Dan Woods

Dan Woods, Contributor

I find technology that matters for early adopters.

5/25/2010 @ 6:00AM

Accelerating The Smart Grid

Is the smart grid and all things smart suffering from the curse of local optima? Based on my work on the Internet of Things and a lengthy series of discussions with Anto Budiardjo, the organizer of this week’s ConnectivityWeek conference, the answer appears to be a qualified yes.

Local optimization is the problem that occurs when a smaller system is made more efficient or more effective in its own terms without any regard for the effect that that optimization may have on the larger systems that it may be a part of. Rabbit reproduction is a perfect example. The efficiency of individual rabbits in breeding can create too many mouths to feed; they consume all the available food. The result: starving rabbits.

My favorite modern, if simplified, example of this is in health care. Most medical procedures like hip replacements and heart operations have become much less expensive. As a result, they are more widely used. The result: exploding system-wide costs.

The general notion of the smart space includes the smart grid, smart things and smart buildings. This idea, which is also sometimes called the Internet of Things, refers to the idea of embedding intelligence in a wide variety of objects that can communicate with each other and with other central sources of monitoring and intelligence. The ConnectivityWeek conference, which Anto Budiardjo has been running for five years, is focused on promoting and examining what is going on in the Smart Space. This is my second year attending the conference.

At the conference I aim to seek out evidence for Budiardjo’s hypothesis that the problem of local optima is having an effect on the pace of growth of the Smart Space. Here’s what appears to be going on: Each vendor has a product, like a wireless router or an advanced meter for the smart grid. The executives and engineers in charge of these products are focused on selling them for their intended purpose. The marketing and product design focuses on selling more wireless routers and smart meters and so on. The business units that support them have aggressive revenue targets to make.

The problem is that in all of this local optimization nobody owns the bigger picture. How do routers and smart meters need to change to enable things that were outside of their original design criteria? How could they be more successful products if the vision for their role were enlarged?

The first question is: What is being retarded? Are there smart applications waiting to be rolled out if only the vision for the parts were a little more expansive? All the players will be there in San Jose for me to ask. After years of analysis, Budiardjo says the answer to this question is a definitive yes. “We work with corporations with multiple business units who often find their collective interactions not well understood in this emerging smart space,” he says.

How do we fix this? Changing organizations is not easy. Budiardjo emphasizes that the problem of local optima in the Smart Space is becoming more recognized, but few have been able to implement effective solutions. Cisco uses the technique of appointing cross-functional teams to focus on important problems. There are many such theoretical approaches to infusing a wider perspective, but few provide protection to an executive who says, “I focused less on revenue in this quarter so I could widen the appeal of the product in the future.”

Even if focused organizations were given latitude to look at the big picture, it is not clear that it would be all that easy to figure out the right thing to do. Given the realities of product development, a reasonable path forward would be to invest in experimental extensions of products and get them in the hands of customers, startups and other innovators to build prototype applications. A top-down approach would likely fail.

Connectivity Week provides the best forum to really answer these questions, but one artifact of the conference also may point the way to a solution. For several years, the conference hosted an impromptu gathering of musicians called the Interoperable Blues Band. The band will not be performing this year, but perhaps it should be reincarnated as a hackathon. If it were possible to create a technology jam session among the big vendors to focus on how to target their products at a wider set of problems, I suspect that the smart world would arrive much faster.


See Also:

The End Of The BlackBerry Elite

How IT Will Conquer Complexity

SAP’s Vertical Future

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