With more than 1.4 million Twitter followers, Cisco Systems’ chief technology and strategy officer Padmasree Warrior might seem as connected as you can get. But she says the world is only 1 percent of the way toward total connectivity.
In an interview about the “Internet of Everything” with McKinsey Publishing’s Rik Kirkland recently, Warrior conveyed her vision for how a significant share of the 99 percent of the people, devices, processes, and information that remains offline will become linked within the next decade. She predicts dramatic, unanticipated changes in everything from health care to farming in the next five years.
Warrior tells Kirkland that by “the Internet of Everything,” she’s talking about “not just connecting the devices onto the network, but how can you use the information that’s being collected to drive better processes, better decision making for businesses, and better lifestyles for users and consumers?” She predicts improved efficiencies in big-data analysis such that every sector, including manufacturing, retail, and transportation, will be transformed.
Advances in connectivity among video, sensors, and the streaming of low bit-rate data will also dramatically alter the consumer experience, Warrior predicts.
In IT, she points to three major “differentials” that will change the future of the IT industry: the importance of the experience of IT—such as the fact that young people now think having access to the Internet is more important than having a car—the importance of velocity, which is driving individuals and businesses to the cloud, and the need to apply analytics to make big data useful.
