Today's Tech Digest - Sep 25, 2019
Kannan Subbiah
FCA | CISA | CGEIT | CCISO | IT Security, Strategy & Governance | Independent Director | Enterprise & Solution Architecture | 3 decades of IT experience and 2 decades of Mutual Funds domain experience.
Digital twins – rise of the digital twin in Industrial IoT and Industry 4.0
Digital twins offer numerous benefits on which we’ll elaborate later. In fact, you might already have seen the concept in action. If you didn’t, the video below, using a bike equipped with sensors, gives you a good idea. However, in real life you’ll notice that digital twins today are predominantly used in the Industrial Internet or Industrial Internet of Things and certainly engineering and manufacturing. If you remember our airplane engine or other complex and technology-intensive physical assets such as IoT-enabled industrial robots and far more, you can imagine why. You can even create a digital twin of a an environment with a set of physical assets, as long as you get those data. ... In the future we’ll see twins expand to more applications, use cases and industries and get combined with more technologies such as speech capabilities, augmented reality for an immersive experience, AI capabilities, more technologies enabling us to look inside the digital twin removing the need to go and check the ‘real’ thing and so on.
AI will be the biggest disruptor in our lifetime: Amitabh Kant, CEO, NITI Aayog
India is among the very few countries globally where the government has driven digitization in a big way. For instance, almost 99.3 percent of Indians pay their Income Tax online. Almost 96 percent of these filings are cleared within three months because they are digital. The new Goods & Service Tax (GST), is digital – cashless and paperless. The Ayushman Bharat scheme is portable, paperless and digital. It provides health insurance to 500 million Indians. The number of beneficiaries is greater than the population of the USA, Europe, and Mexico put together. Every single rupee released through the Public Finance Management System (PFMS) is tracked to the last point digitally. By integrating technology into various aspects of the economy, the government has generated vast volumes of datasets. It is important that we use this data along with computing power and new algorithms to drive huge disruption. That’s the only way we can radically leapfrog and catch up with advanced economies.
European enterprises 'waste' £24,000 a day on unused cloud services, says Insight research
Given the foundational role that cloud is increasingly playing within enterprise digital transformation strategies, these are important areas to address and get right, the report continues, as organisations set about making better use of their data through the deployment of analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence tools. Indeed, 46% of respondents flagged AI, big data, machine learning and deep learning tools as being “critical” to their digital transformation initiatives over the past two years. “When analysed, shared, and leveraged intelligently, [data] can facilitate more informed decision-making, improve the quality of offerings, and enhance the customer experience,” the report said. “IT professionals express confidence in AI, big data and machine learning because these technologies enable organisations to transform data into business intelligence.” But this confidence could prove to be misplaced unless organisations have a robust cloud strategy in place to underpin their plans, the report added.
There is a real demand for AI in healthcare, but preserving privacy is key
The introduction of AI into healthcare is important for several reasons. The main one, though? Scale. “With the NHS potentially losing up to 350,000 staff by 2030, using AI will be the only way to scale services to match the mounting demand that is hitting the UK with a shrinking workforce,” explains Lorica. The impact of AI in healthcare won’t only be felt in the NHS. Instead, the technology will have a wide range of applications in everything from personal medicine to research, diagnosis and logistics. But, despite a clear desire to integrate AI, it must be done correctly. And before it can effectively disrupt the sector, Lorica suggests that “various organisational and cultural changes need to be implemented. ... Before AI can truly transform the healthcare sector, the elephant in the room needs to be addressed: patient confidentiality or privacy. “The NHS holds personal information about almost every person living in the country, which means preserving privacy, collecting and cleaning data and data sharing is paramount,” explains Lorica.
The Interesting Case of Who’s Using the IT4IT™ Standard – Part Two
Digitalization is driving the proliferation of Cloud and Mobility and is causing IT organizations to rethink their IT Operating Model to support both the digital workforce and new service delivery models. To exploit the rapid pace of disruptive IT innovation, HCL Technologies chose to adopt The Open Group IT4IT Reference Architecture to design and develop its XaaS-based (Everything as a Service) product and service offering. This meant that HCL Global IT needed to better understand the business requirements of IT to allow it to achieve the agility and velocity the business and end users required of its services. To achieve this, HCL Global IT required a unified and sophisticated IT Operating Model to support the business in their Digital Transformation journey. Therefore, HCL aligned its product and services to the IT4IT Value Stream-based IT Reference Architecture and developed a product and platform named XaaS Service Management (XSM), which has the ability and capability to address the customer-specific issues and challenges.
Read more here ...