The history of technology-based business is marked by transformations generated by inflection points. An example is the introduction of personal computers, which transformed the business models of the information technology leaders and led to the decline of IBM and the disappearance of DEC. Another example is the Internet, which has transformed the way in which business is conducted.
Industrial automation inflection points
For industrial automation, several new inflection points will arrive in the next few years. This is where growth and success will occur, and from which new instrumentation and automation leaders will emerge.
Let me suggest my favourite possibilities:
MEMS-based sensors and actuators: Micro-electromechanical systems that utilise semiconductor fabrication techniques will produce miniature turbines, motors, gears, moving mirrors and sensors.
Nanotechnology: Business Week has named nanotechnology as one of the 'Ten technologies that will change our lives'. It is the next big revolution, an inflection point that will change almost everything. The commercial interest in nanotechnology is being driven by visions of a stream of new nanotech commercial products and applications that will lead to another industrial revolution in which almost every industry is likely to be affected. As nanotechnology advances into practicality, achievements will transcend and unite such diverse sciences as engineering, physics, chemistry, biology and computer science. The conventional automation business will indeed be revolutionised.
Atomic-scale systems, the next step beyond MEMS: Production with old-style metal bending, grinding and cutting will become obsolete as nanotechnology enables the building of products at the atomic level.
Wireless links: Tiny, low cost, low power sensors and actuators will be connected with wireless links that are fast, economical and yield big advantages. They will be scattered around to measure just about everything that you can imagine. Being low power, they will not need to have batteries replaced, and they may be solar powered. They will be low cost because the numbers required will be enormous.
The pervasive Internet: Soon bandwidth will be plentiful enough to connect everything to everything. The old '“islands of automation' will disappear.
Complex adaptive systems (CAS): The central control hierarchies of the past will give way to new self-organising peer to peer networks, where intelligence resides directly in the sensors and actuators, eliminating large, complex and ineffective centralised control systems. By these standards, today’s PLC and PC-based controls and software will seem ineffective, expensive and even archaic. CAS will provide a level of effectives and robustness that is unprecedented, and old deterministic control architectures will disappear.
Review your own company’s development plans. If the major developments are simply 'new and smaller' PLCs, or 'bigger and better software', you should be nervous. You should be using the business slowdown to work at new inflection points to generate future growth and leadership.
Stop being incremental – look for 10X change!
[Ed: For more on nanotechnology and motion control see 'The next big thing is really small'.]
The end of management
A recent article by Alan Murray is adapted from his book 'The Wall Street Journal essential guide to management'. This resonated with some of my own thinking and recent writings on the lack of innovation in large companies.
Some 60 years ago, the famed management guru Peter Drucker launched the 'practice of management' as we know it today. Drucker was the first to preach the techniques for running large corporations like General Motors which became a prime example of corporate discipline. Drucker’s ideas were promoted by elite business schools like Harvard, which helped America progress through generations of global prosperity.
Interestingly, Drucker’s ideas are not thriving in the new century. GM still survives, but only with a government bailout. Where are the old giants like RCA and Westinghouse? Today, less than 100 companies in the S&P-500 stock index were there when the index started in 1957. Huge, supposedly indestructible institutions like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns have crashed, while new businesses like Google and Facebook have come out of nowhere.
Big companies tend to be very hierarchical and myopically self-reinforcing, organised to minimise new threats to existing order. Management is focused inward, and resources are directed toward preserving structures based on past successes, rather than future opportunities. They develop barriers to innovation by allocating resources based on what has worked in the past instead of on what could determine the future.
By contrast, small companies use radically different mechanisms – fast-acting and much more effective. Today, the fundamental value of an organisation (large or small) is information bandwidth – capacity and speed. Failure in these aspects is a severe restriction. In the information economy, success comes through agility; most big companies just cannot be agile.
The large, managed corporation is becoming outdated. Much of today’s business success has come through bypassing corporate hierarchies, or using revolutionary tactics to 'make the elephants dance'. Today’s biggest winners are the enemies of corporate bureaucracy. Old style hierarchical management is obsolete.
Jim Pinto is an industry analyst and commentator, writer, technology futurist and angel investor. His popular e-mail newsletter, JimPinto.com eNews, is widely read (with direct circulation of about 7000 and web-readership of two to three times that number). His areas of interest are technology futures, marketing and business strategies for a fast-changing environment, and industrial automation with a slant towards technology trends.
© Technews Publishing (Pty) Ltd | All Rights Reserved
printer friendly version