The Innovation of Tech (IoT) = Let’s Make Things Better + Sense and Simplicity + Innovation and You

Dec 18, 2014
Sogeti Labs

Iot1DT Game’s 1st Half
Did you ever reflect on the immense difference in talking about Digital Transformation (DT), over the past 20 or so years? From 1994 on, the year that Tim Berners-Lee finally left CERN to start W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, Digital Transformation was a matter of Business Process Redesign, Reengineering & Improvement (BPR/I), of PC, browser and office suite wars, of e-mail, of Web search, of e-commerce, and of e-business. On a high level, I mean. Who could care less?

DT Game’s 2nd Half
10 years later, the start of the second half, saw the emergence of Web 2.0 in 2004. The DT game roughened. Enthusiasm and skepticism often clashed, but eventually Digital Transformation convincingly scored with the notion and practice of Social Business. From 2004 on, developments accelerated in Olympic 4-year periods as we know. Smartphones and tablets – uncommonly but catchily known as NYPD: Network Your Pet Device – kicked in from 2008 as app stores began to flourish. A new analytics era took off in 2012 with US President Obama’s landmark Big Data Initiative.

12016 will come next, with the Cloud being bound to become truly silver-lined as most IT spend will be in leased computing assets. And finally, an Internet of Things (IoT) or Everything (IoE) is scheduled to be up and running in 2020: for every consumer and industry alike. That alludes to nothing more than “whatever you can conceive beyond what we already digitally did achieve.” DUH!

Game Over?
Indeed today, at the end of the second half of our 20-year Digital Transformation game, the five SMACT forces you must have recognized above, are predictable enough to have a lasting combined impact on the economy and on our lifestyle. Does that mean the Grand DT Game is over? Far from that! In support and from a technology point of view, you would f.i. bring up the infinitely bigger IPv6 address space, loosely defined by this here message from the TCP/IP Guide:

Consider the IPv6 address space a huge box and the IPv4 address space a tiny one. Let the latter be a 1.6-inch square, then IPv6 would equal a square the size of our solar system.

IoT: a Revolution along Evolutionary Lines
WOW, this perfectly applies to our SMACT understanding of Cloud & Things. But – tiny detail – we are talking here of Internet instead of Web. Semantic as it may seem, that might be just a crucial observation. To me, the Web is something utterly coherent, well-architected and functionally planned, whereas the Internet is – just empty space! The size of our solar system, and then? What or who would live there? What goal would it function, et cetera?

To make my point, I once again repeat the last three mottos that Royal Dutch Philips chose to mark its mission: Let’s Make Things Better; Sense and Simplicity; Innovation and You. Together these could result in a true Triumph of Technology, the phrase that Philips used for decades during the 20th century to position itself.

It would mean a revolutionary IoT, and also a basically traditional Innovation of Technology along evolutionary lines, namely Entia Non Sunt Multiplicanda Praeter Necessitatem plus Simplex Sigilum Veri plus Homo Mensura.

Happy New Year!

About the author

SogetiLabs gathers distinguished technology leaders from around the Sogeti world. It is an initiative explaining not how IT works, but what IT means for business.

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