Internet of Things: Have we been doing this for 25 years?

Recently I had the privilege to be invited to speak at the Emerson Process Management annual users conference in Denver. Before my scheduled presentation times, I walked about and met with many engineers and practitioners. With each person I met, I would describe my main purpose for attending the conference and recite the abstract of my presentation called "How the Industrial Internet of Things is Changing Operations". Some were puzzled at my choice of the subject while many others simply stated what seemed to be obvious - "the Internet of Things, we've been doing that for 25 years".

What seemed to be an odd response, caused me to think maybe I was presenting some very old news.  Later the reference becomes more obvious when I discovered Peter Zornio Chief Strategic Officer with Emerson had written about this in Forbes.com. The full article is written very well, worth a read and can be found here - Forbes. Peter describes how the development of microprocessors and networked instrumentation has enabled process industries to make processes more reliable, efficient and safe. However, at the essence of this was the integration of very large amounts of data to support decision making. For Emerson, the ultimate decision-making customer is the Plant Operator. Emerson also describes IoT as Pervasive Sensing" Here, which is based on wireless process sensing and instrumentation.

After my discovery of Emerson's view "we've been doing IoT", I began to rethink the fundamentals of ARC's Industrial Internet of Things model. In my conclusion, Emerson may be correct, but only from the perspective of the plant Operator. In ARC's view of IIoT, benefits extend far beyond the reach and scope of the process operator. The Operator is extremely valuable from a safety and process efficiency perspective, but IIoT does so much more.

IIoT is about digital transformation and the ability to collect data from just about anything and speeds of extremely high frequency. This ability combined with practically free storage in the cloud with service providers like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services,  almost any and all work processes may be transformed by every worker or staff that supports a manufacturing operation or physical process.

ARC research shows IIoT is about the creation of new service models or refined work processes. It is about new production techniques, new partners and new worker expectations and employee engagement.

In summary, maybe we have not really been doing IoT for 25 years, but instead the process industries are on the cusp of something very big and game-changing. (Note: This last paragraph has been edited to clarify my position on IoT.)