly gets enhanced over a period of time and over new patterns of operation. Even further, the advancement then evolves as it includes learning techniques that train the machine to learn in a similar fashion to that of human beings; combining data mining, process natural languages, vision and recognise patterns of information, etc., all to create contextual information. Eventually all these learnings will result in the ability to create artificial intelligence that enable machines to think and take action based on various scenarios that they go through.
The emergence of Information of Everything, with all the various advancements across different fields, poses a great opportunity for exponential growth and also poses a great threat to business existence as competition and new age companies are transforming the marketplace. Traditional operations and business models are fast becoming archaic and disappearing quickly. Almost every industry is going through a phase of disruption and, to stay ahead of the game, executives need to rethink and redesign the approach to technology adoption and investments.