As the tragedy of flight MH370 unfolded over the first few days the pain and suffering of those most exposed to the many uncertainties surrounding their loved ones’ fate was compounded by the inability of the airline to demonstrate any coherent understanding of events.
Even at this early stage many commentators reflected that in today’s interconnected world even the humble hiker or loan sailor is expected to afford a device that sends a signal pinpointing their exact position when activated, or should a catastrophic episode occur then have the device send the position automatically and repeatedly.
Almost all transport companies not only know the exact position of each vehicle (and its contents) but also its average speed, direction, mechanical condition and the estimated time of arrival. In addition, by integrating this information with its other operational systems they can also identify and match new pick up requirements to maximize the overall efficiency of the operation.
So for many people familiar with the low cost of devices that have two way GIS reporting, the very idea that an airline would operate a plane overseas where the reporting of its position could be compromised by a pilot or hijacker started to raise questions of due diligence, unnecessary risk and corporate accountability.
The wider implications for all the other parties across multiple countries who are also impacted by operating aircraft with such levels of uncertainty also become apparent when such a dramatic and unfortunate event occurs. The time, effort and money spent, often over many years, trying to establish what happened after a catastrophic event and then rectifying any systemic problem across the industry is huge and as we have been warned, often still leaves unanswered questions.
The introduction of tamperproof automatic emergency beacons reporting GIS details on all flights would undoubtedly contribute a great deal of meaningful value to everyone involved when a plane experiences an event.
But as with all new technology that has an interconnected and therefore interdependent nature which creates some level of disruption, there has to be a proven demonstrable value to every party whose adoption is critical to a successful and meaningful outcome.
Many industries can vouch that without a clear value proposition to each party that is sufficient to overcome the resistance of adoption, the critical level of adoption will not occur regardless of the merits or cost of any given technology. For example, it would appear equally inexcusable from a patient’s viewpoint that a clinician would make a diagnosis or prescribe medications and procedures without access to even minimal medical records. But this is actually the normal state of affairs and countless attempts to achieve the adoption of e-health records to reverse this have failed despite massive expenditure on infrastructure to interconnect the multiple parties.
Over the following weeks commentators started to familiarize themselves with some of the technological services that all new aircraft have and some airlines use, that enable the real time reporting of the performance of the aircraft. Questions eventually arose as to why some airlines regarded the cost of this reporting to be justifiable from an operational perspective whilst others did not.
The heat of this debate on resistance to change centres around issues, such as who owns or has access to the raw data and who has the rights to the analytics of any individual piece of equipment, such as an engine, to more importantly the entire overview of everything, captured and analyzed. This is because the commercial value of intellectual property grows exponentially as the sources of raw data points increases to a given tipping point where the analysis of everything becomes possible.
So not only would this provide a more valuable retrospective record of events and operational efficiency but it would also provide real time analytics from the vast amount of complex interdependencies of each flight and even generate predictions or warnings to the crew if a known pattern of conditions were to occur.
The cost and development time associated with joining up so many systems and then making sense of all the data has, in the past, greatly inhibited airlines and manufacturers from implementing the notion of joining everything up.
This new value equation is starting to change with the emergence of new powerful cloud based platforms that deliver the long awaited notion that has been around for some years called the Internet of Things. The basic idea is that any electronic “thing” can have its own internet address and therefore can be connected to all other things with some good central intelligence analyzing and orchestrating events and outcomes.
With the advent of cloud computing a very impressive array of new platforms have entered the market that can not only link these things (devices) up but also interconnect with other operational business systems and clouds.
This fusion of data can be exposed to some powerful analytics that can deal with unstructured as well as more conventional structured data in real time. Not only does this remove the need for building conventional data warehouses where reporting is normally retrospective, but it can also provide high levels of operational intelligence delivered to multiple parties via dashboards that delve the knowledge required from a given roles perspective.
This evolution of the internet will undoubtedly lower the cost of connecting everything up to acceptable levels from an operational perspective. However, the barriers and inhibitors will likely be similar to other industries where not only a culture of control and fiefdom power will have to be addressed but also the vexed task of identifying and managing risk, liabilities, and the value of new types of IP will have to be determined in a collaborative manner.
Perhaps the ongoing analysis of the missing flight will focus public attention on the immediate need to get the airline industry at least en par with a haulage (truck) or logistics company’s operations. At the same time the intense scrutiny by consumers and governing bodies may also challenge the airline industry to overcome the barriers to join up all the electronic “things” on the aircraft for reporting and start the journey towards becoming a knowledge-oriented industry.
As with other sectors like mining, logistics, banking, health and transport who have already started this journey, the aviation industry could eventually reach the point where it would acquire valuable knowledge harvested from the raw data being connected to everything.
The initial value proposition would probably centre around reducing the pain and risks that have been publicly scrutinized relating to resolving what happened to flight MH370
But it’s very likely that the ability to leverage the operational value from becoming interconnected to everything will also come into focus. This would lead towards the newfound ability to then predict outcomes and events via powerful analytic tools which would eventually help resolve the core root problem facing every airline which is the ability to purchase and operate new aircraft and remain sustainable as a business.
A very good example of an emerging platform whose architecture embraces the notion that not only things but other systems and clouds will also become interconnected is ThingWorks.
I have done some evaluation of what verifiable and meaningful commercial and public value would occur by connecting up everything in the transport sector using an environment with the similar capabilities of ThingWorks. Based upon the demonstrable degree of value this can generate I would expect to see a similar focus on the aviation sector over the coming months from the simple but profound act of joining things up to everything.
Link to a related article on the Internet of Thing McKinsey Quarterly
Link to PDF white paper Internet of Things : Applications and Challenges in Technology and Standardization
Even at this early stage many commentators reflected that in today’s interconnected world even the humble hiker or loan sailor is expected to afford a device that sends a signal pinpointing their exact position when activated, or should a catastrophic episode occur then have the device send the position automatically and repeatedly.
Almost all transport companies not only know the exact position of each vehicle (and its contents) but also its average speed, direction, mechanical condition and the estimated time of arrival. In addition, by integrating this information with its other operational systems they can also identify and match new pick up requirements to maximize the overall efficiency of the operation.
So for many people familiar with the low cost of devices that have two way GIS reporting, the very idea that an airline would operate a plane overseas where the reporting of its position could be compromised by a pilot or hijacker started to raise questions of due diligence, unnecessary risk and corporate accountability.
The wider implications for all the other parties across multiple countries who are also impacted by operating aircraft with such levels of uncertainty also become apparent when such a dramatic and unfortunate event occurs. The time, effort and money spent, often over many years, trying to establish what happened after a catastrophic event and then rectifying any systemic problem across the industry is huge and as we have been warned, often still leaves unanswered questions.
The introduction of tamperproof automatic emergency beacons reporting GIS details on all flights would undoubtedly contribute a great deal of meaningful value to everyone involved when a plane experiences an event.
But as with all new technology that has an interconnected and therefore interdependent nature which creates some level of disruption, there has to be a proven demonstrable value to every party whose adoption is critical to a successful and meaningful outcome.
Many industries can vouch that without a clear value proposition to each party that is sufficient to overcome the resistance of adoption, the critical level of adoption will not occur regardless of the merits or cost of any given technology. For example, it would appear equally inexcusable from a patient’s viewpoint that a clinician would make a diagnosis or prescribe medications and procedures without access to even minimal medical records. But this is actually the normal state of affairs and countless attempts to achieve the adoption of e-health records to reverse this have failed despite massive expenditure on infrastructure to interconnect the multiple parties.
Over the following weeks commentators started to familiarize themselves with some of the technological services that all new aircraft have and some airlines use, that enable the real time reporting of the performance of the aircraft. Questions eventually arose as to why some airlines regarded the cost of this reporting to be justifiable from an operational perspective whilst others did not.
The heat of this debate on resistance to change centres around issues, such as who owns or has access to the raw data and who has the rights to the analytics of any individual piece of equipment, such as an engine, to more importantly the entire overview of everything, captured and analyzed. This is because the commercial value of intellectual property grows exponentially as the sources of raw data points increases to a given tipping point where the analysis of everything becomes possible.
So not only would this provide a more valuable retrospective record of events and operational efficiency but it would also provide real time analytics from the vast amount of complex interdependencies of each flight and even generate predictions or warnings to the crew if a known pattern of conditions were to occur.
The cost and development time associated with joining up so many systems and then making sense of all the data has, in the past, greatly inhibited airlines and manufacturers from implementing the notion of joining everything up.
This new value equation is starting to change with the emergence of new powerful cloud based platforms that deliver the long awaited notion that has been around for some years called the Internet of Things. The basic idea is that any electronic “thing” can have its own internet address and therefore can be connected to all other things with some good central intelligence analyzing and orchestrating events and outcomes.
With the advent of cloud computing a very impressive array of new platforms have entered the market that can not only link these things (devices) up but also interconnect with other operational business systems and clouds.
This fusion of data can be exposed to some powerful analytics that can deal with unstructured as well as more conventional structured data in real time. Not only does this remove the need for building conventional data warehouses where reporting is normally retrospective, but it can also provide high levels of operational intelligence delivered to multiple parties via dashboards that delve the knowledge required from a given roles perspective.
This evolution of the internet will undoubtedly lower the cost of connecting everything up to acceptable levels from an operational perspective. However, the barriers and inhibitors will likely be similar to other industries where not only a culture of control and fiefdom power will have to be addressed but also the vexed task of identifying and managing risk, liabilities, and the value of new types of IP will have to be determined in a collaborative manner.
Perhaps the ongoing analysis of the missing flight will focus public attention on the immediate need to get the airline industry at least en par with a haulage (truck) or logistics company’s operations. At the same time the intense scrutiny by consumers and governing bodies may also challenge the airline industry to overcome the barriers to join up all the electronic “things” on the aircraft for reporting and start the journey towards becoming a knowledge-oriented industry.
As with other sectors like mining, logistics, banking, health and transport who have already started this journey, the aviation industry could eventually reach the point where it would acquire valuable knowledge harvested from the raw data being connected to everything.
The initial value proposition would probably centre around reducing the pain and risks that have been publicly scrutinized relating to resolving what happened to flight MH370
But it’s very likely that the ability to leverage the operational value from becoming interconnected to everything will also come into focus. This would lead towards the newfound ability to then predict outcomes and events via powerful analytic tools which would eventually help resolve the core root problem facing every airline which is the ability to purchase and operate new aircraft and remain sustainable as a business.
A very good example of an emerging platform whose architecture embraces the notion that not only things but other systems and clouds will also become interconnected is ThingWorks.
I have done some evaluation of what verifiable and meaningful commercial and public value would occur by connecting up everything in the transport sector using an environment with the similar capabilities of ThingWorks. Based upon the demonstrable degree of value this can generate I would expect to see a similar focus on the aviation sector over the coming months from the simple but profound act of joining things up to everything.
Link to a related article on the Internet of Thing McKinsey Quarterly
Link to PDF white paper Internet of Things : Applications and Challenges in Technology and Standardization
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