Preventive Maintenance

Physical things wear our and break. This is the nature of our world. Systems made of physical things are supposed to keep running uninterrupted. To do that they have to be designed in such a way that the components can be replaced effortlessly. Maintenance is not incidental. It is a process.

As things are getting smarter, one of the fundamental design goals should be self-maintenance. Of course database software is not able to replace a failed hard drive. A lighting system will not screw in a new light bulb when an old one fails. But failures - in most cases - are not instantaneous. Usually a deteriorating state of a component can be detected before it stops working completely. Alerting humans and giving them enough time to react.

This was one of the very pleasant experiences I had a few weeks ago. If you can call a hard drive failure a pleasant experience. But hey, hard drives do fail. But when a NAS system I run in my basement detected this condition, with enough lead time to buy a new drive and let me install it without shutting down the server, I have to admit it was pleasant.

Preventive maintenance is on of the first goals realized by IoT. After all these things are meant to be smart and connected. So they should be monitoring themselves and give us time to fix them before they break. Also the replacement procedure should be painless. You should not be using a drill to erase security credentials from a failed thing, before throwing it into a trash can.

And preventive maintenance should really be one of the first features of a smart home or a smart building. Before a coffee maker starts waking me up with an automatically scheduled morning coffee cup, I would love all my things at home to start monitoring themselves for faults.