Smart objects power smart enterprises

When the PC brought computing to the desktop three decades ago, it began a revolution that's led to a quantum leap in the speed and productivity in the offices of businesses and institutions. Today, smart object technology promises to bring a similar shift in efficiency and intelligence to physical infrastructure, logistics chains and customer relationships.

These smart objects, devices that combine processing power, sensor technology and communications capabilities, can be added to equipment, buildings, inventory and virtually any other asset within the enterprise and communicate with management information systems (MIS). The data collected can give both managers and workers a detailed, dynamic picture of system status, asset location and resource utilization within their operational unit or across the entire enterprise.

IN PICTURES: Evolution of the PC

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When the PC brought computing to the desktop three decades ago, it began a revolution that's led to a quantum leap in the speed and productivity in the offices of businesses and institutions. Today, smart object technology promises to bring a similar shift in efficiency and intelligence to physical infrastructure, logistics chains and customer relationships.

These smart objects, devices that combine processing power, sensor technology and communications capabilities, can be added to equipment, buildings, inventory and virtually any other asset within the enterprise and communicate with management information systems (MIS). The data collected can give both managers and workers a detailed, dynamic picture of system status, asset location and resource utilization within their operational unit or across the entire enterprise.

IN PICTURES: Evolution of the PC

Many smart objects can also receive simple commands, allowing rapid, highly granular control of everything from lighting and environmental controls to industrial processes and other complex systems. Unfortunately, the realization of this promise has been relatively slow because many of today's smart objects are still using proprietary communication protocols, making it difficult to move data and commands across corporate and institutional networks which use the Internet Protocol (IP).

If smart object technology is to realize its potential, it must adopt IP as a bridge between the traditional MIS environment and "the Internet of things." Only by leveraging the vast installed base of IP-based networks can the power of today's MIS resources be freed to move beyond the desktop and into the real world. The IPSO (Internet Protocol for Smart Objects) Alliance is the primary advocate for IP-based smart objects for use in energy, consumer, healthcare and industrial applications. Founded as a nonprofit association in 2008, IPSO continues to grow rapidly with more than 50 leading technology, communications and energy company members.

These companies are deploying IP-enabled smart object technologies to relieve "pain points," places within their operational and logistics chains where the lack of visibility and control makes normal operations less efficient and slows their response to changing demands.

The disconnects often occur at system boundaries where information about critical processes, material flows and system status is still siloed within an operational unit and not readily available to the other groups or the MIS infrastructure. In other cases, pain points occur where critical information is still collected manually or is not available at all.

Smart objects 101

Before looking at how some enterprises use smart objects, it might be helpful to review the essential concepts. For the purposes of this article, we can define a smart object as any device that:

- Has some level of processing capability.

- Can sense its own status and/or some aspect of its environment, or act on the local environment.

- Has the ability to share this information with other objects or machines across a network.