Real-time automation will keep everyone in the know

Companies in a wide range of industries are starting to investigate how to gather information in real-time from all parts of their business to help make better decisions. Emerging technologies such as RFID are at the heart of this shift, enabling users to find items anywhere in the supply chain at any time.

Dr Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM's senior vice president for technology and strategy, spoke to Computing about how firms are starting to use these technologies to drive their businesses forward.

Analysts are talking about the concept of the X-internet, a set of technologies that connect a company's information systems to its physical assets. What impact will this have?

Information technologies are continuing to advance at a tremendous rate. The concept of the X-internet (Computing, 26 February) is an example of such an advancement.

Microprocessors are getting faster, cheaper, more reliable, more ubiquitous, so that they go everywhere. They are chatting all the time via wireless. And then, at the other end, you have this massive server and storage and supercomputers, analysing all this information, responding to it.

So we are really building this incredibly sophisticated and ubiquitous infrastructure. And what's interesting is that the real excitement is about what we do with all that and how we put all that technology to work to build incredibly advanced applications across a whole variety of industries.

On-demand computing really brings together all these technology advances with the appropriate industry expertise to do incredible things. On-demand comes into play as a result of being so connected, having all this information and being so well integrated. Whether it's a business, or the government, or a healthcare institution, or a university, you should know a whole lot more about what is going on and how to respond.

If you don't have information, then you don't know what's going on. If you're surrounded by information, and have enough ability to analyse it and respond, it changes the game. You can see advances one after another in all kinds of new application areas. Some are relatively mundane, and some are a little bit farther out.

Being able to track things with RFID tags is going to change all kinds of industries. Knowing where things are, being able to respond to that, being able to provide much higher quality of service. It will significantly lower inventory costs if properly applied. It should lower theft and pilferage if properly applied. So RFID is an excellent example. There are applications in all kinds of industries, such as insurance. Take Norwich Union, they are able to track how cars are driven and charge variable insurance rates, based on that information.

This raises the whole issue of privacy. People are paranoid about how far IT can peer into their lives. How's the industry going to deal with this?

Privacy is hugely important. If the customer says I don't want you to track my driving, then in that case the insurance rate is higher. That's life. There are only a few things where you don't have any choice, such as with paying taxes. For everything else, and this is a lot of why you need the industry expertise, it is about how you apply it properly.

Most of the applications consumers will never see, like tracking inventory in the supply chain. As a consumer you could care less, and the vast majority of the applications will be of that nature. If packages are being shipped and they are tagged, you should be able to know far better than before where they are. I think the market will out how it works. It all depends on the benefits, and very importantly, you must give people the ability to opt-out. However, there will be some things where they don't have a choice.

Think about airports, perhaps for security reasons, who will institute far more sophisticated security devices with some kind of tracking. You won't have a choice there. Well, you do have a choice, you can choose not to travel. I suspect that hospitals will want to track their patients. And if you don't like that, they will say sorry, but that's how they work. But in daily life, I think this will get worked out, just like in society we work out everything else. I honestly don't see that as a big issue.

Where is the most impact going to be felt first?

I think this is pretty ubiquitous, because at heart what we are saying is that with the right work and expertise, we can analyse the key business processes and improve them. Frankly, there is no industry that doesn't have processes that can't be improved. If you look at IT, we have been able to automate those processes that are highly structured, because in the end that's what machines are good for. But lots of what a business or the government does is very unstructured. You make decisions on the fly and people are obviously very good at that.

What's happening, because of technology going everywhere, being connected to everything, and because of the internet, we can have applications that work in a very unstructured world. You don't have to program it all ahead of time, you can more or less have these interacting processes immediately get the information needed to make a decision. And that opens up IT to go many more places than ever before, which is what's happening.

Every industry one way or another deals with technology. You can imagine that once you can connect everything and integrate everything and apply sophisticated applications in real time, you can start automating many of those applications you couldn't do before. Run your supply chain more effectively, make better financial decisions, manage your customer service better. These are things that all businesses are going to have to get right. And if you're a business, how can you say no? If you didn't, you would just not be competitive.

How are web services going to fit in?

The key to web services is the move to a much more modular, organic programming model, based on components. Contrast that with the classic style of programming, where you design a gigantic application, taking years to build it. Because it's so static and rigid it's hard to go back and change it later on. The appeal of this modular approach is that you start implementing solutions incrementally, based on open standards. You can specify their behaviour using workflow applications and things like that, and then you can pad in more components.

Think of the world wide web - it has no master design. There's components, standards, ways of controlling behaviour for when it gets congested, but beyond that it's organic, it just grows on its own. Now, we're applying a similar style at the systems level, which is what grids are building, and at the application level, building apps in this more modular style. And now we're moving to do this at a business process level. It's an incredibly powerful paradigm for the solutions we're trying to create.