You may recall that when we launched the Connected Life Exchange blog we pointed our visitors to a unique microsite called the “Discovery of Data” — an interactive anthology of telecommunication innovation events and the related historical facts.
Today, you can visit and explore yet another fun and informative site. The topic is “The History and Future of TV” – society and technology have evolved and converged to create new video experiences. Those that are more social, mobile and personal.
This question was posed by the Manufacturing IT Director for a major Pharma producer, as part of an annual customer advisory board hosted jointly by Cisco and Rockwell Automation. One answer: Good luck! …And why would you want to?
Chet Namboodri talks about how consumer products are entering production and maintenance workflows and how “Rockwell and Cisco are in the forefront of enabling those solutions” during a recent customer innovation council session.
The migration of technology and applications from Consumer to Business to Industrial has become a well worn path, and the use of Smart Phones, Tablets, Mobile Video and other Operator Interfaces powering work flows and industrial intelligence has become a mainstay for Manufacturers. Read More »
As I’m focusing more on Collaboration and Innovationand less on Supply Chainthese days, I thought I’d share a story of ‘Ideation’ with you for my opening blog. That’s because it’s usually one of the first steps in the product development lifecycle, and makes chronological sense when discussing innovation. In later blogs I’ll share some of the subsequent steps – you know: Selection, Prototyping, Validation, Development and finally, Launch. Different companies use different terms and different processes, but all good products start out with a good idea.
Let me take you back in time for a moment. When I was eight years old I noticed that the local UK comic magazine that I bought on a weekly basis was running competitions for readers to submit puzzles for other readers to solve. I was attracted to the Secret Service game that was one of the prize options, but what was my idea? How was I going to win if I didn’t have a good idea? Well, I decided that I’d submit a match puzzle -- you know we actually had lots of matches in the 60’s! This puzzle isn’t hard (please remember I was eight years old) and looked something like the picture above. The question was “How do you make a square by adding just one more match and not moving the others?”
Anyway, fairly obvious that you make a square by placing a forth match adjoining the other three to make a square with the bases as in the next picture (click ‘read more’ when finished with this page to see how). Well, I had the pride of seeing my puzzle published and, more importantly for me, I actually won the Secret Service game! But that’s not the point… Read More »
Did you know that the Manufacturing Industry is one of Cisco’s biggest sectors served, greater than 10% of overall revenues? You probably know that Cisco has historically served the Enterprise IT and Network buying centers of most manufacturing companies around the globe, but did you know that Cisco has the same business magnitude as Rockwell Automation, Emerson Process Management and Honeywell Process Systems within the manufacturing industry?
That’s because over the past decade we’ve pushed the relevance of Cisco well beyond the concerns of the networking engineer and are now leading the dialogue, solutions and innovations for manufacturers’ lines of business—crossing the entire value chain and ecosystems that compose a manufacturing enterprise. With a complement of collaboration, virtualization and video service architectures that we provide over the network, Cisco has proven to be a trusted partner for manufacturers, transforming their businesses and creating long-term competitive advantage through new models for customer growth, product and business innovation, agility and operational excellence.
Welcome to Cisco’s online presence for the Manufacturing industry, one of Cisco’s largest vertical business segments.
So what can you expect from this blog? Who are the people contributing, and what are their backgrounds? What are Cisco’s views and opinions about the manufacturing Industry? Why would you be interested? Read More »
In the past I’ve written about the classic challenge within Enterprise IT, and specifically within the Data Center, that 70-80% of the resources are allocated to “legacy” activities. This obviously leaves very little time to work on new technology-centric innovations to drive the business. Or to put a different way, “IT only does innovation on Friday”.
The McKinsey Quarterly recently had an interesting article about reshaping IT management, where they introduce the concepts “Factory IT” and “Enabling IT”. The premise being that the focus of the Factory IT (70% of the activities) groups should be about cost-reduction, scale, standardization and simplification. The Enabling IT (30%, hopefully growing) should be focused on innovative ways to enable the business to grow. And the management of those groups doesn’t necessarily have to the same, since they’d have different objectives. Read More »
