Activities Behavior Starts to become Reality
As I flex back from South Africa last week I was listening to an interview on innovation, and there was interview with Microsoft Manager for Australia, and she talked about the change in culture they have implemented in the Australian offices. Switching to Activity based officers meaning that no one has a permanent seat or desk, you go in a morning and select a desk based upon the activity you are doing that day. As you may be on the road, you may be do activities that do not need you in the office, you maybe at other offices. She talked about it as a significant change in culture but it allows agility and focus to adapt your day and role based upon activities not a role.
This is the same I see in my own life and how I have discussed realtive to the Flexible Operational Team in the industrial space, these can only be achieved when people and the culture support an Activity Based thinking and Approach. In South Africa last week, I continued to see the evolution towards this thinking in mining, and food and beverage as I spoke with customers, many do not realise they on this path, yet their actions and ideas are heading in this direction.

This is no different in my life every day, I talk about my work life being in my back pack, with my lap top, IPad, mobile cell, and mobile  wireless hotspot. Based upon the activities I have that day, meetings, calls, site visits, PowerPoint presentation preparations, technology knowledge catch up, interviews,  strategy brainstorming, these are distinct activities require different modes of thinking, I choose the best environment and location for doing these.

This is very different to the way I worked 10 to 15 years ago in an office and defined role, today my activities and role change daily based on the situation and achieving our business goals and the contribution I can make each day to that, certainly my agility, and effective working time and delivery has increased.

This is the same for the industrial world and the changing approach I am seeing in the industrial place, where companies are going to the Flexible Operational Team, as mentioned a couple of weeks ago, can only be truly achieved when people are working against activities vs roles. Key to evolution is that there will be a management of activities, both planned and reactionary, which will be acted upon by the best person, or team in order to respond as fast as possible. This does not mean that people are assigned to a certain interface/ roles,  they should be able to go to best location in the plant in order to execute that activity. This is why the whole operational control is evolving to a an aligned set of systems, that allow people to access, understand and take action in the most effective place possible.

 I was in South Africa at the annual conference there, as usual I saw a lot of innovation, and thought leadership, building on what I have seen in Western Australia in the last 6 months. The big discussion was around effectively using the human asset, through "time to Experience shortening" knowledge access, and actions, and collberation.

 But you see this continued evolution from:

Applications        to        Roles        to         Activities

Activities require a change in thinking:

·         How align information and actions from different systems to enable a co-ordinated and assignable activity.

·         How the UI changes to activities with the information, ability drill and understand and then the associated actions, which may require multiple people and certain procedure.

·         Plus a culture that allows roles and people to be flexible to take on different activities in a must more agile process.

I will expect to see this activity thinking and approach accelerating over the next year but as I have said this means aligned systems, access, and contextualization in order to make it fully effective.  

How Pre Context/ Pre Normalizing vs Traditional Post Context DATA/ INFORMATION is critical to Operational Empowerment

Over the last couple weeks I have ranted on about what is happening that makes this Operational Empowerment Revolution not a nice to have but a necessary in today’s changing/ rotating workforce.  Then I sit in a room and listen to people about “just put a historian in and capture the data we will use it latter to tune the plant”. Yet in the next breadth the comment and vision of operational execution/ excellence with procedures and MES like execution is discussed. I feel cold in the seat, as the vision is correct, the passion is there, but the immediate execution will put them down a path to constrain their ability to go to vision. 

So it was time to pipe up, and get up on the white board and enjoy myself in concepts and opportunity. The data centric model is not bad it works but it brings up shortfalls in ability to evolve to more proactive. I believe as the market moves more and more into all decisions in the NOW, traditional approaches to information systems will be good for analysis, tuning, and post actions, but that is not NOW.

As the worker no matter their role evolves every day to an increasingly Knowledge worker, performing actions and responsibilities beyond their traditional roles, the expectation is a more adaptive business. In the example above the CIO was describing a modern operational Now vision, yet applying a tradition post action solution. We have always heard the next step beyond intelligence and information is action, and this is so true, but the step beyond that is pre-emptive information/ condition and action in the NOW time frame.

The requirements for a information system today is seen in the diagram the key points are:

·   You capture the data as close to source as possible for data integrity

·   You validate (more that just bad data) but is the reading actually valid for the state of the process.

·    The data is then put in context in a “Living agent/ object etc” that can bring in validate, but also do calculation/ kpis etc and generate events. The data is effectively transformed into information that can be stored and triggered into immediate action, but initiating an alarm, or workflow.

·    The storage layer is the tradition historian which could be distributed or central, and could support Tiered  but in a one name space created the layer below in the plat model, providing unique names and context.

·   Operational extensions these are a series of programs/ modules which should extend the plant model with more information, valued context.

·    Then the unifying information model that is accessed and interacted with through rich set of content and analysis clients.

This is vs the traditional Historian approach that captures data un validated and structured and does post normalization.

The pre approach seems more accommodating to evolution, value and ability to take actions in the now, it is also less risk, using a combination of System Platform with the historian built in.

It is time to rethink based upon the “job to Be Done “ today, and the context of the job, the technologies are available!