Overcoming “islands of information”

There is a tendency for promoters of new technology advances and ICT concepts to focus too narrowly on their own novelty and innovation. This is clear from the continued variable levels of success and acceptance experienced in the introduction of RFID technology since its arrival on the scene.

Now the “Internet of Things” paradigm offers further new business and application opportunities, but it also seems to suffer from over simplification of the issues: “The idea [Internet of Things] is as simple as its application is difficult. If all cans, books, shoes or parts of cars are equipped with minuscule identifying devices, daily life on our planet will undergo a transformation. Things like running out of stock or wasted products will no longer exist as we will know exactly what is being consumed on the other side of the globe. Theft will be a thing of the past as we will know where a product is at all times. The same applies to parcels lost in the post”. This sweeping statement assumes that the technology is supreme, yet it ignores the fact that robust operation relies upon sound processes that are always strictly adhered to. You also must have noticed that it implicates a number of elements of lifecycle management.
My point so far is that innovators often do not see beyond the boundaries of their own solution; the author of the preceding quotation ignores mankind’s ability to bypass all kinds of processes if it suits his own selfish purpose. For example, a forklift truck may be equipped with technology for identifying the goods that it carries; but more often than not, the driver is able to switch off the RFID or barcode readers and on-board computer that perform the identification and move goods “anonymously”, thus completely negating the value of such a system. Likewise an interesting looking parcel might be “removed” from the sorting and therefore tracking process.
In the initial stages of the EU PROMISE Project, there was a strong focus on the objective to devise a Product Embedded Information Device, or PEID, on which could be accumulated information about the use of a product or object throughout its entire life, beginning, middle and end. This is quite harmonious with the idea of the “minuscule identifying devices” mentioned in the earlier quotation. However once the applicability of the PEID concept to the requirements of the 11 industrial PROMISE demonstrators was analysed, its suitability as a persistent or only information store began to be in doubt.
 

What this highlighted is that there is also a tendency for new concepts, technologies, and infrastructures to create new “islands of information” which are isolated from other information sources, often creating their own protocol for information exchange, in conflict with the Closed Loop Lifecycle Management (CL2M) objective of “closing the information loops across all phases of all kinds of lifecycles”.

What the PROMISE project demonstrators also taught us was that each one of them included many already existing “islands of information” such as ERP systems, warehouse management systems (WMS), process control systems, field databases, sensors, and of course, at beginning of life (BOL), the “traditional” PLM applications. It was necessary to integrate information from such multiple sources in order to close the information loops and create product knowledge from that information.
The PROMISE Project initially defined the PROMISE Messaging Interface (PMI) as an interface between the PROMISE PDKM/DSS systems and the PROMISE middleware layer. The breakthrough in overcoming the islands of information came through the realisation that the PMI could be used as a common exchange interface between different application types and different information sources. This did not mean modification of every existing information source to support the new interface, but was achieved by creating adapter routines.
The importance of the PMI and PROMISE architecture as an open infrastructure for information exchange across lifecycle phases and a wide variety of applications has been recognised by The Open Group. If you are interested in “overcoming islands of information” and participating in the further development of open standards for Closed Loop Lifecycle Management (CL2M), then please either contact me or register your interest at www.opengroup.org/promise .

If you have any comments or questions related to this article, please post them on my blog.

 

David Potter is Chief Technical Officer, Promise Innovation International Oy., and former Chairman of the Project Steering Board of the EU PROMISE Project.