How to manage the abundance of information

From a scarce commodity to abundance, information has always posed challenges to companies. Maija Nikula, Head of Enterprise Architecture, explains how the industrial internet may bring answers to some well-known problems companies are struggling with today.

Information has always posed a challenge to companies. Some years ago, information was a scarce commodity. Today, there is an abundance of information. In fact, we’re surrounded with so much information that it makes focusing on the right things more difficult than before. That’s quite a paradox.

So how should we go about tackling this issue? The basic principles of the industrial internet are based on the following questions: how to collect information, how to utilize the information collected and how to find the best competences? Basically, the industrial internet tries to solve the problematic of using and utilizing information.

Industrial internet will have an effect on information handling in every area of business. It’s not a concern for the CIO alone. It’s a concern for sales, marketing and finance – and, if the information is used wisely, it will have a positive effect on every area of business. Recent developments in digitalization have equipped us with tools and information which could help us to generate new sales leads and new innovations for marketing as well as make finance functions more efficient. Now, we just need to learn how to use these opportunities.

Enterprise architecture will play an important role in building the platform for the growth of the industrial internet in companies. But how does the industrial internet change enterprise architecture?

Tackling the three V’s of information

With industrial internet and big data, the amount and the structure of data have changed. This comes down to the three V’s of information: Volume, Velocity and Variety. All of these have increased with big data, bringing both challenges and possibilities to utilizing the information.

Sensor data, for example, has increased the volume of information. But the data also needs to be interpreted: when a device gives signals through the sensors to indicate that the device is wearing out, it’s not enough to determine that the device requires maintenance sometime in the future. What is needed instead is the capacity for real-time monitoring and the know-how to pin-point the key findings and set actions based on them.

This brings us to velocity. Data acquired should lead to rapid actions taken in order to get maintenance over immediately. It requires not only analytic tools but also the integration of those tools to ensure real-time analysis.

In event stream processing, the data is not just stored to a database, but analyzed when transferred from one place to another and necessary actions are taken based on that analysis. From an enterprise architect’s point of view, event stream processing is a world of its own, a whole new technology.

This is a challenge of data analytics as a whole: analyses are done constantly and the tools exist, but whether a company is able to take the right actions, that’s another question.

To be able to analyze the growing variety of information, we need to consider what internal resources are needed, partly from a technology point of view but most of all from an information analysis point of view.

From a technical point of view, in order to do this, companies should be able to make changes into existing systems as flexibly as possible. But there is also a need for people who have the competence to figure out how the business should be changed when data acquired suggests that it is needed.

That is why the process of using the analytic tools, integrating them and invocating this information is also a question of change management. The technology today enables faster decision making, but it also requires the ability to change existing operating models faster when required. The changes vary in size, but the key is the willingness to make changes and the ability to make them fast.

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