What is the Value of Autonomic Things in IoT?

Part 2 of 4

Cisco estimates the 10 year net present "Value at Stake in the Internet of Everything Economy" to be $14.4 Trillion USD with the ability to grow aggregate corporate profits by 21% by 2022. This breaks down into the following areas of value creation:

• $2.5T Asset Utilization
• $2.7T Supply Network Efficiencies
• $2.5T Labor Productivity
• $3.7T Customer Experience Management Improvements
• $3.0T Innovations in R&D and Business Models

Well that should get the attention and interest of most CxOs and corporate strategists!

In part one of this series "So what is the Internet of Things?", we reviewed the long history of IoT, some current examples of IoT, and touched on the value in the automotive industry via vehicle relationship management.

Gil Press at Forbes subsequently published a concise chronological review entitled, "A very short History of the Internet Of Things."

Like any TLA (Three Letter Acronym) descriptions and definitions are usually in the context of the person trying to sell you something.

The domain of IoT is focused on capabilities enabled by machines connected across networks of autonomous agents automatically processing events, without human intervention, to create value by adaptively analyzing pools of data to diagnose and prognosticate granular knowledge focused on the value to human consumers of one and ecosystems of many.

While this sounds a bit fuzzy, so is what many include in the domain of IoT - #M2M technology, MIMOSA, machine intelligence, machine learning, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, big data, analytics, diagnostics, prognostics and autonomics - across mechanical and biological systems and multiple industry ecosystems.

The internet of things isn't about the internet nor about things - its about creating better outcomes for people in their various environments, home, work, play, health, cities, ... with intent.

You can think of IoT as halos of sensors and communications and devices and code that surround us. These halos are context specific, even when the person or devices are the same, meaning that within a specific environment there are different intentions for valuable outcomes.

Like many innovations over history, the capabilities of IoT find their origin and startup capital in military research and development.

Vice Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski is often called the "Godfather" of Network Centric Warfare and Network Centric Operations (NCW / NCO). Before his passing in 2005, VADM Cebrowski headed the U.S. Office of Force Transformation and leveraged considerable work and investments made by the Office of Naval Research in aviation, aerospace and defense.

Network Centric Warfare and Network Centric Operations (NCO) were strategic capabilities undertaken by the US DOD, UK MoD and NATO in parallel with Sweden’s Network Based Defense (NBD). NCO/NBD leverage previous capability developments commonplace in A&D such as Reliability Centered Maintenance, Condition Based Maintenance, and the Machinery Information Management Open Systems Alliance (MIMOSA).

Central to NCO/NBD methods and capabilities is the concept of sense and respond. SIDR (Sense, Interpret, Decide, Respond) is a modernization of USAF Colonel John Boyd's OODA Loop concept of operations. Getting inside an enemies Observe, Orient, Decide and Act continuous loop of activities create competitive advantage.

Sense and respond logistics (S&RL) is the industrial internet side of NCO. S&RL is commonly equated with autonomic logistics, but actually only includes the non-adaptive mechanics of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) and Machine-to-Human (M2H) transactions.

The Network of Everything (NoE) adds to S&RL and IoT, Human-to-Human (H2H) interactions, collaboration, knowledge formation and complex decision making.

Diagnostics, prognostics, and health management are common terms in both medicine and aviation service lifecycle management. Another common term adapted from biology is autonomic. The autonomic nervous system is the involuntary, autonomous and automatic control system for visceral organs, functioning below the level of consciousness.

The characteristics of a biological autonomic system are automatic, autonomous and adaptive. Hmm, sounds a bit like my definition for the Internet of Things.

Lockheed Martin Aeronautics developed the Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) for performance based service lifecycle management of the F-35 Lightening II Joint Strike Fighter.

New generation commercial aircraft create up to 1 terabyte of data per flight from the plethora of sensors on board. That data is being processed in flight and post flight, combined with human actions and content, and then analyzed to prognosticate who should do what, where and when in order to optimize asset utilization, labor productivity and supply effectiveness.

Networked autonomics are alive and well developed in aerospace and aviation.

But these initial capabilities have been stove piped along OEM specific closed proprietary networks. Proprietary data schemas and transactions are the antithesis of industry value.

For the total value of the internet of things to be achieved, global open mass collaboration of prosumers is not an option!

Aviation service lifecycle management (AvSLM) business networks need open universally interoperable AvSLM technology networks in order to optimize planes, parts, people and plants across the industry.

But don't think all this focus on the industrial internet is all there is. Retail and consumer IoT is just starting - and - will build upon the capabilities and infrastructure the industrial internet has already put in place.

@Startupman David Hirsch, managing partner, Metamorphic Ventures and former director of vertical markets at Google , recently penned an article for @TechCrunch, “A Second Act for the Internet of Things” in which he discusses where he sees IoT is today and in the future.

While the article starts out presenting some mundane “retail” IoT applications and simple automations – turning your smart phone into a remote control for everything from the air conditioner to home security. This is merely what Hirsch terms the “first act” of IoT.

The much more interesting piece of the article focuses on Human to Machine (H2M) interactions, autonomous activities and adaptive learning which requires turning content into knowledge.

Autonomics is the maturity level 5 capability that delivers value across an ecosystem to individual humans, assets, decisions and actions.

Smart wristbands sense our vital signs, interpret our sleeping pattern and determine when we are ready to wake up, decides which of a plethora of home appliances to turn on based upon the context of the day and personal schedule, then respond by communicating to our smart lighting system, smart TV and smart integrated shower-water heater. Our TV in the bedroom senses eye contact, interprets the context of looking away and incoming calls, messages or physical conversations, decides if the interruption is emergent or routine, then responds by automatically pauses our favorite show or not pausing the adverts.

While the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) only defines five levels, if there were a sixth that autonomics combined with trillions of IoT sensors and devices fed into, it would be Swarm Intelligence.

One key value of autonomics to #IoT, my original question, is the understanding of where an organization is going with their #IoT initiative. What's the end game? What outcomes are affected? Who do I collaborate with to achieve these higher level capabilities? What's the optimal solution, business model, industry strategy and how do I / we get there.

Multi-Attribute Utility decision making, reliability analysis, diagnostics, prognostics, forecasting and autonomics require some structure to data to knowledge processing, even when the raw and source data is both structured and unstructured.

Data architecture, semantics and specifications are the major hurdle for interoperability of the Internet of Things.

The question for non-industrial IoT is - what are the data standard(s)? Where's the semantic web that will enable interoperability of the 1.5T "things" in the world today?

For the industrial internet, the last elements of an open modern set of data, content and transaction standards are being put in place by the Aerospace and Defence Industries Association of Europe (ASD) via the SX000i family of specifications.

So the industrial internet is set - question is - how will retail / consumer IoT deal with this challenge and how long will it take: 5 years, 10 years or more?

In the next installment, we'll discuss how to get from hype to real solutions in Frameworks for #IoT and Networks of Ecosystems.

Part 1: What is the Internet of Things IoT?

Part 3: Frameworks for IoT and Networks of Ecosystems

Part 4: Why IoT needs to be Servitized to accelerate the Tipping Point in a Sharing Economy (or: how servitization accelerates and broadens IoT sales)