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M2M - So what?

5/2/2013

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Rory Murray, one of the Founders of Atholl Consulting recently attended a round table event, with a group of worthy and highly accomplished people who are experts in their respective fields, to discuss the future of Machine to Machine “M2M”. 

Here’s what he learned:

It was an excellent event, hosted by Harvey Nash and chaired by David Wood of Delta Wisdom.

We discussed many aspects around M2M, from the potential size of the market and compelling use cases, to obstacles to adoption and risks, what the next two years might look like and so on . . .

One key thing that I hadn’t previously thought about in detail, although it’s obvious when you do think about it is that M2M is not just about cellular applications.  In-building solutions are probably connected by wire and, in that context, it must be remembered that the Utilities have been doing machine to machine for decades already with their SCADA systems.  We tend to think of Smart-Metering as the obvious emerging M2M application for Utilities, but we’ve already been doing it for a very long time!

In terms of size of market, it really depends what you mean – total number of connected devices, number of monitored things (e.g. cars, houses, etc) because these could each contain dozens, even hundreds of devices all monitoring aspects of overall status.  Think about a car, for instance, the brakes, tyre pressures, throttle, fluid levels, lights, etc., etc. all have monitoring devices that are talking back to a central brain within the vehicle which, in turn could be sending data in real-time to some central manufacturer’s database with real-time diagnostics.  It could be linked to the GPS so that if you’re running low on fuel the GPS suggests the best options for filling up – preferred brand, cheapest, closest, etc.

One really critical aspect to come out of the meeting was the fact that there are no dominant players in the M2M space in terms of technologies, operating systems, software, standards, applications, hardware, communications, etc – this means small companies are on a relatively level playing field with the big boys.  This represents both a threat and a huge opportunity because the market is immature enough and so incredibly diverse, in terms of the plethora of opportunities and applications, that everyone could make an impact in their chosen niche(s).  But there is a need for these various organisations to collaborate closely if they want to make progress and to keep the value chain as short and simple as possible.

Another key consideration, which has not been addressed to date, is international roaming, if you have a car with one of these systems, how will it work when you go abroad and are using another cellular network?  Who pays the bills?  On the subject of costs and value, what will deliver a compelling enough case to make us want to use these systems and who will pick up the tab for it all?  In eHealth, it could be a question of saving significant money through early intervention, meaning the business case works for the health provider and they pay.  For cars, it will probably be the manufacturer who pays, but there is an interesting pay-as-you-use model for insurance, road-tax, etc. too.

Another point of note was getting to the stage where the complexity was hidden and you could buy the complete service without having to think about how it works.  This speaks to some of the issues raised above, but if you want to offer a service, then the service must JUST WORK with no additional subscriptions, software downloads, or any other user intervention and again, this means an ecosystem of companies coming together to create a seamless and transparent value proposition that people or companies will buy because it delivers value.

In the case of smart-metering, this means it must work well for both the consumer and supplier because having real-time measurement must be something that has value for both parties – it helps me, as a homeowner to manage my consumption and bills, as well as helping my energy provider to give me a better service.

Lastly, many of these services create security and intrusion concerns – I don’t want my daily activities spied on and I don’t want to be hacked or defrauded either as an individual or as an organisation.  The solutions are there to many of these issues, but can cottage companies confidently deliver robust solutions to market at a price point that represents value whilst taking care of our personal data?  At what point does the potential loss of privacy get outweighed by the benefits?

In summary, I think we ended up with many unanswered and unanswerable questions, it was a bit like a Donald Rumsfeld speech –

There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know.
There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know.
But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don’t know.


My main conclusion is that the opportunity is vast and is basically only limited by imagination and the ability to create a compelling business case for that makes individuals or companies want it enough to pay for it.  Some will be mass market and some will be highly specialised niche markets, but the opportunity for small companies to make a big dent and vast fortunes is probably as big today as it was when a small group of guys decided to build a search engine that is now a verb in daily use.

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BIG Data - Not such a big deal!

4/26/2013

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Why “Big Data” is no big deal

There’s a lot of talk about big data these days like it is something new and mysterious and only a small elite group “get it”.  This is simply not true.

The fact is that nobody, apart from the hardware and software vendors, care about data, oh and the people who peddle themselves as “experts”. NOBODY! 

What we do care about is information, knowledge, insight, intelligence.

Big data has existed for years, the data has always been there, we just didn’t know how to use it, or have the tools to make sense of it.  Now we do and in just the same way that we escaped having to navigate to our documents by typing C:\\my documents\work\customer\invoices and could simply click an icon, we now have tools that will give us the information we need at the click of a mouse because the complexity is in the code behind that mouse click, but it’s not rocket science!

Let’s take a supermarket as an example:

They have rows and rows of shelves stacked full of goods and every one of those items has a barcode and a price and a sell-by date and they know how many they have and they know their weight and locations, both on the shop floor and in the warehouse.  There are thousands, even tens of thousands of individual items to keep track of!  Then there are the buy-one-get-one-free type deals, where the price you pay must be adjusted in real time to give you discounts on specific combinations of items - That’s not “small data!”

Then you do your shopping and you go to the till and they scan or weigh each item and add it to your total bill, but they also deduct it from the inventory, so they know what’s been sold and what they need to re-order.

You also have the mark-downs, where they reduce the prices of items that are near their sell-by date, so they don’t have to waste those items, but if they fail to sell, then they do zero-rate them and dispose of them – that’s all being captured by the systems.

They’re also tracking you, if you’re a regular customer with a loyalty card – they know a lot about you and your family and they can target special offers at you for things they think you’ll buy.

They’re also tracking the weather and if it’s going to be a lovely weekend, then they change their ranges to promote items that you will want to buy – salads, beers, soft drinks, barbeque food, etc.  and you have to get it right because you don’t want to be left with vast amounts of unsold food that has a short shelf life that ends up getting wasted!

What about the staff, you have to ensure you have the right number of staff with the right skills on duty at the right time, you have to calculate their hours and pay, overtime, pensions, deductions, etc.

There’s a lot going on and that’s just one store!  Now think about it on a regional and national level, with hundreds or thousands of stores and potentially different weather across the nation or state.

BUT who needs to know how many cans of baked beans got sold last week, probably just a handful of people in the whole company.  Likewise for most of the other products, especially long-life and non-perishables.  The fighter-pilots in this scenario are the ones predicting sales of short-life perishables like fish, meat, salads and fresh fruit – they have to get it as close to perfect every day, without fail.  So they need a lot of information and dashboards and projections.

But they are actually the same information, dashboards and projections as the person with responsibility for baked beans, they’re just glad that if they get it wrong, they can sit in the warehouse for a week.

The bottom line is the data is the same, it’s sliced and diced into graphs and charts and exception reports in almost the exact same way for all products and the people for who it matters get those reports at store level and at regional and national level.  Then there are summary reports for managers because they don’t need to know how many kilos of fish got sold UNLESS a lot wasn’t sold and it has made a loss.

Let’s not forget that this data is also analysed by time of day, day of the week, season, weather, festivities and celebrations, etc. and the data is stored for years, so they can look back at previous trends to inform their decision-making.  “What happened last time we had good weather for the May Bank Holiday?”.  It’s also being analysed to see how we respond to advertising and news stories across both traditional channels like TV, radio, magazines, etc. but also new media – Facebook, Twitter, etc.

So, YES!, there’s a lot of data and a lot of real-time data because every barcode that is scanned is real-time data, changing the shop’s inventory before that customer has even left the shop and they know if you always buy that, sometimes buy it or have never bought it before, if you’re a card-carrying loyal customer.

But is it really BIG Data and what does that even mean?

Well it’s certainly big in terms of sheer volume and that’s why we’re hearing so much more about it now than we used to because we now have the applications and the hardware to process it into meaningful information within reasonable timescales.  Apparently 90% of all the data ever created has happened in the last 2 years- incredible when you think how old man-kind is.  But data is not information, it’s just bits and bytes on a disk somewhere until someone makes sense of it!

The really big news is around data augmentation, which is basically taking seemingly unrelated data and merging it with other data – the weather affecting sales of salad is augmented data – sales + weather data.  Mad cow disease or horsemeat scares impacting sales of processed beef products is augmented data- news + sales, but again, not rocket science! 

But some of it gets very clever and those abilities to predict trends could change our lives! The speed at which they were able to crunch all the video footage of Boston, find the bombers and publish their photos was big data, kind-of.  If the Russian information had been managed properly and the CIA and FBI had shared their data and the incident had been stopped before it even happened, that would have been big news for big data, but still not exactly rocket science.


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    Author

    Rory Murray has 25+ years of experience creating and delivering high value, strategic solutions for diverse organisations across Europe, Middle East, Africa, India and North America.  In this time he has accumulated extensive expertise covering Sales and Marketing, Pre-sales and Technical Design, Operational and Management, Project / Programme Management and Delivery.

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