Supply Chain Real Time Sensor Data

FedEx have taken the step of developing sensor bundles that you can drop into a package for real-time tracking of your precious cargo. Sensors on the device tell you where the package is, its temperature, and whether the package has been opened.

$120 US a month is a little pricy for the laity, but would be worth it for special cargo in the area of life sciences, which is the target market.

However, if this information can be sent via such simple tracking devices, and the price goes down, then these devices could be used for so much data logging of sensor information.

So, apropos of nothing. Maybe when the temperature sensors come to people's iPhones, instead of folding at home, we could have "Weather at Home." Crowd sourcing micro climate information from people's mobile phones.

Now that would be the BOM!

Ross

We interrupt this business blog with a gratuitous picture

Usually I write about the visualisation of business process models. However, this week I have just come across some truly beautiful pictures of the 3D Mandelbrot set, and they made my computer graphics heart go all a quiver. So I thought I would share the URL with the 2.5 people who read my blog.

Enjoy.

Ross

QUT BPM Wordle

Last weekend our research group had a retreat at the O'Reilly's Forest Retreat in Lamington National Park, Qld. I ran a session where I asked the group members present to write down five phrases that represent their research work. After removing obvious phrases, such as Business Process Management and Services, I uploaded the data to the Many Eyes visualisation service at IBM, and came up with this Wordle.

A Wordle displays words from a sequence of text, in a size that is proportional to the number of times it is present. It is often used in folksonomy research, as it provides insight into emerging clusters of terms within the language of a community.

Enjoy.

Ross

BPMVE YouTube Channel

You might want to look at the BPMVE YouTube channel, where I post videos of our demonstration software.

A widget of this channel is also situated on the right of this blog.

Ross

My Latest Papers

For those interested, I have updated my eprints at QUT to include my latest papers.

Ross

Ten Billion Reasons for Serious Research Funding

Found a blog entry here that is predicting a ten billion dollar industry for Serious Games.

This number will start to rival the size of the games industry as a whole, which is $11.7 billion as of 2008.

Would be good if the prediction comes true. I might finally get some substantial funding for my BPM research in this area. :-)

Ross

Interactive Visualisation to Facilitate Expert Knowledge

Came across this tool for structuring arguments over at the Independent Newspaper. You can register and add arguments for the main topic, and vote for the arguments posted by other people.

Might be useful for eliciting expert information for Business Process Modelling. Using software tools for gathering such consensus-based information from clients, may help with some of the problems with modelling software and business systems. Such collaborative software can be used to obtain a more accurate estimate of the way people do work in an enterprise.

Ross