Where is our iPod?

Patent no. 200,521 was issued to Thomas Edison in 1878 for a phonograph.  For  the first time in history, man was able to record and replay sound. 

About 100 years later, in 1979, Sony introduced the Walkman, a miniature portable cassette tape player, and forever changed the landscape of personal entertainment. 

And just over 20 years after that, Tony Fadell, Steve Jobs and the team at Apple  introduced the iPod, a portable digital media player to contain an entire collection of music and photo albums.  (A fascinating story – click here to read more.)

The automation sector of the process industries parallels the above.

The first industrial automatic controller is believed to have been invented in the 1870’s.  Electromechanical, pneumatic controllers and mainframe computers dominated the process control industry until 1975 when Honeywell introduced the first distributed control system (DCS).   

The greatest return on automation investments have come from advanced process control and the digitization of business work processes.  This has allowed companies to reduce operations staffing by unprecedented amounts.

An unintended consequence of these improvements has been an increasing information load for the remaining operations staff – which is manageable, provided all these new innovations were easy to use when taken all together…

Where the iPod design is beautiful and simple to use, even for disparate media types and sources, automation improvements to the process industry have been much less so.  Layered applications and compartmentalized focus on individual layers has led to a confusion of systems and applications – not always so easy to use for every operator… especially in times of crisis.

What is needed is the breakthrough to consolidate all best-in-class solutions from multiple vendors and technologies in a seamless environment with the goal to make changes and operator use as simple as adding or playing songs on an iPod.

That’s a great vision for our industry to shoot for … as simple as an iPod.  Steve Jobs had it right with his first Mac computer and has it right again!  As an industry, we should be taking note and following his lead.

While I’m proud to say that a number of our R&D investments at PAS are doing the iPod thing – making deployment simpler, reducing or eliminating ongoing maintenance requirements and making it all easier to use.  See my recent APC blog for an example…

But despite the best efforts of industry standard groups and vendors like PAS, there will always be multiple systems & devices with layers of databases & applications. 

And for that there’s Integrity – more to come on that later….