DigTwin 1: What’s an Intelligent Digital Twin?

A lot of people have been asking us, exactly what are we creating at Process Intelligence and Dynamics?

We tell them we are creating a product to create intelligent digital twins of business processes. Many times, we get hugely perplexed looks.

So let me start this blog by explaining what’s a Digital Twin.

Wikipedia defines digital twin as “A digital twin is a digital replica of a living or non-living physical entity.” The virtual entity will exist simultaneously with the physical entity, seamlessly share data and allow advanced functionality to operate without disruption to physical entity.
Now, digital twins are much in vogue in industrial IOT space. There is a lot of literature available. I have provided below, links to a couple of very good blogs.
We at PID believe that creating a universal platform to create digital twins will prove to be a real game changer for easy adoption of futuristic disruptions like AI, Automation, RPA, IOT and other digital technologies.

In the twins we are creating, we are trying to abstract out the common structures, common flows and principles of dynamics in business processes. So, the twin of a business process will:
1. Capture and resemble the flow and dynamics of the process
2. Continuously (at regular intervals) fetch data from various transaction systems. Act as a supervisory monitoring layer. This will make it ‘LIVE’.
3. Interpret and depict in near real time the actual status of the process as well as individual transactions
4. Capture the ‘intelligence’ within process data
5. Enable supervisory interventions at pre-defined points in actual process execution

This kind of twin implementation will provide huge benefits to business and IT. I am listing only the salient ones here.
1. The twin can work on selected, important data points and will be free from the clutter of transaction systems
2. Its curated, uncluttered data will be a boon for implementing future technologies like AI, RPA, block chain etc.
3. Being a twin, such implementations and modifications will cause ZERO disruption to business and IT operations
4. This will help achieve a clear separation of business strategy, performance monitoring, planning and tracking etc. from low level transaction and IT operations.

If you wish to understand the IOT use cases in depth, here is a beautiful article by Bjorn Fidjeland.
Our concept is somewhat similar to ones explained in this blog from Dirk Ammerman from SAP.

But again, the foundation of achieving all this is to go back to basics: the process…
Interesting? More on how we look at the process in the next blog…

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