Mindful Machines: Humanizing the Digital Revolution with IoT

By Ravi Kumar S., Infosys

Amid a digital revolution, businesses are finding their customer wants and needs are constantly changing. Established companies, regardless of their industry, need the agility and the know-how to think digitally to best serve their customers’ evolving expectations. To do this, businesses need to leverage the latest in digital technologies – specifically the Internet of Things – to change, simplify and humanize the way they operate.

The key to this transformation is making services and information more relevant, immediate and more desirable. Take Uber, for example, the company modernized the transportation industry by digitalizing the user experience and connecting internal and external users.

This model of hyper-connection between users, has been enormously successful for consumers, and is now being replicated in the B2B world to streamline internal activities and data gathering. It also takes a “Zero Distance” approach, meaning reducing the distance between producers, data, services and users to zero through cost performance and automating sophisticated tasks. By extension, Zero Distance eliminates the middle layers, dramatically bringing down cost.

There are two aspects to managing digital revolution in any sector. One approach is to make improvements through incremental updates. The other is to redefine the landscape through massive changes to the customer experience. IoT is driving this change across industries by reducing the distance between the points of manufacturing and consumption, as well as understanding and preventing points of failure in machines. It also brings valuable insight into what the customer wants and what is delivered. At its core, IoT ensures companies bring intelligence directly to these end-points.

Companies are already looking for opportunities to extract further business efficiencies as well as delight customers by elevating their experience and by developing highly desirable contiguous offerings that promise new avenues to create more value.

For example, the move by the energy industry into smart metering was designed to eliminate the lag in tracking consumption. It replaced manual meter reading with live, near real-time digital reporting. The byproduct of this has been to provide customers with greater visibility of their energy consumption by cost as well as units consumed – creating a more dynamic marketplace with well-informed users. As a result, users are better equipped to understand the competitive cost and value of the service being provided.

Additionally, we work with an insurance company to monitor end-user driving behavior through IoT technology, enabling both risk protection and prevention. The initiative naturally evolved into a new approach to pricing – that of usage-based insurance. Using an in-car telemetry plug-in, the insurer can monitor and transmit driving proficiency data and generate driving profiles. This led to the shaping of personalized premiums that rewarded responsible driving as well as a market-disruptive innovation that has changed the insurance buying experience and buying dynamics.

For the aviation industry, a key IoT use case is the creation of a digital twin for airplane landing gear. Continuously improving the reliability of landing gear, which is a critical subsystem of an aircraft, while reducing the development lifecycle, is a task that keeps designers busy every day. Creating the digital twin for a landing gear by fitting actual hardware with 30 additional critical internet-connected sensors allowed all operational behavior and parameters to be virtually tested. This includes predicting a gear’s useful remaining life and how that intersected with the number of flights planned for it. What started out as an exercise in predictive maintenance created lasting positive implications for making flying safer.

IoT enables both computing and traditionally non-computing devices to become connected, allowing us to benefit from a data-rich ecosystem of more intelligent, responsive, governed, mindful machines. Moreover, it amplifies human imagination, taking mundane and routine tasks and allowing them to be automated and digitized. This frees the business and its users to pursue new ideas, new ways of making and working. For instance, integrating IoT with design thinking will fundamentally focus on problem definition rather than problem solving. A design thinking approach prioritizes business outcomes and objectives and then helps build an innovative path to achieve the objective. IoT as a technology is disruptive, whether it is the way business models are changing, products being offered as a service, or products evolving more rapidly.

Ravi Kumar S. is president and chief delivery officer at Infosys. Send e-mail about this commentary to DE-Editorsmailto:[email protected].