What's the next big thing? According to IBM, it's not one thing. It's five. Based on an online "InnovationJam" it held involving more than 150,000 people from 104 countries, Big Blue says that in the next five years, we will see such things as remote access healthcare, a 3D version of the Internet, real-time speech translation, the ability to micromanage the environment, and mobile phones that will come close to "reading our minds."
IBM says that work under way now, including some it is doing, will pave the way to these five developments. In healthcare, for example, IBM says that advances in wireless technology coupled with the ability to securely capture sensitive medical data will enable the movement of healthcare information from doctors' offices to wherever patients happen to be. The emergence of a 3D Internet will aid remote healthcare as well as foster interactive education and consumer goods buying. One more example: Starting with so-called "presence" technology, mobile phones will evolve into devices that can continually learn about your preferences and needs.
Is IBM indulging in science fiction? I don't think so. In fact, I think that these five technology predictions, if they should come to pass even in part, could play a significant role in manufacturing in the years ahead.
Access to data via wireless technology can be applied to any field, not just healthcare. Today, many manufacturers I speak with are clambering for greater visibility into their operations. Not only do they want greater visibility into materials availability, where things are in the production cycle, and the state of their equipment, they also want to be able to take action on that information to correct a problem or make an adjustment.
Thanks to the communications and software technologies available today, manufacturers are already making headway in improving what they can see and what they can do in their operations. But just imagine something bigger. Just imagine, based on what IBM is saying, being able to walk through your factory in Shanghai, for example, in 3D over the Internet while you are sitting at your desk in Cleveland and then, in real time, confer with your supervisor on a problem and fix it together. That's real globalization, baby!
And you might even be able to do this with your cell phone. IBM says that it and Norway's biggest telecommunications group are testing technology to enable networks to learn about users' whereabouts and preferences as they commute and do other things.
The point of these five innovations — and they are just five out of many — is that there is a tremendous amount of work going on now across the technological landscape to improve performance by orders of magnitude. Innovation is on the march in networks, software, hardware, storage, and in other technologies, as well as in how they are applied on the plant floor, at the enterprise business level, within the supply chain, and for product design and development.
My sense is that we are on the cusp of a major new era in technology that will make what we are using today seem pretty crude. The era ahead will become known as the humanistic era in technology. It will be a time when technology will serve people in ways we have only dreamed of.
What's your view of technological things to come? Write to me at Dbrousell@thomaspublishing.com.