IoT failures and trust in technology

At the beginning of April this year I attended the building IoT in Cologne. At the conference, which was organized by heise developer, iX and d.punkt publishing house, everything revolved around applications for the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0 in lectures and an exhibition. Together with my colleague Yang Zhong, I presented modern user experience concepts (UX) for IoT solutions in a lecture.

At the end of our presentation, which showed a user’s work processes, from the data acquisition of a real “Thing” to the visualization of live data in the dashboard using a Digital Twin, there was a very stimulating discussion. Two points were particularly interesting here:

  • In many application areas, the topic of customer journeys is high on the agenda – which confirms the current trend.  
  • It is essential to develop software for users – which was also a consensus.

The evening was dedicated to Industrial IoT. As a moderator, I hosted a discussion with representatives from various enterprises and software companies, such as Miele, Dürr Dental, Codecentric or akquinet. An intensive discussion around the predominant topics of the industry 4.0 took place here. In addition to the choice of the control electronics or the wireless standard, this also includes questions as to whether an IoT solution should be operated in a cloud. The reasons for solutions in a cloud are of course the convenience and the relatively efficient and simple scalability with regard to the number of “things” to be managed. On the other hand, managing the software on your own servers (on-premise) means that confidential product or customer data really won’t leave your premises. The discussion has confirmed my assessment that both approaches have their advantages in practice and are applied accordingly.

One of my personal highlights at this year’s building IoT was a negative hit list of IoT products, so-called IoT failures: products that have massive security gaps, such as open data interfaces. Some “classic” vulnerabilities were already known, such as unaltered standard passwords that allow data misuse. Others gaps really surprised me: such as a smoke detector of a well-known brand, which is already equipped with a microphone (?!) as standard, which in turn allows unwanted monitoring in living rooms.

Why is there a microphone in a smoke detector?  We can’t say that for sure, at least it’s not in the customer’s interest and causes a massive loss of trust in technology. And that is precisely the point: acceptance of new technologies requires trust. And this is becoming more and more important with increasing digitalization.

20 years of PLM: Why do many still doubt the benefits?

In the meantime, I can look back on several years of consulting for Product Life Cycle Management. A topic whose popularity has fluctuated considerably over the years and is currently on the rise again in the wake of digital transformation.

Despite the increasing attention for PLM again, I notice that the term continues to have a large, cumbersome, tedious, and uneconomical taste. Amazing, because the effort that many companies put into ERP projects, for example, was and is significantly higher in most cases. Nevertheless, the necessity and benefits of – expensive – ERP projects are discussed, but rarely questioned, see Haribo and Lidl.

How do these different perceptions come about? One explanation could be that the benefits of PLM for management and employees in companies have not been sufficiently exploited over the years. This was mainly due to the fact that the scope and visibility of PLM projects in companies was often very limited.

A closer look shows that many of the earlier PLM implementations were in fact PDM implementations. PDM, Product Data Management, focuses on product descriptive data, primarily CAD models and drawings. “PLM” was therefore limited to the core areas of product development, very often even to Mechanical Design. Although beeing avilable in some PLM solutions for years, Change Management, Document Management, Project Management, cross-departmental collaboration or communication with external parties have not been used. Instead, solutions based on Excel, Outlook, the file system or SharePoint were often created on their own. Tools that everyone in the company knows. And for those one can very easily find someone to “optimize” these tools by macro programming. In addition to that, the negative attitude towards PLM was certainly fuelled by the overloaded, highly compressed “engineering user interfaces” of the 1st and 2nd PLM product generations.

So it’s no surprise that PLM was seen in the company as an expensive, less useful and exotic application!

In the current PLM renaissance, companies now have every opportunity to learn from the deficits of the past and to take advantage of the impressive potential of Product Lifecycle Management. Many obsolete and discontinued PDM and PLM solutions are currently or soon to be replaced by modern 3rd generation PLM platforms, which also support the use cases around the Digital Twin and the Internet of Things. They breathe life into the PLM idea by effectively and efficiently supporting processes across phases, departments and company boundaries. New, web-based HTML-5 user interfaces significantly increase acceptance among all user groups in the company by making even complex relationships clearer and handling them more efficient.

Now there is a chance to realize “real” Product Lifecycle Management! Against the background of new, digital business models, which put the use phase of products much more in the foreground, this becomes all the more important. PLM solutions play a central role here, as they lay the foundation for data relating to the Digital Twin.

But in the end, hard facts also count when it comes to benefits and ROI: If PLM is actually used company-wide with all its possibilities, high economies of scale quickly result from the significant minimization of non-value-adding activities. This alone often enables a return on investment after just one year. Regardless of the additional revenue potential from new, data-driven business models that PLM will enable in the future.

The Digital Twin and Quantum Physics

New topics must be sorted with suitable terms. They make communication efficient, because in the best case the sender does not have to explain things from scratch.

The term Product Lifecycle Management was a fairly good way of doing this. You remember: “From the cradle to the grave” and so on. But as the Germans are, they go to the bottom of everything and even deeper. Over the years, there have been plenty of challenging definitions, many of them, which have not helped much.

Here we go again, I thought while reading a recent article The Digital Twin Theory. The authors on the beginnings of their work: “On the other hand, the idea of ‘Digital Twin Theory’ matured during a random contact with quantum physics…: From the point of view of quantum physics, electrons are located in several places simultaneously… It seemed exciting to examine whether these properties could also be assumed for digital twins”.

OK, the freedom of science is a great asset, and original thinkers are in demand. But please don’t be too original. That something is not wrong is not enough, right? It should also be somewhat helpful.

Why the fuss? The Digital Twin is a beautiful, simple picture to understand the potential behind the Internet of Things. It would be a pity if this were lost according to the motto “Why just when you can make it complicated?”

And by the way, the English Wikipedia says: “A digital twin is a digital replica of a … physical entity…”