My Smart House and the Quest for a Great Analogy Pt 2
It’s time for part two of my quest for a great analogy — comparing the amazing world of information management, data analytics and business intelligence to some of the lessons I’ve learned from adding smart house items to my house.
For those who weren’t here for part one, I asked readers to imagine themselves to be in a truly smart city; one where every house was able to communicate with a city super-computer, enabling the efficient delivery of utilities. Houses were free to implement smart things as they wish, with the city simply mandating the communications environment.
I then went through many of the steps any business looking to implement information management will need to go through:
- Setting goals — I wanted a smart house which was beautiful, elegant, simple and had data storage,
- Defining success — it was important to me that people would feel relaxed,
- Building infrastructure — I got the builders to put fibre throughout my home, and
- Implementing tools — I used Philips Hue Light bulbs, Apple Time Capsule and a FritzBox router.
But I finished the week with a significant issue. Power Plugs. Who would have thought!
The Problem of Competing Priorities
For me, the great power plug dilemma of 2016 came right down to some competing priorities. I was stuck.
On the one hand, I sincerely desired to reduce my energy consumption. This wasn’t just about being environmentally friendly, it could actually save me significant amounts of money. Yet I also wanted something which was simple and easy to use, and therein lay the rub.
The problem is this: due to the new and emerging nature of smart home devices, there are many competing ways of doing this out there, none of which offer a complete solution. For instance, Philips does not offer power plugs. Another solution, WeMo, does not offer coloured light bulbs. To make this even more complicated, up until recently most of these solutions also don’t talk to each other. This has started to change recently with the advent of Apple’s HomeKit, however, in Australia at present, we are limited to older products.
As a result I was stuck between two priorities — efficiency vs simplicity.
For me, this is a perfect analogy for many organisations, and it’s tough! Every business has legacy data — customer records, phone numbers and so on. Often times these are locked up in special programs or things created by some tech guru at some stage and it seems almost impossible to get them to work together! And almost without fail these things are critical to some part of the business. Like a leech, they suck away quietly at your efforts to reform your organisation for the Information Age, making everything harder.
Being quite determined to solve this issue, I started to look into it more and more. Surely there had to be a way to get through this, even if this required some extra work. And luckily for me there was!
Enter my wonderful, beautiful and amazing Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi’s are pretty amazing, and are starting to change the world; however I wont go into detail about them here. I found I could use this little device, at the cost of $30.00, to connect WeMo devices to HomeKit (if you’re interested, here are the two tutorials I followed here and here), solving my simplicity problem! However, there was a significant cost — it still took me a whole weekend of trying things, working through some issues and lots of trial and error!!!
But here’s the thing — building this system is going to save me heaps of money in electricity, vastly simplify my life, and help me create beautiful spaces as I continue to build my business. For me, the cost was worth it.
For many organisations, this is where things get hard! Information management is an art and a skill and it’s tough at times. Investing time in building your team and learning to become a data-driven organisation will help, but it is still going to be tough going at times. You have to decide if the cost is worth it.
On the back of my investigations I went ahead and bought some WeMo smart plugs and carried on.
It was at this point I had a bit of an epiphany.
Here I was installing all of these things, having fun, turning my walls all different colours and so on, but really, who cares? It’s nice and fun when I have friends over for dinner and BBQ’s, but am I really helping here? I had covered off on all of my initial goals, but was I really achieving anything here?
I asked myself, ‘What could I do with all of this data?’
And this is where it started to get really exciting (full disclosure here, I have only just started down this track, so it will probably take a while for the results to come through). During my initial setup and installation of tools I had been using a little home energy monitor to measure all my electricity consumption — making sure I was actually saving electricity — and storing the results.
But then I figured out that all the smart devices I had installed: the WeMo, the Raspberry Pi, the Philips Hue lights could all store information too. Things like when they switched on, how they worked together, when the most efficient times were. Not only that, I already had a way to measure my energy consumption; surely I could use some data analytics to start prepositioning my stuff to really drive down my electricity usage?
I did a little research and realised that yes indeed I could do this. In fact, this was an area which was just starting to be explored. Furthermore, many of the areas I was doing my studies in could be applied to this.
This was amazing! With all the stuff I had gathered and the work I had put in, I could absolutely do some cool things! I could explore if keeping my house cool in the mornings was more efficient than cooling it down again in the afternoon. I could look into how I used my lights, maybe using sensors to make them more efficient. What about a display alerting me to issues? or one of the new Tesla Batteries, charging it in when electricity is cheap to be used when electricity is expensive? All with very little extra work.
For me, this is the moment I live for.
This is the moment when all the hard work, all the frustration, all the time solving challenging issues all makes sense. This is the meeting where I stop trying to sell this amazing capability and managers, executives, CEO’s and key decision makers start to see it for themselves. This is when the conversation changes to asking the right questions — instead of ‘why should we do this?’ it becomes ‘lets try this and measure if it works’.
It is here, in this moment, I really believe the true power of the Information Age exists. There is so much data out there, so many opportunities just waiting to be discovered and getting data management right is the foundation of seeing them!
But this wasn’t all. I now had the foundations for building a smarter home and now I wanted to explore them. I wanted to look into everything and understand it.
But alas, for this episode I was out of time :( Join me in my next episode as I start to dive in and explore all that this foundation can do for me and be inspired as I share how this could truly change your business!
James Hinton
As a person who is passionate about the ability of information to transform organisations, I am always interested in hearing from my readers. I’ve spent nearly eight years in this field and have just embarked on working towards a doctorate in this area but I feel like I’ve just started.
If there’s any way you feel I could help, please feel free to email me on james@creativeappnologies.com, join me on linkedIn — James Hinton or add me on Instagram at creativeappnologies.
