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.  

Virtual “Situation Room” for Industry

We are not talking about just large Operational Centers but as pointed out over the last couple of weeks these are coming into play more and more especially in Mining, Upstream, and refining, but realistically it is just a part of the new “Virtual Situation Room” that enables the “Flexible Operational Team ”.

The key aspects of a “Virtual Situation Room”:

·         Operational Activities are Transformational across the "day in the life" of the worker, who does not need to be tied to a particular location to execution that activity

·         Collaboration and Interaction is Natural across the Operational Team

·         Awareness and context is native so situational awareness and decisions can be made dramatically faster, workers are not monitoring systems, they brought aware of growing situations.

·         Team work is natural, learning is natural across the team

·         Embedded operational practices enable Operational Innovation as a part of the operational culture.

·         Alignment of the different levels of loops in the industrial landscape are aligned

·         Unification/ alignment through federation is core across plant systems, and multi plant

The concept of the “Virtual Situation Room” can be seen in the diagram, but is based on unified industrial landscape which we use the Enterprise Control platform as the foundation to align the different levels of industrial operations, as well as put things in context of the workers activities in a timely manner. This enables a harmony of automatic loops at the control, operations layer and at the business layer, but with the critical human intervention and decision in a timely manner. We all heard of “Lights out Manufacturing” the concept of no or minimal people on a site and the plant can run, this has been proven to be not practical as an “agile business” requires business and operational decisions to be made based on the different vectors effecting the business today. Such as price, energy, safety, environment, and supply with minimal inventory requiring a very reactive system, the human brain is the best device for making these more complex decisions.

As you can see in the diagram you have workers in and outside the plant who work through the appropriate device to access the information, in context and understand the required actions or best practices available to make the action in a timely manner. They are able to interact, drill in, access experience, and interact, and play out into the future understands the effect of a decision.

This concept while looking new terms is the essence of the Enterprise Control, and what I have been discussing for the last 3 months, you should have realised that the empowerment of the operational workers (no matter role or situation) to make timely decisions is the key.

To achieve this we need “loosely coupled and tightly aligned” plants, applications, people, systems, assets. This will require systems like ArchestrA a “peer to peer” model and architecture, to evolve even further to an even more federating system. But it will require a broader thinking in implementations as well.

There are many aspects to explore within the alignment of plants, key is we not saying a MEGA system, we a federation of many systems into aligned operational system that is manageable and sustainable. Next couple of weeks I want start discussing MEGA vs federated, and what happened to interoperability with the enterprise, as this area too has evolved in thinking a long way in the last 4 years.