The Internet of Things is still in its infancy, argues Abbas Haider Ali, CTO of xMatters, a company that provides intelligent communications processes. Over the next few years, he predicts, it will completely change how most of us do our jobs. In this interview with The Enterprisers Project, he explains how those changes might take place.
The Enterprisers Project (TEP): How is the Internet of Things transforming the workplace today? What further transformations do you foresee in the next year or two?
Ali: We're in the very early days of IoT in the workplace. We're just starting to get to the point of having the cost of sensors be low enough to deploy everywhere. Ubiquitous and meshed connectivity is just starting to take place. These are the foundations on which transformations will be built. We still need the ability to truly connect all the data together and have general purpose analytics that starts to make sense of it. Over the next year or two we're going to see the beginnings of mesh networks supplementing the routing-based internet connectivity we see today. I believe that will drive down the cost of connectivity and create more resilient connections between systems.
TEP: What about five or ten years from now?
Ali: Today we think of IoT transformed workplaces where equipment tells operators that something is wrong and asks for help. Or we track consumers inside of retail spaces, or track employees in dangerous workplaces. In the next five to ten years I think we'll see that the rules-based and classical data analysis techniques to drive value out of this information will fail. They'll be replaced by narrow AI (think Watson, WolframAlpha, Cortana, etc.) that will be purpose-built and self-teaching in their applications. We'll see specialized learning systems in healthcare, manufacturing and other domains that will ask questions of the data and environments faster than we can think of them, much less answer them. These narrow AI systems will still be a far cry from the Artificial General Intelligence scare stories that we hear about in the news and in the tech sphere, but from our standpoint today, they will transform how we work.
TEP: Some observers note that much of the growth in IoT technology is machine-to-machine (M2M) communications in which, for instance, a temperature sensor reports dangerously high temperatures in an equipment room so the cooling system is activated automatically. In an environment where machines can increasingly solve their own problems, how are human roles evolving?
Ali: Machines can solve rudimentary problems for themselves at the control level. Work around equipment failures inside of redundant systems, for example. Or provide early warning of known service problems. Human roles at this stage are still about making decisions and providing the intuitive direction of data analysis. These systems are also generally distinct and cannot work together effectively. Yet.
As they continue to mature, the human roles of doing repetitive and dangerous tasks will be fulfilled by machines first. In these environments humans will take on the roles of custodians. Just as the industrial revolution and the information revolution caused disruption in the workplace and shifts in the skills required of the global workforce, the IoE (or Internet of Everything) revolution will start the next wave of disruption, which will include variations of AI and advanced robotics. As a society, we'll have to make sure that we have the social safety nets in place to deal with these challenges. Fringe discussions of basic incomes will become more commonplace as we can accomplish the global productivity we see today with less direct involvement of people.
TEP: As IoT becomes more entrenched in the enterprise, what challenges will arise? How can IT departments meet those challenges?
Ali: Enterprise leaders today should already have plans that they're either executing on or are on the drawing board around the four technology mega-trends we see in the tech marketplace today: social, mobile, analytics/big data, and cloud. IoT-related challenges touch on all of these and accelerate the need for enterprises to adapt. IT departments find themselves in a uniquely advantageous position in that they've been dealing with increasingly intelligent and interconnected machines over the last ten years or more. They know about the challenges of large scale monitoring, fault-tolerant design, highly interdependent services, and managing operational tasks across these services.
The difference in the IoT world is a question of much higher scale, interdependence, connectivity and data. IT departments should be key stakeholders in building out innovation labs for their companies where they can apply their experience in smaller settings to transform how their businesses will need to operate in the future to survive. By doing these activities, they will be better able to identify the challenges they have to address.
Dealing with data and analytics is certainly a huge problem to tackle. Creating reliable and self-healing networks is another. Providing actionable information to people is yet another challenge and key to engaging workers. I also see enterprises starting to experiment with wearables. Not in a pure "consumerization of IT" sense but really looking at what type of wearable technologies will connect people as just another thing in the Internet of Everything.
TEP: What advice would you give IT leaders about realizing IoT's full potential in the enterprise? What pitfalls should they avoid?
Ali: Like all business transformations before it, IoT will carry something of an "adapt-or-die" mantra in the marketplace. The reality is that enterprises need to stay ahead of change wherever they can. The challenge is that the pace of change isn't steady, it's accelerating in its own version of Moore's Law. That means that the wait-and-see approach is not a viable one.
IT leaders have to strike the very difficult balance between bringing the best of current tech into their enterprises and actually creating business impact with it, while also keeping one eye on the future without getting caught up in the hype. That leaves them little choice but to foster an environment where their teams can prototype, experiment, and fail quickly and frequently. The successes will generate phenomenal results for their companies, but the path will be littered with many failures. That's not a model that IT leaders have traditionally been allowed to follow. Courage is what will separate the successful IT leaders from those who fail.
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Abbas Haider Ali is the Chief Technology Officer of xMatters. He brings over 15 years in networking, cloud-based services, and multi-modal communications. He has helped create the vision for adopting intelligent communication strategies across business scenarios. He holds a BASc in Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto.
