Alexis
Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Talk Tech with Data Dave. I’m Alexis, your host of this podcast, and I’m here today once again with my dear friend, Data Dave.
Hi, Dave, how are you today?
Data Dave
I’m very well, Alexis. How are you?
Alexis
I’m good. It’s Friday here in real time. Yes, I know we drop these episodes on Tuesdays, but yeah, happy for a Friday. It’s finally spring, which is nice. So, I’m ready for the weekend. I’m ready for some sunshine. I’m ready.
Data Dave
Okay, good. Excellent.
Alexis
But today is a new-ish sort of topic.
I’m very excited because we, in general at D3Clarity, do not have a ton of content related to the Internet of Things. And so, I am excited to dive into this topic with you, a little bit more. Here we go with the question. And we’re going to have to talk about it in a little bit of depth because I’m going to be honest with you, I just said Internet of Things, and I don’t 100% know what that means. So, we’ll have to break it down a little bit. Here we go. Okay.
Data Dave
Okay.
Alexis
How does the Internet of Things impact data management?
Okay, we’ve talked about data management a hundred times before, but just like I said, Internet of Things, IoT. Maybe I don’t 100% know what that means. So, let’s start there.
Data Dave
Okay, so the Internet of Things and data management.
Yes. We normally talk about data management in context, really for us, in context of business data, person data, and sort of behavior, behavioral type data. Yeah, that’s what we normally refer to.
We talk about customers, we talk about vendors, we talk about suppliers, we talk products, we talk about all these kind of things and how businesses operate. That’s where we spend most of our time.
Alexis
I mean, that’s what we do.
Data Dave
That’s what we do a lot of. We do get involved with the Internet of Things on the periphery within some of our projects.
So, let me talk about the Internet of Things.
So, what is the Internet of Things? Well, let’s start with things. Right, so it’s a thing rather than a person. So, you, when you use things, you create a trail of information wherever you go. I bought something, I did this, I did whatever. Right?
Alexis
Right! I create data. I create data, Yep.
Data Dave
So you create this trail. Well, the idea on the Internet of Things is that things can create a similar trail.
Take a thing. Let’s take an easy example. Your car.
Alexis
Okay.
Data Dave
Your car creates a trail of things, and the manufacturer, you’ve heard of General Motors, OnStar?
Alexis
Yes, of course.
Data Dave
Press the OnStar button, and they suddenly call you up and whatever. Right? And help you out.
Alexis
Make sure I’m okay. Yeah, check on me.
Data Dave
You’ve seen the commercials.
What OnStar also does, and what a lot of this also does, is it tracks the telemetry of the vehicle. So, it’s got engine speeds, engine temperatures, oil temperatures, everything else. And it’s continually tracking that thing, that vehicle. So, you got this stream of data flowing back to home base to tell what the thing is.
Alexis
Okay.
Data Dave
So if you take a fleet manager like Avis or Hertz or whatever, or any large fleet, they’re interested in the health of their fleet, the maintenance of their fleet, where is their fleet, what is their fleet doing? What is the temperature doing? Is it likely to run out of gas? All kinds of things from that vehicle.
And this is the Internet of Things. It’s the interconnectedness of things connecting to the Internet and using that to generate data that can then be used for decision-making purposes.
Alexis
Okay, so my friend used to work for a rental car company, and she always would tell me about how they could kind of track their cars. They could figure out where their cars were in their fleet and how they were doing. They were using that telemetry data that the cars were creating.
They were using Internet of Things data.
Data Dave
Yeah, exactly – to make decisions.
We talked to a rental car company, and what we were doing with them, where do you park cars at the airport in order for them to be chosen? And they wanted their leased cars to be chosen before their own cars, because then they didn’t pay as much money. Okay, so location of cars, health of cars, and that sort of thing.
Using Internet of Things data to tell you the tire pressures of all your cars. Because rental cars, a good example, they used to check the tire pressure every time a car came back from a rental. Well, with the Internet of Things, I can eliminate that cost because the car will tell me what its tire pressures are.
Alexis
Because the car has a sensor in it that manages that anyway.
Data Dave
Exactly. The car’s got that sensor. The car can broadcast that and can tell home base, “All my four tires are good.” I no longer have to spend money with somebody tracking that all the time.
That’s sort of the Internet of Things: is the ability to collect all this information from all these things that are now on the Internet.
Alexis
So, we always say the idea that data is just evidence of history, that somebody did something, or if you will, something happened. But the Internet of Things data would be data that a thing did a thing.
Data Dave
A thing did something. And this data can be an awful lot of data, Real sort of streaming data, which is, you know, temperatures of gas turbines and airplanes collected every millisecond or every second or whatever time they want to do it, with a view of predictive maintenance.
Alexis
Mmhmm.
Data Dave
“I think this temperature is starting to drift up. Therefore, I need to change something. I need to do some maintenance.”
Alexis
Yes, we’ve talked about that a little bit before when we talked about digital twins in an episode a while ago. Yes, okay.
Data Dave
Exactly. And the digital twin is very similar to this, which is the digital twin is bringing all this data from the equipment.
Take an oil rig or an airplane or a factory or any number of different things and streaming the current state of all that equipment. So, you’ve got an accurate, real-time picture of temperatures across an oil rig.
Alexis
Got it.
Data Dave
Pressures in every valve. You can now monitor all these things. And so there can be a tremendous amount of data in this. But it’s that interconnectedness of things on the Internet.
You see adverts for refrigerators that can tell you they’re low on milk.
Well, that’s a thing telling you something.
Alexis
Yeah.
Data Dave
And you’re using that to make decisions. Do I need to buy more milk, or am I going to have black coffee tomorrow morning?
Alexis
That is the perfect segue to the actual question, I think, because you just said you’re using it to make decisions. So, the entire question here is, “How does the Internet of Things impact data management?”
Data Dave
It can impact it tremendously. if you separate the two for a minute.
If we’re a company that is operating a sensitive factory, then the Internet of Things is tremendously interesting because you need to collect all that telemetry data to know the health of your factory. And you want to correlate that with your reduced costs on maintenance, reduction of risk of failure, and various other things to feed back into that other business data. But you don’t want the data native because streaming data of a sensor or 100 sensors every 10 milliseconds or whatever isn’t decision-making data. Right? That is information, but it’s not decision-making data. What you need to do is correlate that with health.
Alexis
Yes.
Data Dave
If I’ve got a time series data that tells me temperatures over time for a particular sensor, when is that unhealthy? How do I alert based off that? How do I collate all this data into a decision?
You’re running low on milk. Okay. That’s a relatively straightforward thing. What are you actually measuring?
Now, I don’t know how these fridges do that because I don’t know whether they know whether I put a carton of milk or a carton of orange juice in my fridge. But they can tell you you’re running low on something.
So it’s…How do you, how do you get there? It’s that indirect piece.
Do you have to manage, store, and whatever? Yes.
You have to think about Internet of Things data in the nature of that data. So, I’ve got time series data from a sensor. Well, how long do I have to keep that around for? I can throw it away pretty quickly because I want the trend, but I don’t actually have to know every millisecond.
Alexis
Yeah, yeah. Especially if you’re keeping it, like you just said, you’re running it every millisecond.
Data Dave
Right.
Alexis
That’s so much stuff.
Data Dave
It’s so much data. Right. If you’re thinking about a gas turbine engine on a ship or in an airplane, that’s a tremendous amount of data about that airplane.
Alexis
Yeah.
Data Dave
Now, you may want that data, but what you’re really looking for are the trends and the analysis from that data to say, when should I pull that for maintenance? When is this likely to be dangerous? How do I improve my maintenance, improve my quality, improve my safety, and at the same time reduce my costs of maintenance by doing preventative maintenance rather than reactive maintenance?
That’s where the Internet of Things comes in. It does feed into those business decision-making constructs that we normally talk about, but it’s a higher-level construct. You’re starting to say, “When do I order parts for this maintenance on this aircraft based off of the aircraft telling you that it is becoming unhealthy?”
Alexis
Well, listeners, as it often happens, our conversation went a bit longer than expected. Be sure to tune in to our next episode of Talk Tech with Data Dave. I promise more insight into how the Internet of Things impacts data management as we continue. Till then.
