Digital Twins, Predictive Twins, Models

In a NetworkWorld article by Shaw and Fruhlinger there are two nice definitions.

A digital twin “can include a description of the devices, a 3D rendering and details on all the sensors in the device. It continuously generates sensor readings that simulate real life options.”

A predictive twin “models the future state and behavior of the device based on historical data from other devices, which can simulate hardware and/or software breakdowns and other situations that need attention.”

SAFe (and of course DevOps) talks about it.

Does the Leadership in your firm understand the value of them?

What research have you done on it?

What hands on experience do you have with it?

What are your industry front runners (and thus competitors) doing with them?

While digital twins are becoming more complex, please realize these tools are not new. It's just the new buzz word of the decade. They have been around and improving for the past many decades.

How does the firm you are working with (and thus you) deal with these and even more complex methods to model, prototype, test double, and simulate Products, Process, and Projects?

Models are meant to be used to learn, to answer a question.

A business question. A technical question. A market question.

It might be a product question, a process question, a development question, a test question, even a system of systems question.

Don’t build one for grins (okay, do it over the weekend while you're having a cold adult beverage) Or for being able to pad your resume with more buzz words.

A small step you can take today is this.

Do a search. Find an article of interest. Maybe a book. Maybe a tool tutorial.

Read an article or two.

Continue your lifetime learning.