IoT: Are You Ready For New Management Approaches?

The Internet of Things (IoT) introduces some new ways to manage as the "things" Aka agents can actually negotiate, collaborate, sense, suggest and act on their own. This is a very different mode of operation and I'm not sure folks are preparing themselves to deal with some of the issues. There are ways of dealing with these issues, but thinking about them now will prepare you for this new world of distributed intelligence acting with freedom levels only afforded to trust worthy humans in the past. Even if it is a personal assistant suggesting a course of action to a human, there are some new issues to wrestle with now. The IoT / Agents will change the way you deal with governance, risk and ethics. In fact the IoT will help you manage.

Examples of IoT autonomy:

http://gartnernews.com/stopped-at-the-border-what-happens-when-things-negotiate/
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2014/06/pegaworld-2014-digital-pressure.html    See Pipeline Inspection

http://www.amazon.com/Business-Process-Management-Next-Wave/dp/0929652223


Governance: 

Today system and machine actions are programmed and hard to change quickly. While the IoT / agents can be given policies/rules and constraints, all of them can change quickly and the negotiation between things / agents can create unforeseen combinations. This will put a premium on simulation and predictive analytics applied to the negotiations between and actions by these things.


Risk:

The control systems or constraints could be faulty even without fore thought. What id one of your thing / agent negotiates with another organizations personal assistant and it gives out faulty knowledge, advice or actions?  What happens if an agent invades someones privacy?  Who is to blame when this autonomy goes to end to end processes involving multiple parties?


Ethics:

How will people feel when these things start taking all the jobs because organizations can get a personal assistant that is an agent / thing to work 24 by 7 without breaks or complaints? . What will happen when some agents can alter other agents in flight? What could these agent flocks evolve to become and will they be benign?


Net; Net:

While I an excited about the days of IoT and distributed intelligence. The kinds of intelligence and knowledge rich processes will multiply and amaze us, but we need to start thinking about the changes in management and the legal ramifications as this rolls out.


Additional Reading:

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/09/agents-have-power-of-intelligent-and.html
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/10/agents-can-efectively-bid-for-process.html
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/09/harnessing-business-complexity-with.html