Analyzing General Electric's Industrial Internet Project: A Case Study

This case study examines General Electric's Industrial Internet project, focusing on its application of Enterprise Information Architecture (EIA). The report provides an overview of the project, including the use of Architecture Overview and Component Relationship Diagrams to illustrate the project's structure and goals. It details the importance of information management and integration, emphasizing the need for data analytics across various departments within GE. The study explores cloud infrastructure strategies, including the suitability of different cloud models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) for GE's operations, and the adoption of Predix, GE's own software platform. Furthermore, the report discusses strategies for application and service integration, such as automating business processes and developing composite applications. The conclusion emphasizes the importance of implementing these strategies for the successful deployment of the Industrial Internet project, highlighting the potential for improved security, real-time monitoring, and data analysis. The report also offers recommendations for planning, security, and business strategy adjustments.

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Case Study-General Electric (EIA)
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

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Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................2
Discussion........................................................................................................................................2
Enterprise Information Architecture Reference Architecture (EIA RA).....................................3
Architecture Overview Diagram..............................................................................................3
Component Relationship Diagram..........................................................................................5
Information Management and Integration...................................................................................6
Application and Data Storage Infrastructure Design...................................................................8
Application and Service Integration............................................................................................9
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................9
Recommendations..........................................................................................................................10
References......................................................................................................................................11

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Introduction
The General Electric is a multinational conglomerate corporation based in New York and
headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, United States (Ge.com., 2018). The conglomerate
corporation is defined as a large corporation formed by merging of different and distinct parts or
items. The report focuses on the case study of General Electric that has proposed a project
Industrial Internet. There are diagrams also which demonstrates the scenario of the case study.
The purpose of the report is to explain General Electric case study on Industrial Internet project
with reference to Enterprise Information Architecture and diagrams. The cloud options and
suitability are also discussed.
The structure of this report is a brief explanation of General Electric and details of the
proposed project through Architecture Overview Diagram and Component Relationship
Diagram. The other sections of this report are strategies for integration of information
management and cloud infrastructure strategies.
Discussion
The General Electric Corporation is a big player and holds a reputable position in market.
The Industrial Internet is proposed By General Electric to have powerful operations that can
immediately identify system failures and downtime (MIT Sloan Management Review., 2018).
The project can also withstand high risk situations such as life-threatening situations and provide
safety. The following sections will discuss the General Electric Corporation details and the
overall scenario of the Industrial Internet project with reference to Enterprise Information

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Architecture templates. The cloud infrastructure strategy and strategies for services and
applications integration are also discussed in details to analyze the project.
Enterprise Information Architecture Reference Architecture (EIA RA)
The below two diagrams are Enterprise Information Architecture models which explain
the General Electric case study on Industrial Internet.
Architecture Overview Diagram
The General Electric project Industrial Internet is presented through building blocks that
help to build and develop the project. The common functional capabilities are described through
Architecture Overview Diagram for future business prospective. The Architecture Overview
Diagram is designed according the business needs for General Electric project Industrial Internet.
The Architecture Overview Diagram shows the capabilities that are required to achieve the
objective and the required goal of Industrial Internet project in General Electric (Chang, 2016).
The goals which are required to be achieved are described briefly. The first goal is real-time
monitoring and acquisition of data through the Industrial Internet project to analyze the
environment outside and inside of General Electric. The second goal is real-time analytics of
data that are necessary to build and develop Industrial Internet project within General Electric.
The third goal is to integrate predictive business analysis and purposes for future prospective and
effective operation of Industrial Internet for the General Electric business growth. The fourth
goal is to properly present Industrial Internet project to the General Electric management
department for authentication and authorization. The fifth goal is to finally present to the
customer to assess the impacts of Industrial Internet on the business growth of General Electric.

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Figure 1: Architecture Overview Diagram
(Abstracted from week 2 lecture slides)

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The diagram above illustrates the goals and objectives of Industrial Internet that is to be
presented to the General Electric Management department.
There are three major sections and they are finance department, Human Resource
department and Data warehouse. The finance department is responsible for financial planning
and upgrading the components of Industrial Internet project (Ahmad and Brosio, 2015). Cost
Maintenance and assessment of profit are also looked by this department from the beginning to
end of the project. The Human Resource department is responsible for acquisition of appropriate
workforce and evaluating them for different departments (Whetzel and Wheaton, 2016). The
overall scenario is briefly explained to the appropriate workforce by the Human Resource
Department. The Data Warehouse is responsible for managing transaction including data history
maintenance, data quality improvement and adding values to business growth (Stein and
Morrison, 2014).
Component Relationship Diagram
The component relationship diagram describes the relationships among the components
presented in the diagram. The below diagram illustrates the relationships among the various
components of Industrial Internet project. The system developer can easily identify the
functionality and operation of the information system through this diagram for Industrial
Internet. The diagram is derived by architecture overview diagram, in other words the
component relationship diagram is the next phase of architecture overview diagram (Galliers and
Leidner, 2014). The component relationship diagram depicts the development of Industrial
Internet project with reference to connections between the components. The diagram has all the
components and connections between the components that are required to deliver functionality
and operation to General Electric. It consists of components implementation, components name,

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composition interoperability, and finally the evolution, customization and deployment of the
components through the diagram.

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Figure 2: Component Relationship Diagram
(Abstracted from week 4 lecture slides)

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Information Management and Integration
The adoption of data analytics are used for decision making purposes for every
organization. General Electric needs to have insights from data in areas such as sales team,
finance team, marketing team, procurement team and other teams relevant to the Corporation.
These departments have its own targets that are separated and individual to each team. The
targets of individual team results in success and analysis of data structure to ensure security
and privacy. Each department has concern for success of its department and the information
is secured from other departments also. This helps in integrity and security. The working and
function of each department can be described by following examples such as marketing team
has concern related to number of leads generated (Shmueli et al., 2015). The next example is
sales team which has concern related to meeting the targets of the business operations. The
other example is finance team which has concern related to financial condition of business
and cost maintenance. Another example is information technology that has concern related to
proper and effective use of data analytics for the project. The data sources for General
Electric are such as web data, marketing automation data and CRM data which are generated.
The other data sources are such as media, cloud, Internet of Things and databases which are
generated within the company (Talia, 2013). The media sources include Google, Facebook,
Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. The cloud storage includes structured and unstructured data
from various types of cloud options. The web data source includes data from websites that are
free and that are paid. The Internet of Things sources include machine generated data
(Jaseena and David, 2014). The databases data sources are structured data generated form
company’s databases.
The data integration comes under data strategy components. This is explained as the
five components compose data strategy and they are identification, storage, provision,
integration and governing. The integration strategy is explained as integration of data after

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going through identification, storage of relevant data, provisioning of data among workforce
of company (Baesens, 2014). The integration is costly as it includes moving and combining
of data across the information system, and extraction and loading of data. The data
integration is seen as challenging however it needs to be deployed effectively.
Application and Data Storage Infrastructure Design
There is a need to have cloud storage as it is an asset for every organization. The
cloud storage models are based on different models that are service models and deployment
models. The service models include IaaS, PaaS and SaaS and deployment model include
private, public and hybrid cloud (Rittinghouse and Ransome, 2016). The private, public and
hybrid cloud are defined as the clouds suitable for different purposes of organization’s
operations. The private cloud provides services that are managed by the company whereas
public cloud provides services that can be access by the company over the internet. The
hybrid cloud has functions of both the services of private and public cloud. IaaS is used for
services on rent that are provided by external providers for business purposes. SaaS is used
for accessing on the internet using browser for business operations. PaaS is used by
combining the IaaS and SaaS service models.
The cloud storage models suitable for company’s function and operation are based on
the provided service by the three models. SaaS is used as installing, managing and updating
without human effort and thus cost is reduced. PaaS is used as an environment where the
services can change when required. IaaS is used to control applications when there is a need
of scaling up or down related to traffic networks in the system.
General Electric adopted cloud storage due to some reasons and they are speed-
oriented services, security and privacy, lower costs, scaling ability, global visibility and

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failure of isolation. The company introduced Industrial Internet and developed its own
software, Predix, for deploying the project (Predix: The Industrial Platform Advantage.,
2016). The cloud infrastructure strategy requires some points. The first is cloud storage has
security and legacy system issues in spite of advanced technology, thus it should be looked
upon before deployment. The second is high agility, scalability and support is required to
have greater business operations (Mishra et al., 2013). The third is to manage the overall
operation of business working such as recruitment and retaining of customers. The fourth is
management of cost for adoption of cloud storage. The fifth is evaluating the risks of cloud
storage within the company for future purposes.
Application and Service Integration
The strategies for integration of application and services are described in the
following discussions. The application integration strategies are automating business process
and composite application for business improvements (Bussler, 2013). The automating
business process or in other terms business to business integration where two companies deal
on specific purposes. This process provides common gateway for communicating and
working on suitable purposes. The benefits of automating business processes are fast, cheap,
accurate and visible within the organization. The composite application has benefits of cross-
application functions to do jobs efficiently and effectively. The service integration has
strategies and they are addressing systematic and effective procedural barriers for business
collaboration process (Charter and Tischner, 2017). The service integration provided by
service provider is necessary to meet the client’s requirements. The agreement of each and
every person of the company is needed to establish service integration. The final strategy is to
develop a model for service and application integration planning to be presented to higher
authority.

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The above strategies for service and application integration are done to meet the
requirements of General Electric Company to develop Industrial Internet.
Conclusion
The above discussions conclude that there is need of implementing the above
strategies in order to get a useful insight of Industrial Internet project internally and externally
in General Electric. The implementation of the Enterprise Information Architecture models as
explained in the discussion through diagram, necessary to gain the knowledge and
understanding of the information system. The report also focuses on various factors of
implementation and integration strategies of applications and services in information system.
The proposed project is valuable and effective if above strategies are implemented properly.
The project can achieve security, speed and real-time monitoring and analysis for long term
use in future. The cloud options are also discussed which concludes that there is a need of
deploying cloud infrastructure with proper strategies. Therefore, it can be concluded that the
project discussed in this report need to be properly and efficiently deployed to gain
understanding and knowledge of the project
Recommendations
 To adopt strategies for planning and development before deploying Industrial
Internet project.
 To begin with best security practices by establishing common security inside
and outside General Electric.
 To modify and reorient the business strategies to gain full potential of the
project.
 To ensure active participations from merchandisers to invest in the project for
security, interoperability and management for system operation.

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 To upgrade the information system timely for data protections and security for
the proposed project.

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References
Ahmad, E. and Brosio, G. eds., 2015. Handbook of Multilevel Finance. Edward Elgar
Publishing.
Baesens, B., 2014. Analytics in a big data world: The essential guide to data science and its
applications. John Wiley & Sons.
Bussler, C., 2013. B2B integration: Concepts and architecture. Springer Science & Business
Media.
Chang, J.F., 2016. Business process management systems: strategy and implementation. CRC
Press.
Charter, M. and Tischner, U. eds., 2017. Sustainable solutions: developing products and
services for the future. Routledge.
Davenport, T.H. and Dyché, J., 2013. Big data in big companies. International Institute for
Analytics, 3.
Gal, A., 2015, August. Big data integration. In Keynote speech at international conference on
open and big data (OBD 2015).
Ge.com., 2018. Our Company. [online] Available at:
https://www.ge.com/in/about-us/building [Accessed 6 Jan. 2018].
Jaseena, K.U. and David, J.M., 2014. Issues, challenges, and solutions: big data
mining. NeTCoM, CSIT, GRAPH-HOC, SPTM–2014, pp.131-140.

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MIT Sloan Management Review., 2018. GE’s Big Bet on Data and Analytics. [online]
Available at: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/case-study/ge-big-bet-on-data-and-analytics/
[Accessed 5 Jan. 2018].
Predix: The Industrial Platform Advantage., 2016. [ebook] General Electric. Available at:
https://www.ge.com/digital/sites/default/files/Predix-Platform-Advantage-Infographic.pdf
[Accessed 6 Jan. 2018].
Rittinghouse, J.W. and Ransome, J.F., 2016. Cloud computing: implementation,
management, and security. CRC press
Shmueli, G., Bruce, P.C., Patel, N.R., Yahav, I. and Lichtendahl Jr, K.C., 2017. Data Mining
for Business Analytics: Concepts, Techniques, and Applications in R. John Wiley & Sons.
Stein, B. and Morrison, A., 2014. The enterprise data lake: Better integration and deeper
analytics. PwC Technology Forecast: Rethinking integration, 1, pp.1-9.
Talia, D., 2013. Clouds for scalable big data analytics. Computer, 46(5), pp.98-101.
Whetzel, D.L. and Wheaton, G.R. eds., 2016. Applied measurement: industrial psychology in
human resources management. Routledge.