Wahoo! Liveblogging #Liveworx ’18!

Always my fav event, I’ll be liveblogging #LiveWorx ’18.  Stay tuned!

Keynote: Jim Heppelmann:

  • “from a place to a pace” — how fast are we moving?
  • no longer OK to think of a future destination, builds inertia (“your main competitor”). Disruption may have already happened. Hard to sustain advantage due to pace of change. Must “embrace a pace of change”
  • Um, this sounds like argument for my circular company paradigm shift!!!
  • Customer Experience Center will occupy top floor of new building.
  • combo of  physical, human and digital — transforming all at once speeds change:
    • physical: been constrained by subtractive manufacturing, while nature improves via cell division (i.e., additive). “Adopt Mother Nature’s mindset.” — new additive aspects of Creo. Example of Triumph cycle sing-arm using additive. CREO uses AI to optimize performance: non-symmetrical design. Still need to use simulation tests: new intermittent, continuous style: they are doing new partnership with ANSYS (product simulation software), unified modeling and simulation with no gaps. Historically, simulation only used at end of design cycle, now can use it throughout the process: “pervasive simulation.”
      • ANSYS “Discovery Live”: optimizes for real-time. Integrates with Creo — instant feedback on new designs. “simulation critical to innovation.”
    • digital: working with Microsoft Azure (Rodney Clark, Microsoft IoT VP). Microsoft investing $5b in IoT.  1st collaboration is an industrial welder: IoT data optimizes productivity.  BAE can train new employees 30-40% quicker.
    • finally, human: “Mother Nature designed ups to interface with the physical. How do we integrate with the digital? — Siri, Alexa, Cortna still too slow.  Sight is our best bet. “Need direct pipeline to reality ” — that’s AR. “Smart, connected humans.” Sysmex: for medical lab analysis. Hospitals need real-time access to blood cell analysis. They have real-time calibration of analysis equipment. Also improving knowledge of the support techs, using AR and digital twins when repairs are needed.
      • Will help 2.5 billion workers become more productive
      • AR can project how a process is being programmed (gotta see this one. will try to get video).
      • All of their human/digital interface initiatives united under Vuforia. Already have 10,000 enterprises using it.
    • Factories are a new focus of PTC. 200 companies now using it in 800 factories. Examples from Woodward & Colfax.  Big savings on new employee training.

Keynote: Prof. Linda Hill, HBS, “Collective Genius”:

  • Innovation= novel + useful
  • Example of Pixar: collective genius “filmmaking is a team sport.”
  • 3 characteristics of creative organizations they looked at:
    • “creative abrasion” — diversity and debate
    • “creative agility” — quickly test the idea & get feedback. Experiment rather than run pilots, which often include politics
    • “creative resolution” — ability to make integrative decisions. Don’t necessarily defer to the experts.
    • sense of community and shared purpose.
  • values: bold ambition, collaboration, responsibility, learning.
  • rules of engagement: respect, trust, influence, see the whole, question everything, be data-driven.

Ray Miciek, Aquitas Solutions. Getting Started on IoT-based Maintenance:

  • his company specializes in asset maintenance.
  • “produce products with assets that never fail”
  • 82% of all asset failures are random, because they are more IT-related now
  • find someplace in org. where you could gain info to avoid failure.
  • Can start small, then quickly expand.

 

Surprising Benefits of Combining IoT and Blockchain (they go beyond economic ones!)

One final effort to work this blockchain obsession out of my system so I can get on to some exciting other IoT news!

I couldn’t resist summarizing for you the key points in”Blockchain: the solution for transparency in product supply chains,” a white paper from Project Provenance Ltd., a London-based collective  (“Our common goal is to deliver meaningful change to commerce through open and accessible information about products and supply chains.”).

If you’ve followed any of the controversies over products such as “blood diamonds” or fish caught by Asian slaves & sold by US supermarkets, you know supply chains are not only an economic issue but also sometimes a vital social (and sometimes environmental) one. As the white paper warns:

“The choices we make in the marketplace determine which business practices thrive. From a diamond in a mine to a tree in a forest, it is the deepest darkest ends of supply chains that damage so much of the planet and its livelihood.”

Yikes!

Now blockchain can make doing the right thing easier and more profitable:

“Provenance enables every physical product to come with a digital ‘passport’ that proves authenticity (Is this product what it claims to be?) and origin (Where does this product come from?), creating an auditable record of the journey behind all physical products. The potential benefits for businesses, as well as for society and the environment, are hard to overstate: preventing the selling of fake goods, as well as the problem of ‘double spending’ of certifications present in current systems. The Decentralized Application (Dapp) proposed in this paper is still in development and we welcome businesses and standards organizations to join our consortium and collaborate on this new approach to understanding our material world.”

I also love Provenance’s work with blockchain because it demonstrates one of my IoT “Essential Truths,” namely, that we must share data rather than hoard it.  The exact same real-time data that can help streamline the supply chain to get fish to our stores quicker and with less waste can also mean that the people catching it are treated fairly. How cool is that?  Or, as Benjamin Herzberg, Program Lead, Private Sector Engagement for Good Governance at the World Bank Institute puts it in the quote that begins the paper, Now, in the hyper-connected and ever-evolving world, transparency is the new power.

While I won’t summarize the entire paper, I do recommend that you so, especially if blockchain is still new to you, because it gives a very detailed explanation of each blockchain component.

Instead, let’s jump in with the economic benefits of a blockchain and IoT-enabled supply chain, since most companies won’t consider it, no matter what the social benefits, if it doesn’t help the bottom line. The list is long, and impressive:

  • “Interoperable: A modular, interoperable platform that eliminates the possibility of double spending
  • Auditable: An auditable record that can be inspected and used by companies, standards organizations, regulators, and customers alike
  • Cost-efficient:  A solution to drastically reduce costs by eliminating the need for ‘handling companies’ to be audited
  • Real-time and agile:  A fast and highly accessible sign-up means quick deployment
  • Public: The openness of the platform enables innovation and could achieve bottom-up transparency in supply chains instead of burdensome top-down audits
  • Guaranteed continuity:  The elimination of any central operator ensures inclusiveness and longevity” (my emphasis)

Applying it to a specific need, such as documenting that a food that claims to be organic really is, blockchain is much more efficient and economical than cumbersome current systems, which usually rely on some third party monitoring and observing the process.  As I’ve mentioned before, the exquisite paradox of blockchain-based systems is that they are secure and trustworthy specifically because no one individual or program controls them: it’s done through a distributed system where all the players may, in fact, distrust each other:

“The blockchain removes the need for a trusted central organization that operates and maintains this system. Using blockchains as a shared and secure platform, we are able to see not only the final state (which mimics the real world in assigning the materials for a given product under the ownership of the final customer), but crucially, we are able to overcome the weaknesses of current systems by allowing one to securely audit all transactions that brought this state of being into effect; i.e., to inspect the uninterrupted chain of custody from the raw materials to the end sale.

“The blockchain also gives us an unprecedented level of certainty over the fidelity of the information. We can be sure that all transfers of ownership were explicitly authorized by their relevant controllers without having to trust the behavior or competence of an incumbent processor. Interested parties may also audit the production and manufacturing avatars and verify that their “on-chain” persona accurately reflects reality.”

The white paper concludes by also citing an additional benefit that I’ve mentioned before: facilitating the switch to an environmentally-sound “circular economy,” which requires not only tracking the creation of things, but also their usage, trying to keep them out of landfills. “The system proposed in this paper would not only allow the creation (including all materials, grades, processes etc) and lifecycle (use, maintenance etc) to be logged on the blockchain, but this would also make it easy to access this information when products are returned to be assessed and remanufactured into a new item.”

Please do read the whole report, and think how the economic benefits of applying blockchain-enabled IoT practices to your supply chain can also warm your heart.

 

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More Blockchain Synergies With IoT: Supply Chain Optimization

The more I learn about blockchain’s possible uses — this time for supply chains — the more convinced I am that it is absolutely essential to full development of the IoT’s potential.

I recently raved about blockchain’s potential to perhaps solve the IoT’s growing security and privacy challenges. Since then, I’ve discovered that it can also further streamline and optimize the supply chain, another step toward the precision that I think is such a hallmark of the IoT.

As I’ve written before, the ability to instantly share (something we could never do before) real-time data about your assembly line’s status, inventories, etc. with your supply chain can lead to unprecdented integration of the supply chain and factory, much of it on a M2M basis without any human intervention. It seems to me that the blockchain can be the perfect mechanism to bring about this synchronization.

A brief reminder that, paradoxically, it’s because blockchain entries (blocks) are shared, and distributed (vs. centralized) that it’s secure without using a trusted intermediary such as a bank, because no one participant can change an entry after it’s posted.

Complementing the IBM video I included in my last post on the subject, here’s one that I think succinctly summarizes blockchain’s benefits:

A recent LoadDelivered article detailed a number of the benefits from building your supply chain around blockchain. They paralleling the ones I mentioned in my prior post regarding its security benefits, of using blockchain to organize your supply chain (with some great links for more details):

  • “Recording the quantity and transfer of assets – like pallets, trailers, containers, etc. – as they move between supply chain nodes (Talking Logistics)
  • Tracking purchase orders, change orders, receipts, shipment notifications, or other trade-related documents
  • Assigning or verifying certifications or certain properties of physical products; for example determining if a food product is organic or fair trade (Provenance)
  • Linking physical goods to serial numbers, bar codes, digital tags like RFID, etc.
  • Sharing information about manufacturing process, assembly, delivery, and maintenance of products with suppliers and vendors.”

That kind of information, derived from real-time IoT sensor data, should be irresistible to companies compared to the relative inefficiency of today’s supply chain.

The article goes on to list a variety of benefits:

  • “Enhanced Transparency. Documenting a product’s journey across the supply chain reveals its true origin and touchpoints, which increases trust and helps eliminate the bias found in today’s opaque supply chains. Manufacturers can also reduce recalls by sharing logs with OEMs and regulators (Talking Logistics).
  • Greater Scalability. Virtually any number of participants, accessing from any number of touchpoints, is possible (Forbes).
  • Better Security. A shared, indelible ledger with codified rules could potentially eliminate the audits required by internal systems and processes (Spend Matters).
  • Increased Innovation. Opportunities abound to create new, specialized uses for the technology as a result of the decentralized architecture.”

Note that it the advantages aren’t all hard numbers, but also allowing marketing innovations, similar to the way the IoT allows companies to begin marketing their products as services because of real-time data from the products in the field. In the case of applying it to the supply chain (food products, for example), manufacturers could get a marketing advantage because they could offer objective, tamper-proof documentation of the product’s organic or non-GMO origins. Who would have thought that technology whose primary goal is increasing operating efficiency could have these other, creative benefits as well?

Applying  blockchain to the supply chain is getting serious attention, including a pilot program in the Port of Rotterdam, Europe’s largest.  IBM, Intel, Cisco and Accenture are among the blue-chip members of Hyperledger, a new open source Linux Foundation collaboration to further develop blockchain. Again, it’s the open source, decentralized aspect of blockchain that makes it so effective.

Logistics expert Adrian Gonzalez is perhaps the most bullish on blockchain’s potential to revolutionize supply chains:

“the peer-to-peer, decentralized architecture of blockchain has the potential to trigger a new wave of innovation in how supply chain applications are developed, deployed, and used….(becoming) the new operating system for Supply Chain Operating Networks

It’s also another reminder of the paradoxical wisdom of one of my IoT “Essential Truths,” that we must learn to ask “who else could share this information” rather than hoarding it as in the past. It is the very fact that blockchain data is shared that means it can’t be tampered with by a single actor.

What particularly intrigues me about widespread use of blockchain at the heart of companies’ operations and fueled by real-time data from IoT sensors and other devices is that it would ensure that privacy and security, which I otherwise fear would always be an afterthought, would instead be inextricably linked with achieving efficiency gains. That would make companies eager to embrace the blockchain, assuring their attention to privacy and security as part of the deal. That would be a definite win-win.

Blockchain must definitely be on your radar in 2017.

 

Lo and behold, right after I posted this, news that WalMart, the logistics savants, are testing blockchain for supply chain management!

 

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Blockchain might be answer to IoT security woes

Could blockchain be the answer to IoT security woes?

I hope so, because I’d like to get away from my recent fixation on IoT security breaches and their consequences,  especially the Mirai botnet attack that brought a large of the Internet to its knees this Fall and the even scarier (because it involved Philips, a company that takes security seriously) white-hat hackers attack on Hue bulbs.  As I’ve written, unless IoT security is improved, the public and corporations will lose faith in it and the IoT will never develop to its full potential.

Now, there’s growing discussion that blockchain (which makes bitcoin possible), might offer a good IoT security platform.

Ironically — for something dealing with security — blockchain’s value in IoT may be because the data is shared and no one person owns it or can alter it unilaterally (BTW, this is one more example of my IoT “Essential Truth” that with the IoT data should be shared, rather than hoarded as in the past.

If you’re not familiar with blockchain, here’s an IBM video, using an example from the highly security-conscious diamond industry, that gives a nice summary of how it works and why:

The key aspects of blockchain is that it:

  • is transparent
  • can trace all aspects of actions or transactions (critical for complex sequences of actions in an IoT process)
  • is distributed: there’s a shared form of record keeping, that everyone in the process can access.
  • requires permission — everyone has permission for every step
  • is secure: no one person — even a system administrator — can alter it without group approval.

Of these, perhaps the most important aspect for IoT security is that no one person can change the blockchain unilaterally, adding something (think malware) without the action being permanently recorded and without every participant’s permission.  To add a new transaction to the blockchain, all the members must validate it by applying an algorithm to confirm its validity.

The blockchain can also increase efficiency by reducing the need for intermediaries, and it’s a much better way to handle the massive flood of data that will be generated by the IoT.

The Chain of Things think tank and consortium is taking the lead on exploring blockchain’s application to the IoT. The group describes itself as “technologists at the nexus of IoT hardware manufacturing and alternative blockchain applications.” They’ve run several blockchain hackathons, and are working on open standards for IoT blockchains.

Contrast blockchain with the current prevailing IoT security paradigm.  As Datafloq points out, it’s based on the old client-server approach, which really doesn’t work with the IoT’s complexity and variety of connections: “Connection between devices will have to exclusively go through the internet, even if they happen to be a few feet apart.”  It doesn’t make sense to try to funnel the massive amounts of data that will result from widespread deployment of billions of IoT devices and sensor through a centralized model when a decentralized, peer-to-peer alternative would be more economical and efficient.

Datafloq concludes:

“Blockchain technology is the missing link to settle scalability, privacy, and reliability concerns in the Internet of Things. Blockchain technologies could perhaps be the silver bullet needed by the IoT industry. Blockchain technology can be used in tracking billions of connected devices, enable the processing of transactions and coordination between devices; allow for significant savings to IoT industry manufacturers. This decentralized approach would eliminate single points of failure, creating a more resilient ecosystem for devices to run on. The cryptographic algorithms used by blockchains, would make consumer data more private.”

I love it: paradoxically, sharing data makes it more secure!  Until something better comes along and/or the nature of IoT strategy challenges changes, it seems to me this should be the basis for secure IoT data transmission!

 

 

 

Live Blogging Gartner ITxpo Barcelona!

After a harrowing trip via Air France (#neveragain) I’m in lovely Barcelona, live-blogging Gartner ITxpo courtesy of Siemens — but they aren’t dictating my editorial judgment.

Keynoter is Peter Sondergaard, Sr. VP, Gartner Research:

  • start with high-scale traditional IT structures, but with new emphasis on cloud, etc. IT system now partially inside your org. and part outside.  We are half-way through transition to cloud: half of sales support now through cloud. More financial, HR & other functions. General trend toward cloud, but still some internal processes as necessary. Must clean up traditional inside processes.
    • “Ecosystems are the next evolution of Digital”
    • Must learn to measure your investments in customer experience.
    • Starting to explore VR & AR (personal shout out to PTC & clients such as Caterpillar!!)
    • must understand customer’s intent through advanced algorithms.  Create solutions to problems they don’t even know they have!
  • next domain of new platform: Things:
    • build strategies with two lenses: consumer preferences, AND the enterprise IoT lens.
    • leverage exponential growth in connected things
    • 27445 exabytes of data by 2020!
    • can’t just bolt on new systems on old ones: must rework existing systems to include devices — processes, workflow, much harder (i.e., my circular company paradigm).
  • intelligence: how your systems learn and decide independently
    • algorithms– algorithmic intelligence — drives decisions
    • now, AI, driven by machine learning. Machines learn from experience.
    • information is new code base
    • we will employ people to train things to learn from experience through neural networks
  • ecosystems
    • linear value supply chains transformed to ecosystems through electronic interchange.
    • others can build experiences, etc. that you haven’t thought out through APIs  — my “share data” Essential Truth. APIs implement business policies in the digital world.c
  • customers
    • customer driven

Where to start?

  • 70% of IoT implementation is through new organization within companies!

Now other Gartner analysts chime in:

  • insurance: engage your customers.
  • smart gov: must interact with those who implement. Must re-imaging public involvement sense/engage/interact
  • case study: Deakin University in Australia: digital platforms to enhance student experience.
  • case study: Trenitalia mass transit system switching to predictive maintenance! Huge cost savings. “Experience hands & beginners mind at work” — love that slogan!!!! “Listen to the train instead of scheduling maintenance”
  • blockchain: ecosystem, brilliant in simplicity. All can see transaction but no one can invade privacy. Use to solve many problems: data provenance, land registry, public infrastucture, AI.
  • Woo: use this to TRANSFORM THE WORLD!!!
  • ratz — I was preoccupied at time, they talked about a new mobility system for seniors — re my SmartAging paradigm!!
  • paradigm shift — partnering with competitors (much of what I wrote about in DataDynamite: share data, don’t hoard it!)  Think about Apple & Google driving car companies’ interfaces. “Do you join hands with digital giants or join hands with them?”).
  • ooh, love the digital assistant correcting his presentation. I can only dream of a future where there are millions added to grammar police!

 

 

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