IIoT is like the digital camera on your phone

Jonas Berge's excellent article in Control Engineering Asia http://www.ceasiamag.com/article/instrumental-to-success/11137 caught my attention right from the start when he drew a comparison from IIoT to the digital camera on the phone in your pocket.  He made the point that even though photography has been around for many decades, the way we use those captured images is now vastly different.  We no longer eventually get prints made and paste them in albums, then rarely look at them.   We use those images every day - to remind us where we parked the car, to make sure we buy the right part from the hardware store, help find a store at the mall, to save the serial number of a new gadget we are registering online, to remember to buy the right brand of cereal at the grocery store, or to share our mood with friends. 

We use the digital information in ways we never imagined. 

Jonas' point is that digital technology is also transforming how work is done in plants. "Plants are now made smarter by instrumenting and digitally integrating assets to make our work easier."  His article looks at how remote monitoring services can augment the value of instrumenting assets. 

It seems to me that we are at a similar point in the adoption of IIoT technologies.  Our inability to envision the emerging digitized environment in action leads us to think linearly about a set of disruptive technologies that will transform the industrial space in many unforeseen ways.  Our starting point is, 'Haven't we already done something like this?'  The answer is no. 

Think again about the digital camera on your phone.  It's not just the fact that it produces a digital image that makes it so much more powerful.  It is mobile and omnipresent.  It is networked.  It has metadata.  It is available to apps.  It lives in the cloud.  All of these add new dimensions to the potential value of the image.  The same will be true for smart industrial plants. 

Be sure to check out Jonas' article, which is not really about digital cameras.  He makes many great points about instrumenting and remotely monitoring plant assets.   I plan to reference it again in a future post. 

Posted in IIoT and I4.0 Viewpoints