PrivateFleets.com

Last week, I had the chance to visit the GE Global Research Lab in Albany, N.Y. Since many private fleets lease trailers from GE Equipment, and some use GE’s trailer tracking system, VeriWise, I wanted to provide a few snippets from an insightful speech on the future of technology by Dr. Joe Salvo, manager of the Pervasive Decision Laboratory for GE.

      Salvo said we are leaving the Information Age and entering a new age, the Systems Age. In the Systems Age, everyone is drowning in data. The content is so pervasive, and so inexpensive. Information has become commoditized and it is hard to tell the truth from error.

      The logistics industry is not just trucks and trailers. It’s an entire system. We are moving away from physical assets to a knowledge economy where information and data exchange are totally abundant, ubiquitous and growing exponentially.

      Very few people realize the great new frontier we are on. The value is no longer bounded by how many physical things you can own or lease. The value is in the knowledge you can create in the virtual space.

      With so much data, storing information has become a nightmare. Today, the problem is that you don’t have to throw anything away so people just keep buying more and more storage and become paralyzed. People have stopped making decisions as to what data needs to be stored.

      Salvo said many more things that I believe have revolutionary implications for private fleets. In a few days, I will provide a full recap of Dr. Salvo’s speech and how he thinks the VeriWise system will solve the information challenges that fleets face in the new Systems Age.