What Power Plant Software Can Learn From Consumer Apps Like iTunes
Released on 11/07/2014
Good morning everybody. My name's Greg Petroff.
I manage user experience for GE, which is
a very large company, been around for a long time and design
hasn't been part of the DNA of the culture of the company
at all and we are sort of been challenged to find ways
to bring design into a incredibly well-run engineering
organization that doesn't really understand design too well.
I'm going to highlight a project that we've been working on
for the last two years.
It's really about the people who make the planet run,
that keep things running.
The guys and gals who keep the jet engines
operating on the plane that you flew to come out to
the conference.
The people that keep the power on.
The folks who keep the medical machines at hospitals
operating so that clinicians can help you
if you need to or find yourself in that kind of situation.
What is it about this space?
It's an interesting place.
We call these people field engineers and they
have to work in some of the most difficult situations
you can imagine.
This is a guy who is sitting about 350 feet in the air
in the tallest wind turbine in the world, in the Nacelle.
He has to bring everything up a ladder, right?
There's no elevator that takes you up that space.
You have to climb your way up to the top.
He has to operate in an environment that is challenging
to say the least.
These guys, the folks that work in these environments, we
haven't really developed software or tools for them.
They're late to the technology revolution.
They're not really software people. They're craftsmen.
They treasure their tools. They treasure the experience
of having an intimate relationship with the machines that
they service and they become sort of connected to them.
In a way, they're sort of the machine whisperers of our
industrial world.
They work in really interesting environments.
Sometimes it's dangerous environments.
It's tight spaces.
It's places that are difficult for people to get into.
You can see this person
is in a water processing space.
They have to disassemble these things, put them back
together again and it's a big challenge for them
in terms of how to do it.
So we spent a lot of time watching these people at work
and it's one of the nice things about GE. It has so
many different businesses that we can sort of study
field engineers in locationss on an oil platform, in a
manufacturing facility, at a hospital, and we can study
them in different cultures too around the world
and in different weather conditions.
As I said earlier, there are ... They have to operate
in environments which might be 125 degrees outside
or in an environment where it's minus 40 degrees so it's
a challenging space for people to be productive and
get work and an interesting problem to solve for.
So just some more cool pictures of kind of the space that
they get to operate.
One of the things we've discovered in sort of watching these
people at work are a couple of really simple truths.
One, nobody respects the context of what they're doing.
They don't have actually access to the tools that they
need to be successful when they're out on the job.
This environment that they work in, in infrastructure,
they know why they're there. They're being called because
there's a failure or there's a repair that needs to be made.
We actually know why they're there because we sent
them there.
The systems that are operating on these machines have
sensors in them now that generate tons of data, so we
know what's going on in the situation at that moment
but we don't really respect the moment, the environment
that they find themselves in and offer them the information
that they need to be successful.
So we spent some time sort of looking at this and
the biggest part, for them, is sort of Understand
what I'm doing and I need to accomplish.
Make that easy for me.
So we spent a lot of time.
This is, looking at it, this is a picture of a turbo.
It's a part of a locomotive.
It weighs about two tons
and they get removed pretty often because it's the part
on a locomotive that breaks the most often.
It's not just fixing what's broken, it's actually
they have a lot of decisions to make.
Because we know the behavior of how this particular
locomotive or this particular turbo has been operated
in a context of a larger fleet of systems and they may
make a decision to repair something that's not even
broken yet because they already have it out
of the machine.
So they have a lot of strong decisions that they have to
make along the way.
In that process, repairing what's not necessarily
broken is an important part of their decision process.
So we also know that there are a lot of remote
locationss, right?
These people have to wear safety gloves and goggles and
equipment that gets in the way of them being able to have
access to computing.
They're not normally software people, right?
They're people that hold tools.
We've historically given them some degree of software and
if you look in the space, it's really late to modernize.
If they have something it's a DOS screen with
you know, the green screen of death.
We in an inflection point and the irony is that
we actually can change their lives pretty
radically right now with where we are from a computer
science standpoint, with cloud and data and analytics,
and being able to take information off of the machines
that we have out in the world.
So what happens when we have a platform that knows that
you're there?
What happens when if I walk up to a machine, the machine
knows I've already arrived at the situation?
What happens when all of the infrastructure and databases
and systems that can support you being effective,
also are aware of that context and moment?
That's the space that we've been really interested in from
a design standpoint.
So we did a bunch of things.
We started looking at how could we build a simple design
system for GE as a whole.
We built a bunch of prototypes 3 years ago
when we started the adventure.
We didn't really know what we were making.
We made a bunch of different types of applications.
We then built that in a way where we could actually
build very fast, so we built a design system for
engineers to build software with, so we built it
and code enabled it. That allowed us to sort of make
it the speed that we could think so we didn't have to
think to make. We could make to think and that
enabled us to get smarter along the way.
Then, because we live in the world, we spent some time
on geospacial tools, making mapping more interesting,
more valuable for people.
Along the way we also sort of discovered how to provide
guidance to people who are building applications.
The design team that we have is not large enough to build
all of the software that's going to get built in GE
so we had to make it in a way that people could create
and aggregate and make their software as quickly as
possible.
We were challenged with some other things.
We were able to actually make really simple, delightful
applications that allowed us to prove our point around
how design could matter for the folks in the field.
We also had to explore new typography so I love the fact
that we're talking about typography today.
GE has a really strong typographic branding style to it
except there was never design for digital devices so we had
to go and redesign the type experience in GE back to the
skeletal side of the typeface and then rebuild it from
scratch.
So we did that and that got embedded into the software
that we built.
Click.
So then, basically, we came to a new idea, an idea
around what we call context-based computing.
This is, in the background what you're seeing here is
something we call PredixCo. It's a very simple
application that allows a field engineer to have everything
that he needs. So we build these micro-applications.
They're very small. Byte sized.
If I walk up to a piece of equipment
the system will assemble those micro-applications
automatically into a playlist.
It's sort of like you know, if you go to the gym
and you have your iTunes list of music that you're going
to listen to, we can create a list of software, software
as media, and put that together to make the perfect
experience for an engineer or a field engineer could
create their own collections, their own toolkits.
The thing that's cool about it is that you only need
to know four motions to be able to use it.
Sort of left, right, and up and down. We can support
that whether you're wearing gloves or even with motion
controllers so that if you're in a situation where
you have a wrench and tools, it's very easy for people to
use it.
What we found when we put this out into the field is that
people really liked using it.
In fact, there was a lot of speculation that if we gave
ipadss to field engineers that they would break them
or that they would forget them or that they would fall
apart. What we found out is that they became these
treasured items for them. They cared for them so
carefully because it was the first time that someone had
actually provided them the context that allowed them to
do their job and be successful in the moment and have
access to all the information that they needed.
In doing that, we created a whole sort of ecosystem of
building these kinds of applications very quickly.
Now what we can do is we can sit down with a specific
field engineer and build an application in a matter of
hours and build that and make them more productive.
In that story, actually, we're democratizing the design
process and we hope in that process, we'll be able to
improve the quality of the infrastructure that we count
on in the world, moving forward.
Thank you.
(applause)
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