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Industrial data contextualization at scale

Shaping the future of your data culture with contextualization

 

My colleague and good friend Marko had interesting thought on Smart and Connected factories  and how to get data out of the complex factory floor systems and enable machine learning capabilities on Edge and Cloud . In this blog post I will try to open a bit more on data modeling and how to overcome a few typical pitfalls – that are not always only data related.

Creating super powers

Research and development (R&D) include activities that companies undertake to innovate and introduce new products and services. In many cases if company is big enough R&D is separate from other units and in some cases R is separated from D as well. We could call this as separation of concerns –  so every unit can 100% focus on their goals.

What separates R&D and Business unit ? Let’s first pause and think about what business is doing. A business unit is an organizational structure such as a department or team that produces revenues and is responsible for costs. Perfect so now we have company wide functions (R&D, business) to support being innovative and produce revenue.

Hmmm, something is still missing – how to scale digital solutions in a cost efficient way so we can have profit (row80) in good shape ? Way back in 1978 information technology (IT) was used first time. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines information technology as “the technology involving the development, maintenance, and use of computer systems, software, and networks for the processing and distribution of data.” One the IT functions is to provide services with cost efficiency on global scale.

Combine these super powers: business, R&D and IT we should produce revenue, be innovative and have the latest IT systems up and running to support company goals – in real life this is much more complex, welcome to the era of data driven product and services.

 

Understanding your organization structure 

To be data driven, the first thing is to actually look around in which maturity level my team and company is. There are so many nice models to choose from: functional, divisional, matrix, team, and networking.  Organizational structure can easily become a blocker in how to get new ideas to market quickly enough. Quite many times Conway’s law kicks in and software or automated systems end up “shaped like” the organizational structure they are designed in or designed for.

One example of Conway’s law in action, identified back in 1999 by UX expert Nigel Bevan, is corporate website design: Companies tend to create websites with structure and content that mirror the company’s internal concerns

When you look at your car dashboard, company web sites or circuit board of embedded systems, quite many times you can see Conway’s law in action. Feature teams, tribes, platform teams, enabler team or a component team – I am sure you have at least one of these to somehow try to tackle the problem of how an organization should be able to produce good enough products and services to market on time. Calling same thing with Squad(s) will not solve the core issue. Neither to copy one top-down driven model from Netflix to your industrial landscape.

 

Why does data contextualization matter?

Based on facts mentioned above, creating industrial data driven services is not easy. Imagine you push a product out to the market that is not able to gather data from usage. Other team is building a subscription based service for the same customers. Maybe someone already started to sell that to customers. This solution will not work because now we have a product out and not able to invoice customers from usage. Refactoring of organizations, code and platforms is needed to accomplish common goals together. A new Data Platform as such is not improving the speed of development automatically or making customers more engaged.

Contextualization means adding related information to any data in order to make it more useful. That does not mean data lake, our new CRM or MES. Industrial data is not just another data source on slides, creating contextual data enables to have the same language between different parties such as business and IT. 

A great solution will help you understand better what we have or how things work, it’s like a car you have never driven and still you feel that this is exactly how it should be even if it’s not close to your old vehicle at all. Industrial data assets are modeled in a certain way and that will enable common data models from floor to cloud, enabling scalable machine learning without varying data schema changes.

Our industrial AWS SiteWise data models for example are 100% compatible with modern data warehousing platforms like Solita Agile Data Engine out of the box. General blueprints of data models have failed in this industry many times, so please always look at your use case also from bottom up and not only the other way round.

Curiosity and open minded

I have been working on data for the last 20 years and on the industrial landscape half of that time. Now it’s great  to see how Nordics companies are embracing company culture change, talking about competence based organization, asking from consultants more than just a pair of hands and creating teams of superpowers.

How to get started on data contextualization ?

  1. Gather your team and check how much of time it will take to have one idea to customer (production) – is our current organization model supporting it ?
  2. Look models and approach that you might find useful like intro for data mesh or a  deep dive – the new paradigm you might want to mess with (and remember that what works for someone else might not be perfect to you)
  3. We can help with with AWS SiteWise for data contextualization. That specific service is used to create virtual representations of your industrial operation with AWS IoT SiteWise assets.

I have been working on all major cloud platforms and focusing on AWS.  Stay tuned for the next Blog post explaining how SiteWise is used for data contextualization. Let’s keep in touch and stay fresh minded.

Our Industrial data contextualization at scale Kickstart