The view is echoed in many respects by Hugh John of Accenture, who believes that after the Internet and the Web, hugely enhanced mobility and cloud and other major tech advances we are now embarked on a new era which involves the digitisation of everything. “A lot of it began in the last decade, when we developed smart M2M — on the factory floor, for example — and used the Internet in part for the communications. The digital mesh idea is all of that accelerated, consumerised and becoming more and more pervasive. It is also powered by much more than sensors. It is the gathering of data that has the value, combined with modern analytics and even by artificial intelligence, all of which is at an early stage but is potentially transformational.”
Business models
It is also giving rise to many new business models, John said. “If you land in Spain, Google maps will tell you anything you want to know about your surroundings, directions or whatever. Other types of mobile apps can have PayPal embedded for payments, so you have multiple online services joined up for better service delivery. That in turn raises questions around privacy and transparency — the consumer wants control of personal data and also transparency as to how it is used.
“Because it’s all about the data in so many ways. That’s what the services are founded on. A good example of the dilemma is health data. Say you use a smart watch to monitor some condition. Who should have access to that specific data? How can you control that access? There will be multiple layers of security, set, we hope, by the users. So that health data may be accessible to a hospital or emergency medical care but not to your health insurer or sellers of healthcare products.”
Consumer expectations have risen but that is in part because so many services are using vast data resources to deliver seamless and satisfying ‘experiences’, he adds. “That assumes that people consent to the use of their data for the best experiences. Many of those experiences are most effective when they are personalised, which in turn raises the many questions around the balance that should be struck.
Service challenge
“Big challenges are also arising in the design of digital services. We used to design the services to perform consistently and deliver them to many—the more the better. Now we have to work on personalising the services, designing many variations to suit each individual users. A personal banking portal, for example — actually any subscriber portal — should know exactly what services I already have. That meshing of multiple services offers enormous potential. Plus challenges, of course.”
One of the most quoted examples of the potential value of the IoT is smart buildings and smart cities. IBM is a leader in smart cities technology and in the built environment its R&D programme centres on the idea of The Cognitive Building as a way of taking a holistic approach to enabling all of the potential systems, devices and data to be fully joined up. “A key part of that is bringing all of the data together in one place,” said Dr Claire Penny.
“Then you can start to manage the data so that you can get a real understanding of what you can or should analyse and the priorities. Some data should be analysed immediately so that action can be taken, other elements may simply be stored for later analysis to show patterns over time. Then there is some data that should be analysed first, then stored appropriately. Plus, there is likely to be some data that can be discarded, because it is of no significance or ephemeral.
Smart buildings
“The design of the data management and analysis is potentially complex, which is where the needs of the various stakeholders come in,” Penny explains. “The building owners and operators will certainly need information for decision making, but so may the end users or the people who market buildings. All buildings have a designated purpose and that will almost always involve people who will interact with it over time. With a cognitive building it responds to people but the management also learns exactly how the building is being used and how the set of systems is performing, according to the deign brief but also in accordance with the actual usage. Many smart building can adapt in response to real life conditions, for example in climate control or energy use.
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