All over the world we hear “Cloud”. As a supstitution to SaaS or ASP it is no more guilty. “Cloud” gets more the appearance of “data underlying” communication between “information nodes”. This could be an information support of an ERP/CRM/SCM/MES… to a user or also a communication between system and/or machines itself. We have to care more about the source of the information (where it is, which situation exist during generating the information, …)
This makes it more and more difficult to value the reliability of an information. Not only the point of security is a matter of fact but also the quality and context of an information.
Business Applications of the Future
The well known ERP systems normally do have well defined structures and data models (based on the experience of years and hundreds of projects). If they do have to integrate information from other systems, they normally define an interface (API) to be used by partners. But what if partners are using a non known (global existing) module / information node? A direct information taken form a production equipment? … . How can we be sure that the figures coming out of these information nodes are fitting the expectations and needs by the leading “Business Application”? Who is driving the process or is it driven by the information?
If we take a closer look to the global ICT discussion we see a change from well structured processes to a “big” data driven business. We are learning more and more about what kind of information might influence the process and can be helpful to streamline the process itself, avoid process steps or other complete processes (like we discuss with “Predictive Maintenance”)…
In a global approach we describe this new ICT environment based on industry topics with “Industry 4.0” and on other areas with the global basswood “IoT” (Internet of Things). Common source of both is a huge amount of information we have to analyze and evaluate based on
a.) Source (automatic, human interface, …)
b.) Context of occurrence (time and place)
c.) Content itself
The power actually existing IT infrastructure gives uns the ability to monitor a huge amount of information. The speed of evaluation and the moment of occurrence are an important fact to put it on the right sequence of a decision process to secure the decision. There is a flow in processes and a strong learning curve in how datas can help us to increase quality, process security and time. Perhaps in a near future intelligent algorithms (assistants, avatars, …) will overtake the evaluation of data, recurring description of fluent processes and finally the “decision making”. A self steering system!
We are happy to discuss with hundreds of software and hardware companies around the world about their view the fast changes in this disruptive time period and we are glad to assist them in finding the right partners / alliances to grow their business.