Tomorrow, The Internet of the Machines will use Prescriptive Workflows to drive businesses…

In the past few years, Cloud and its underlying technologies and services (SaaS, PaaS and IaaS) has become the key technology driver behind some of the most innovate business engagements to date. In today’s world companies of all size use Cloud services to support their business objectives. The primacy of such objectives rest on the ability for companies to monitor, acquire, correlate, aggregate and analyze data from which companies derive the strategy necessary to support and meet revenue goals.

Subsequently data gathering and processing is either performed thru a network of systems or humans. In many cases humans create workflows that performs tasks and actions to deliver a business benefit. As an example, your bank may have setup overdraft protection for which when your account goes below a specific cash level it automatically receives additional funds. Unbeknown to most, the overdraft workflow may create additional activities from which would send an email acknowledging the action taken, furthermore correlated workflows may also notify a bank employee to check back with you on your account status.

As the aforesaid example shows, most workflows are created by humans; inherently progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine-To-Machine (m2m) connectivity has setup the stage for machine to learn, decipher and derive actions or tasks thru Data Collaboration Workflow that are currently reserved for human. Microsoft latest push with chatbot shows a future for limitless m2m services without the need for web or mobile applications.

The Internet of Everything (IoE — people, process, data, and things) has accelerated a trend for which other “Entities” must now process and analyze the data to drive tasks or actions as human are faced with the daunting task of digesting and aggregating the inordinate size and speed of data. I’m sure you read every day about Big Data and its effect on business.

Such model will take us from Predictive Business Workflow to Prescriptive Business Workflow

I foresee that within 5 years, the Internet of the Machine (IoM) will collaborate on managing retail truck delivery for which the Machine will receive weather forecast data indicating “Heavy Snow Storm”, consequently the machine will check road traffic conditions and reroute products from Colorado to Nevada to a store who has low inventory after having checked online and discovered a high customer demand for those products. Such model will take us from Predictive Business Workflow to Prescriptive Business Workflow. To further my point just look at IBM recent acquisition of “The Weather Company”.

Additionally m2m Data Collaboration Workflow will become common practice and will help increase revenue while providing better cost management.

A new breed of scientists, technicians and engineers are already hard at work fulfilling such foresight but companies must also invest in defining new strategies to support the paradigm of the IoM, this would also include connectivity, architecture, infrastructure and Cloud services.

Follow me on twitter @thinkahead and let’s continue the discussion