The drive from Dubai to the Omani coast takes you through deserts with sand dunes and mountains along roads with warning signs to watch out for camels. Sure enough, I did see camels just wandering around in the desert.
When I arrived at the client I was visiting that day in Oman, I had to wait in the security hut until someone came to pick me up. The security guard did not speak English but I tried to strike up a conversation anyway. I told him that I had seen camels on my drive there. I could see he did not understand the word camel so I took a pen and paper and drew a picture of a camel. As soon as he recognized what it was I was drawing, he jumped up in the air and shouted “Jamel” (hence I discovered the Arabic word for camel!).
He then grabbed his mobile phone and excitedly showed me pictures of himself with camels. I quickly determined that he owned eight camels and he named them all and from his expressions I realized they were a great source of joy to him. He spoke about them like they were his children and he had pictures where he was kissing and hugging them.
At my meeting, the client was explaining how they wanted to look at utility usage in addition to production line equipment usage over time. Although the production line itself was fully automated, the meter and machine readings were manually read and recorded. We discussed ways that the readings could be captured automatically and fed into a database and displayed and analyzed through a Business Intelligence dashboard. They were very excited about this but when I mentioned how much time this could save the supervisor in the morning since he would not have to collect the information manually any more, the supervisor spoke up. He explained that when he toured the factory floor each morning, he not only collected the meter readings but he spoke to the people on duty and found out if there were any issues or problems over the last 24 hours and gathered a lot of other useful information. He spoke fondly of this responsibility and his relationship with both the workers and the machinery. It actually reminded me of the way the security guard had spoken about his camels.
Interestingly, it was this very supervisor who was the main instigator behind the idea of bringing in business intelligence dashboards to the company. We agreed that there were plenty of other great benefits to automating the data collection into the dashboards without changing his daily factory floor tour. This was an inspired supervisor who loved his job and his company and clearly saw the importance of maintaining both the data analysis and the human action parts of their operation in harmony.
Taking advantage of technology while maintaining the essence of what makes an organization run smoothly creates intelligent and sustainable processes.
The next morning as I was leaving the hotel I saw three camels grazing on the manicured grass in front of the entrance. These are smart camels, I thought – taking advantage of man-made technology to sustain themselves!
