In a few short years, social media have become the fastest-growing platform for workplace communication. Now it looks like machines will be getting in on the act.
Of all the examples of social enterprise that Salesforce.com trotted out at its Dreamforce conference in San Francisco last month, the one that really represented a new frontier came from General Electric, which is running with Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff's suggestion to "create a social network around an aircraft engine."
Last year, GE tapped Benioff & Co. to help push the boundaries of the man-machine interface. The result is a concept known as GE Share, in which social capabilities embedded in everything from turbines to CAT scanners to jet engines will eventually enable engineers -- both within GE and at its customers -- to follow data feeds generated by such products. That data will be used as the basis for collaboration among the engineers following the feed, as well as between engineers and the product itself.
In a keynote appearance at Dreamforce, GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt said the ability to use social media to marry real-time customer data with real-time performance data generated by products is a holy grail for the company.
"If we can change the way our engines operate by getting real-time data, that's huge," Immelt said. This emerging approach to social media "compresses time, it compresses layers, it makes access happen, and I think it's just beginning."
For instance, if engineers can use GE's jet engine data feeds to make adjustments that would reduce fuel consumption by just 1 percent, it would lead to $2 billion of savings for airlines (and, presumably, a lot more engine orders for GE).
Charlene Begley, GE's global CIO, also made a quick appearance at Dreamforce. She made it clear that there's an enormous amount of real-time intelligence to be gained from using social media to access updates from products as they're operating.
"If we can quickly grab that data and turn it into information for a railroad to run their locomotive better, or for an airline to have better fuel efficiency, that's huge value," Begley said. GE Share "just unlocks that for us."
Charlene Begley, president and CEO of GE Home and Business Solutions and senior vice president and CIO of GE.
Not that tapping social media in this way doesn't raise some technology hurdles in managing a new (and potentially huge) stream of data. In fact, Stefan Ried, a Forrester Research analyst who covers cloud computing, voiced his skepticism during Benioff's description of the GE project. "Does Salesforce.com really have a Bigdata Strategy to handle volumes of machine events???" he asked on Twitter. "The platform can't deliver today!"
GE's plan may be the most ambitious example yet of man-machine social networking, but other efforts have been exploring that frontier. For example, Alex Williams wrote last month on TechCrunch about efforts at VMware to embed social capabilities in host machines and virtual servers, enabling IT administrators to monitor communications between hosts and servers.
Elsewhere, there is a social media outlet for commercial robots. The outlet is designed to let the machines alert their owners about things such as batteries that need charging or vacuum bags that are nearly full.
Clearly, this is a largely untapped frontier that holds great promise for the future of business, especially once Salesforce.com and other suppliers of social enterprise technology can address the accompanying big-data challenges.
Mitch, kindly allow me to make merry fun of the concept of "an Internet of Things" without meaning any disrespect to you. This is one of those "the Internet is a series of tubes" things that people who've never seen a router or switch come up with. They are trying to make themselves seem more intelligent by pretending they know what they're talking about, and those as ignorant as themselves are pulled in, but anybody with any knowledge of reality at all silently snickers behind their hand in disbelief. I know you used the term ironically, which adds to the fun, but isn't it time to drive a stake through the heart of this monster? Michael is absolutely right -- monitoring systems have been in place for years, especially at airlines. Heck, back in '83, I remember some database work I did with tracking fuel records on specific airframes. It showed some surprising things, like the fact that some captains were actually easier on the throttles, saving more fuel, but in at least five separate instances, they could spot when a rough landing had tweaked an airframe, causing it to waste fuel through excess drag caused by a bent tail or wing. Punish the guilty, reward the deserving, and fix aircraft, all from tracking a few fields in a few databases. Social media as monitoring system is ludicrous -- it's all publicity, and we need to make it clear we know this, and won't tolerate this nonsense any longer. Can we all agree this would be a noble goal indeed?
It does appear that this might be a man-hour eater. Trying to manage the reams of data spilling out might not benefit in the ROI column. Although it's not clear just what is going to be done with the social network/machine interface in order to figure out just what's possible
I think it's always better to reduce noise so that when you're trying to improve your signal-to-noise... your filters don't have to work as hard!
eg. it seems better to eliminate the spammers rather than try to come up with better filters... but in practice, getting rid of spammers may be the harder task.
I'll have to dig up the report on data storage, but I vaguely remember that the amount of computer-generated metadata in the world is vastly more than the amount of human-created data. This isn't so surprising since machines can generate all kinds of metadata 24/7 -- even when it's mostly garbage... the trick is getting machines to generate useful data only.
I'm going to make some inquiries here. I think there must be a savings involved in using the social media app as opposed to a traditional monitoring app.
I find it amazing that just because you can do Social Networking;people want to implement it everywhere;even where its not required(Often at the cost of Valuable Engineers Time used up or at cost of Security).
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Recently, the Obama administration has been of two minds where privacy rights are concerned. On one hand, you have an administration that vowed to veto CISPA and mandated open data for government websites. On the other hand, you have an increasingly out-of-control Department of Justice on a fishing expedition at AP and demanding legislation to let the FBI wiretap private, encrypted communications and levy fines if a company fails to comply.
The apartment and house sharing service, Airbnb, now requires members to verify their identities by demonstrating a presence on the web, and by either scanning a government ID or entering detailed personal details. Other enterprises should take a close look at Airbnb's verification policies.
Facebook advertising is a lightning rod. It seems neither brands nor consumers are 100 percent happy about the social media site's policies, placement, or procedures. But the real controversy about Facebook ads and promotions is over whether they work.
By now, you've most likely heard about the 3D-printed gun that Texas-based Defense Distributed demonstrated last week. But we haven't heard the last about the censorship war that began soon afterward.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
Subsidized handsets, rather than locked handsets, should be the focus of regulators. We're not getting good deals, not fostering innovation, and weakening our power as buyers.
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