Ramblings from an Automation Mad Man (A Blog Series):
By Jerry Maldonado – VP of Automation, Customer Lifecycle Solutions
Remember not too long ago when we would venture into a movie theatre with this grand screen, our purchased snacks, and our excitement for the long awaited sequel of our favorite sci-fi thriller? Remember the special effects they used to show robots pulling parts together or refrigerators calling their owners to tell them that they were out of milk? In those films, houses were leveled by small unmanned machines, cars drove themselves, and people wore small devices that tracked their every movement. In this futuristic past, every human was connected to a piece of technology and that technology assisted mankind in minuscule everyday tasks. Well, look no further into the past, those are here and alive in the present.
But are we ready for it?
In today’s world, what we saw in our futuristic past is coined the “Internet of Things” and companies are leveraging this idea to power our lives with software. In the IoT, fabrics of sensors and monitors, motors and actuators, wireless and wired software come together with hardware to do amazing things. Today, a person on one side of the globe has access to an application to control lights at a home that sits on the other side of the world. A new app update is released so often in our days that we become immune to just hitting the button and not fully understanding that the process our devices go through is complex. The device connects to something, read and transfer data to somewhere, and then more times than not, we end up watching something happen that is not supposed to happen.
All of these devices, all of these updates, and all these things that are connected to everyone and everything.
They are to the left of us, to the right, basically everywhere and it has to make you wonder - how does a business track the data and activity so that they can report on them, fix them, and ultimately modify them for support and nurture?
The IoT is an amazing era and I welcome it with open arms. But like amazing things of the past such as the birth of the pc, the movement of landlines to mobile phones to smart phones, and the introduction of tablets how do we contain and make sense of it all? Remember if we don’t manage it correctly, that sci-fi movie we think we are watching will turn into a horror film that will keep us awake for years to come.
Follow the ramblings of an Automation Mad Man Every Wednesday. Did you miss last week's post? Read it here: How and When the IoT Was Conceived (Mad Man Version)