What are Digital Twins ?

Digital Transformation has brought in all the new concepts and technologies at the hands of consumers and businesses alike.

Digital Twin is one of them. It is a virtual image of your machine or asset, maintained throughout the life cycle and easily accessible at any time. It involves internet of things connected devices generating real time data in Big Data platform.  This data is further analyzed in the cloud.

With a digital twin, machine manufacturers are able to use the power of digitalization to achieve improved efficiency and quality. This approach helps ensure optimized machine design and smooth operation.

Today, machine intelligence and connectivity to the cloud allows a huge potential of digital twin technology for companies in a variety of industries

Digital Twin allows the asset operator to predict precisely when maintenance will be required based on the unique conditions, experienced by that particular asset.

GE has built a digital wind farm collecting data from turbine sensors, which uses big data and the Industrial Internet to drive down the cost of renewable electricity.

Here are the several advantages of Digital Twin technology:

·        Explore the impact of various design alternatives

·        Do simulations and testing to ensure that product designs will meet requirement

·        Understand how a projected change to a manufacturing process might impact costs or schedule

·        see the current operating status along with any recent alarms and maintenance performed on a machine

·        be instructed on how to perform proper maintenance procedures, for the specific problem they’re addressing

·        Preventing the failure, or anticipating it and doing the required maintenance before failure occurs, can shorten outages

Digital twins give airlines a better idea of what happens when a jet flies through a flock of birds, or through dust storms in hot environments.

The digital twin, combined with advanced analytical tools and machine learning, will provide a platform that changes the traditional way of how we look at the analysis of asset’s condition and performance.

It will enable a new generation of advanced predictive analytics.

Top 10 tips for Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation is changing the way customers think & demand new products or services. There is so much discussed in various forums as to how to go digital. No business will undergo digital transformation without making any mistakes. 

Here are my top 10 tips to make it successful.

Evangelize Digital internally, externally and celebrate even the small successes!!

It is extremely important to evangelize the digital within the organization and to the external stakeholders – employees, partners, suppliers, customers.

Celebrate each and every small success to make it visible at all levels to increase the moral of the team and show the value to leadership.

First assess your organization digital maturity, then identify digital trends impacting your industry and act!!

Getting to know where you stand on the digital maturity is extremely important so that you can create a roadmap as to where you want to go. Identify important trends in your industry and plug the gaps.

Deal first with Organization's internal resistance to change, for Digital Transformation!!

There are various organizational politics which will hold you back or stall your digital transformation efforts. Resolve all the internal politics and resistance to change before embarking on bigger journey. Culture change is absolutely essential.

Identify what Customer need from your service, not what your organization thinks they need. Transform accordingly.

Find out what your customer wants in real sense than assuming what they want. Once you know that, prioritize the unmet needs of the customer and take them head on.




Work with each senior stakeholder, to quantify the extent to which their business function will benefit from the digitization

If you work in silos, then you will miss the rigor and advantage of digitization. Get each and every senior stakeholder by your side by explaining them the benefit to their function. Some companies have hired Chief Digital Officer to get organizational alignment.

Recruit right people with right technology for success!!

It all depends on how expert your team is. If you don’t have right people on the job, then hire them from outside. Technical expertise plays a significant role in digital transformation.

Avoid the cost of trying to do it internally and then learning, bring in the expert to do the job!!

Ensure you have time on your side. If you keep on learning by own mistakes you will miss the tide and cost a business. Get an expert from outside if he/she is not available internally.

Treat Digital as a new born baby who takes over a year to walk on its own. Have patience to see the results!!

Never expect the returns immediately. Digital Transformation requires proper nurturing like a baby hence set the expectations of senior management of RoI.

Establish and communicate a clear vision of digital transformation for the business, and individual stakeholders.

 

Have a proper vision defined for organization and communicate it to all the levels of hierarchy to ensure everyone is on same page.

Fail Fast, Be flexible and prepare to change your pace/direction if needed.

Finally be flexible and be happy to fail fast but learn quickly and move on to new ideas to try out.

Top 5 uses of Internet of Things!!

While many organizations are creating tremendous value from the IoT, some organizations are still struggling to get started.  It has now become one of the key element of Digital Transformation that is driving the world in many respects.

It is really a time to look beyond the hype and get real about Internet of Things.

Just putting IoT in place may not help organizations but applying analytics is extremely essential for the success of IoT systems for better decision making.

Here are top 5 areas where IoT is making the disruption:

1.     Wellness - IoT helps continuously monitor the patients and symptoms to early detection, diagnosis & accelerate breakthrough drug development. Wearables like Fitbit, Apple watch, and Samsung have all created new revenue streams from giving their users workout analytics and the ability to set daily health goals. Mobile apps around wellness have been around for years now to track your sleep, weight, nutrition, and more. 

2.     Safety and Security – Sensor based monitoring of elevators, escalators improves travelers safety at airports.  Sensors, which are much cheaper these days, can let you know whether or not your water pipes are leaking or are about to burst. The drones will allow the handful of rangers to quickly investigate reports of fires, than traveling into remote parts of the jungle over unpaved roads. Connected cars allows vehicle diagnostics and real time intervention from technicians for better safety.

3.     Marketing – with use of IoT, businesses can reach to right customer at at right time using geofencing. It is a virtual field in which apps are capable of sending alerts depending on your entrance or exit from a vicinity. With geofencing, your shopping experience can be more hyper-personalized to what you’re looking for. 1-800-Flowers covered the area around jewelry stores that were close to their flower shops to encourage customers to buy flowers with jewelry. Amazon Go is Amazon’s store concept without a check-out line. 

4.     Smart Cities & Smart Infrastructure – IoT is helping build the infrastructure which is really smart in quick response and improves the life of residents. Real time weather response systems, better traffic management, waste management, and optimal utilities management helps governments around the world.  Smart Homes helps people more peaceful life.

5.     Energy, Aviation & Manufacturing – Using IoT to do predictive maintenance can reduce downtime up to 50%. Companies like GE have put up 100s of sensors across the plant that provide round-the-clock monitoring and diagnostics of existing hardware. IoT enabled engines consume almost 15% less fuel than average jet engines, and also have reduced emissions and noise.  Smart grids helps in increasing the reliability and efficiency of grid, avoid thefts.

In future IoT will continue to enhance our lives more and more by tracking our needs in real time giving opportunity to businesses to react accordingly and immediately.

Cybersecurity in Digital age

You must have heard about the global cyberattack of WannaCry ransomware in over 200 countries. It encrypted all the files on the machine and asked for payment. Ransomware, which demands payment after launching a cyber-attack, has become a rising trend among hackers looking for a quick payout.

Every day it seems another news breaks about cyber-criminals hacking in and stealing data, & information. Private companies, government agencies, hospitals…no one is immune. Cybersecurity is no longer buried in the tech section of organizations, newspapers and websites - its front-page news.

With the penetration of the digital movement, cyber-attacks have also doubled year over year, making businesses and government sites more vulnerable.

In simple terms cybersecurity is use of digital technologies to protect company networks, computers and programs from unauthorized access and subsequent damage.

In recent times, every organization has launched a “go-digital” initiative. This has led to explosion of connected environments.

The growing mobility trend has sparked a rapid growth of endpoints that must be secured, and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) programs mean that employees could be accessing sensitive data on unsecured devices.

The prevalence of cloud based services and third party data storing has opened up new areas of risk.

As businesses adopt the new technologies like Big Data, Analytics, IoT & Mobility, the focus must be on how to safeguard the data spread across devices and cloud.

Cybersecurity must be a key factor during your journey to digitally transforming your business, just as you would ensure that your offices, brick-and-mortar store has locks and security systems of the highest quality, your digital storefront must have the same levels of security. If consumers do not trust these digital storefront with their data, or if that trust is broken because of a data breach, the cost to rebuild that trust is incredibly high.

The best way to protect yourself is to be suspicious of unsolicited emails and always type out web addresses yourself rather than clicking on links.

There are different types of attacks we have seen so far:

·        Hackers target the software vulnerabilities that are yet to be discovered  and patched

·        Attack on mobile devices: malwares designed specifically for smartphones to steal data

·        Data leakage: hackers steal the data by interrupting the traffic between organization and cloud environments

·        Programming: hackers use malicious code on any server that gets replicated and allow them to delete, steal data

There are multiple ways to combat these cyber-attacks:

·        Network defense: detect unwarranted traffic e.g. someone communicating with malicious host, malware entry into the network, unauthorized data transfer

·        Detect user access violations: misuse of user access within the system, ensure proper authentications, use of antivirus, malware to prevent steal user information

·        Mobile device protection: detect unauthorized devices or prevent hackers from compromising individual devices.

·        Protect data in motion & rest: ensure data transfers protected within various environments

·        Investment in securing IoT devices – today with everything is connected it is extremely important to secure all access points.

Today with machine learning organizations are in a very good position to know what users are doing that can affect the network and increase risk. Artificial Intelligence is used to constantly learn new malware behaviors and recognize how viruses may mutate to try and get around security systems.

Traditional IT security practices like network monitoring and segmentation will become even more critical as businesses and governments deploy IoT devices.

Recent events have highlighted the growing need for enhanced cybersecurity.