Believe the IoT Hype or Perish: Equipping Today’s Graduates for Tomorrow’s Tech
I recently attended the second annual Internet of Things World Forum in Chicago, IL. In the opening keynote presentation, Wim Elfrink, Cisco’s EVP of Industry Solutions and Chief Globalization Officer, referenced Gartner’s latest version of its“Hype Cycle,” noted that IoT (the Internet of Things) has climbed over the past year to its peak. Yet, on closer inspection, the enviable place IoT is enjoying within this technology-evolution framework is actually named the “peak of inflated expectations,” a precarious high point where individual dazzling success stories of early adopters and visionary speculation are outshining wider market reticence and slow early adoption. In the model, this magical time is usually followed by a “trough of disillusionment,” then — if the market responds favorably to second and third-generation tech — the “slope of enlightenment,” and finally — if wide market adoption takes place — a “plateau of productivity.”
The conference certainly provided many vivid illustrations of success and the potential of IoT, but will this fledgling industry make it through the inevitable coming trough, and climb “high and right” on the chart with predicted tens of billions of connected devices, as was enthusiastically espoused by Elfrink in his opening remarks?In Short, Should We Believe the Hype?
John Chambers, Chairman and CEO of Cisco, made it quite clear when I asked him whether he sees IoT as a rising tide that will float all economic boats, or more of a competitive, zero-sum game? His response was that in the connected future, there will be winners and losers as adoption of pervasive connectivity assumes a larger role in the future economic and social success of companies, cities, and even entire countries. Granted, Cisco is heavily invested in IoT and what they call IoE (Internet of Everything, which includes people) and is betting on its success, but the examples of companies and cities around the world that have embraced the idea of connectedness give us glimpses into its tremendous value. Let me share just a couple of telling examples presented to the Forum’s participants.
‘Smart’ Cities and Countries
Chicago and Barcelona were cited among the cities whose residents benefit from reduced crime, improved emergency services and better infrastructure enabled by real-time data fed by sensors throughout each city. (Incidentally, these cities hosted the last two IoT World Forums.) More and more cities from Brisbane, Australia to Moscow, Russia are implementing IoT in some way — transportation and parking, water and sewage management or municipal energy consumption. Among countries, we heard that the leaders are Israel (“the first truly digital state”), Germany, the United Kingdom, France, South Korea, Mexico and Saudi Arabia.
Rio Tinto: Operating in a Changing Landscape (Literally)
Many companies are adopting connectivity to optimize their operations with data they receive from equipment. In his keynote presentation called “Mining, Our Internet of ‘Big’ Things” John McGagh, Rio Tinto’s Head of Innovation, described how its Mine of the Future program has enabled the company to make its operations safer and more efficient. Mining changes the Earth’s landscape quite literally every day, making any existing maps inaccurate. Rio Tinto installed sensors on its vehicles and equipment to get a more precise picture of what’s happening on the ground, an improvement that lets the machines act as mobile sensor platforms and do the dangerous work in the mines, while humans supervise safely from a distance.
Another surprising benefit of this real-time data feed is the company’s ability to know precisely where operators have left expensive equipment and vehicles in the labyrinthine landscape of a mining operation that can be the size of a small city. Evidently that was a challenge in the past, as equipment that costs tens of millions of dollars in some cases was sometimes lost or misplaced. Now, sensors constantly communicate the equipment’s location back to the operations center and help Rio Tinto avoid unnecessary expenditures — a high-stakes version of the mobile phone app I use to remind me where I parked my car!An Imposing Presence: Meet AVA500
Throughout the conference, there were many great demonstrations of robotics in action, real-time and simulated data from factory floors and other examples from industrial settings that demonstrated how effectively connected systems can work. One of my personal favorites, and a hit with other conference guests, was iRobot AVA500 with Cisco TelePresence, a video collaboration robot used by a conference participant who was physically in Germany. The machine, which really was a mobile column with a monitor on top, moved easily from room to room and had no problem communicating with speakers and other attendees.
The physical freedom of virtual presence afforded by AVA500 was especially impressive in contrast with another memorable Forum experience — a private tour in Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry of U-505, the World War II German submarine which was famously captured intact by the Allied forces, together with vital intelligence assets of an Enigma encryption machine and secret code-books. There was, not surprisingly, much discussion about security models, encryption and privacy in the Forum sessions. For all our faith and reliance on modern computer-based security systems, I wondered what the contemporary equivalent might be of the fleet of warships and aircraft it took to secretly capture the Enigma machine aboard U-505? Perhaps that helps put one of the critical IoT challenges in perspective.
Today the AVA500 with Cisco TelePresence will set you back about $75,000. My “MIT hacker” version, built with components easily found around my home (think tablet aboard a Roomba), may not be as sleek, but will work in a pinch.
While AVA’s novelty is certainly entertaining, its very presence among humans should make us think deeper about the effects of virtual communications technology, something we have been experimenting with already at MIT.
Meeting the IoT Higher Education Challenge
People who come to MIT Sloan or other MIT Schools to further their professional education tend to have strong technical and engineering backgrounds. The pace of evolution and disruption of business models in their industries is accelerating continuously. We need to equip our graduates with tools that enable them to learn, re-learn, and un-learn many times over throughout their careers to remain successful. And we need to become more efficient, affordable, relevant and timely in the delivery of our programs.
Matter of Scale
We have been experimenting with different technological approaches to help solve these challenges, primarily by offering digital learning courses on topics like Big Data and Analytics. These courses are just as rigorous and engaging as on-campus ones, only made available to much wider audiences. Our typical on-campus courses can accommodate maximum of 100 participants at one time. In contrast, the MIT Sloan Exec Ed’s Big Data 4Dx course offered a live Virtual Classroom experience as an extension of an on-campus course to 200 participants; and the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab / MIT Professional Education course titled “Tackling the Challenges of Big Data” is usually taught to twenty people. When offered as a SPOC (Small Private Online Course), a version of the increasingly popular MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), it drew nearly 4,000 participants.
Closing the Talent Gap
As Jeanne Beliveau-Dunn, Vice President and General Manager of Cisco Services pointed out recently in her post-conference blog post, “there are over 11 million unemployed people in the U.S. today, yet 45 percent of employers cannot find qualified candidates for open jobs.” At the Forum, she presented startling findings from Cisco’s 2014 Annual Security Report. The report incorporates data from CareerBuilder, IBSG and Bureau of Labor and Statistics and projects a one-million shortage of qualified workers in the Internet security industry in the next five years and two million jobs needed in the information technology and communications in the next ten. What can top higher-education institutions and leading technology companies do to help fix this disparity?
To address the undeniable talent gap, Cisco is convening a group of leading tech companies, industry change agents, and higher education institutions in what is called a the IoTWF Industry Talent Consortium and includes the New York Academy of Sciences, Stanford University, Cisco, Xerox, GE and CareerBuilder among others. The Consortium’s goal is to identify and implement new educational programs, professional development initiatives and policy interventions to help rapidly build the skills needed for the marketplace to fully realize the value of IoT industries.
We at MIT Sloan Executive Education have joined the Consortium on behalf of MIT, and I am looking forward to working with this group on these important challenges. And, of course, I am also looking forward to next year’s IoT World Forum 2015, which will be held in Dubai. Or perhaps by then I will be sending my “virtual” self.
Peter Hirst is Executive Director of Executive Education at MIT Sloan School of Management.
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