The Internet of Things (IOT) has been poised to deliver an unparalleled surge of productivity growth… perhaps for too long? Analytics is foundational to IOT, and the adoption of IOT holds the promise of unleashing a new age of pervasive data. How do we make sense of the hype around IOT and what it can actually achieve? As a highly respected analyst, Phil is uniquely qualified to talk about the potential of IOT and its avatars in the Factory of the Future and in Smart Cities. With Phil’s deep experience in hands-on modeling, this episode provides a two-track insight as he talks about the impact of analytics, but also his own analytical approaches.

Phil Marshall, New Zealand

Dr. Phil Marshall is a co-founder and the Chief Research Officer of Tolaga Research, where he supports thought leadership and product development. Before co-founding Tolaga in 2009, Dr. Marshall was a Vice President at Yankee Group for nine years, leading its global service provider technology practice. In addition, Marshall has held various management and engineering roles at Verizon International, Spark NZ, and BHP NZ Steel. He has over 25 years of experience in the ICT industry and has supported projects in over 40 countries. He has a Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering and is a Senior Member of the IEEE.

Highlights

[00:05:00] “I think the art in analytics is underestimated. In effect for that matter, I would say the art in mathematics is underestimated… think … how art would be treated in schools, if you treated it more like mathematics and it's almost like an artist would end up spending all day painting fences.”

[00:12:00] “We've had challenges, right? But it doesn't mean that the IOT market is a failure. Absolutely not. I see a huge role for it more broadly, if you'd think about it as the instrumentation of things.”

[00:15:00] “With predictive maintenance 99.9% of your data is irrelevant. It's just that 0.01, which is incredibly valuable when you know, something has gone wrong. And so you have a data sparsity problem, right?”

[00:23:00] “Nine times out of 10, the forecast is wrong. It's not what the number is, it's what the inputs are, what the assumptions are, how you built it…”

[00:26:00] “There's a real balance in automotive manufacturing in terms of where you place that automation, where you place the digital intelligence, and how you develop it.”

[00:31:00] “There are some aspects of manufacturing… where it just makes no sense to automate… So there's a real art of being able to understand where [advanced technologies] are most appropriately implemented and where you draw the line.”

[00:35:00] “To progress smart cities, think of the day in the life of a typical citizen and where are the areas or what are the things that are important? I think the priorities should become pretty clear when you do that.”

[00:41:00] “I underestimated the power of status quo inertia around traditional solutions, risk aversity, stakeholder priorities... it was pretty much across the board. I'd missed all of those.”

Resources

Tolaga’s website: https://www.tolaga.com/