On a crisp winter morning in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Wilbur and Orville Wright made history when they achieved the first powered flight. With Orville behind the stick, the plane traveled nearly 120 feet on its inaugural flight. Those 12 seconds represent a watershed moment in aviation, but they were the culmination of nearly three years of trial and refinement. Between 1900 and 1902, the brothers tested hundreds of different wing shapes and airfoils. When early models failed to produce the expected amount of lift, they tried changing the wing size. When that failed to solve the problem, they built a wind tunnel to measure their own values for lift and drag.

On a hot summer afternoon in 2003, an overloaded power line in Cleveland, Ohio drooped onto underlying foliage, tripping the high-voltage line and sending a power surge back through the system. Earlier that day, a technician in the area had gone to lunch after repairing an alarm processor and neglected to turn the system back on. Without the proper safeguards in place, line after line throughout the region tripped. Neighboring grids started feeding power into Northeastern Ohio, tripping more lines until cities as far as Detroit and New York were in the dark. It was the largest blackout in American history. In New York, the subway system ground to a halt, stranding commuters and trains. Across the region, more than 50 million people lost power.

For decades, software management tools have been helping us manage everything from our time to our money, and even our fitness. Integrating technology into our lives to solve problems and make processes easier is something we just do now. We see a problem in our life or in our business and our first instinct is to research a solution to which we can confidently outsource that challenge.

The technology landscape for IoT devices is undergoing a big change. The data protocols used to connect assets to the cloud are being upgraded, providing new opportunities and use cases for a wide range of industries. 

In our five-part “Work Connected Series”, we will explore the trends that will drive innovation in the field service market over the next few years. Here we will focus on the influences of big data.