The newest entrants to the workforce never experienced the world before the internet or cell phones. So naturally, business dynamics are changing. These young workers have a totally different perspective on what’s possible, in part because they’re arriving at their desks just as the internet and cellular industries converge to create two revolutionary new spaces – the internet of things and big data.
Traditional corporate decision-making processes have been structured around hierarchical data-collection systems from the lowest levels of the supply chain, progressively moving up into departments, eventually making their way as performance charts, graphs and red flags into boardrooms. As information technology evolved from standalone mainframes to networks, including PCs and other types of devices, the time between data collection and its arrival in the boardroom dropped significantly. But, with few exceptions, most processes remained confined to data from assets inside four walls.
Enter innovators such as Federal Express that revolutionised corporate operations with a truly global deployment of processes touching assets outside the gates. A few years later, with the arrival of 2G cellular telephony, major vendors established departments to develop the radio element of handset technology into modules that could be embedded into machines, cars, alarm systems and more. The birth of machine-to-machine communications (M2M) continued extending the reach of business processes.
Executives can leverage big data analytics to glean performance metrics, product changes, launches and more – as they happen
As the internet grew, analysts sought to understand its impact on traditional commerce. For example, until then retail prices had typically included a 50 per cent bump for distribution margin stacking that the internet had the potential to replace. With global retail valued in the trillions of dollars, the potential represented by the internet was an economy in and of itself – and the drive to retrieve those 50 cents became the initial and pivotal push to expand the internet’s role in corporate processes even faster.
As this evolution began to show tangible results, these processes hungered for access to assets even farther off campus, causing advances in M2M to arrive at an intersection with the emerging cloud space. Cloud technology enabled machines, sensors and other devices to upload and store vast amounts of raw data to create an analysis base and deliver brand new models for assessing performance, profitability, competitiveness and more.
Just as pilots in a glass-cockpit jetliner can punch up high-level information from hundreds of sensors and systems into manageable displays, so too can executives in the modern boardroom leverage big data analytics to glean performance metrics of operations, product changes, launches and more – as they happen. What’s more, corporate executives can interact with their assets all the way to the very edge of the supply chain, and view amalgamated real-time results and data analytics-based predictions and trends.
For the past 12 years, Telit has been at the vanguard of this reinvention of the boardroom. We welcome the world’s new thinkers, and encourage the continued and relentless challenge of boundaries and limitations. Our products and services are about simplifying the connection of “things” to the internet of things as we continue to add value in this business process revolution.
