Gartner thinks companies are finally starting to take security and protection of data seriously, and will focus more on the very practical improvements to operations they can make using IT. Big data, AI and other tech will play a role, but in service to other goals.
This is a good trend. For years we’ve known that cybersecurity requirements were preventing the full realization of computing’s ability to change how we work. Finally people are putting more effort into real solutions. If it works, it will be a giant step ahead.
Focusing on making sure customers and workers can mprove their productivity will also yield big benefits. If we use AI and data-driven decisions for that, and adopt the agile, experimental approach, great strides can be made.
AUTHOR
Naomi Eide
@NaomiEide
PUBLISHED
Oct. 19, 2020
I am fascinated by this article. What an innovative solution!
Many years ago my family and I took a trip to Guatemala. One of the highlights of my trip was going to see the Maya ruins at Tikal, which is in the jungle in the central Peten area far east of Guatemala City. There aren’t any roads to get there, so you had to fly.
We got on our plane (a DC-3) at the Guatemala City airport. All seats were occupied with passengers going to the jungle area. The flight was one of those hedgehoppers, only a couple of thousand feet above the ground, right above the trees. We made several stops.
Finally we arrived at the town of Flores, on the shores of Lake Peten Itza. The stewardess (that is what they were, then!) informed us that the stop would be for a while, and we were allowed out on the tarmac in the steaming heat to wait while they refueled the plane.
As we watched, a group of men went into the plane. We wondered what they were doing. In a few minutes they started emerging, each one carrying a plane seat. This went on for a half hour, as many seats in the plane were removed and stacked on the tarmac.
The Digital Container Shipping Association has unveiled its new T&T standard for tracking containers while en route between shipper and consignee. They are quite detailed and have been planned using some of the latest design thinking techniques, including the definition of personas who might use the system one way or another. They’ve prepared some very nice slide shows to describe at a high level what they are doing.
DCSA was launched by MSC, Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd and ONE last April, with CMA CGM, Yang Ming, Evergreen, HMM and Zim joining a month later. This is a fairly quick turnaround for a first standard delivery.
The catch will be how fast people start sticking to them when building equipment and systems. Doing so can be predicted to help sales, via a network effect– since the standards make systems compatible, there’s less hassle making one system relate to another. A close review should be done of the standards, to see how many choices individual participants are given to make the information specific to their needs. Such choices tend to produce systems that lose their compatibility if one of the partners changes, and make specific programming necessary when others try to adapt to the system. It’s the anthesis of cooperation. And these standards are meant to promote cooperation rather than competition.
An example of the issue can be seen with EDI, in which general record structures are defined, but a lot of latitude is given to provide extra information or different information. The result is that EDI needs to be specially programmed for each pair-wise interaction of companies, a problem that has haunted us for 20 years even though
EDI, in general, was a big step forward.
Let’s hope that we all have learned from the past, and can use the standard to really lubricate information flow in supply chains.
Supply Chain and Logistics 