An oft-retold story about the history of Silicon Valley claims that Apple (Nasdaq:AAPL) founder Steve Jobs swiped the ideas he saw at Xerox (NYSE:XRX), including the concepts of the mouse and Windows, to build the personal computer market.
There’s some debate about how indebted Jobs was to Xerox, but there’s no doubt that Apple’s emphasis on the importance of design and usability was a cornerstone of the company’s success.
While the advances in technology and emphasis on design fostered by the computer industry have arguably spread into other segments of the economy over the years – the car industry for one – some sectors have rigidly stuck with the tried and true, resisting pressure to embrace a more user-friendly ethos and the technological advancement that often accompanies it.
The mining industry in particular has been reluctant to accept and incorporate new technologies, especially those developed outside of the industry.
“There’s absolutely an apprehension [in the mining industry] for accepting anything new,” said David Willick, North American commercial director for GE Mining, in a PwC report. “I think we’re very close to a tipping point, and that attitude has to change.
According to a report from Clareo, a Chicago-based strategic consulting firm, low investment in research and development in the mining industry has slowed progress in critical technology areas, including design.
However, this mindset appears to be changing, particularly in B.C., as evidenced by the number of tech companies jumping into the mining industry.
One of them, Digitalist, recently opened its first Canadian office in Vancouver’s Gastown. The company collaborates with traditional industry players, like mining companies, to help them more efficiently use their data and technology through more intuitive, user-friendly design. One of the main reasons the company chose B.C. was because of the resource sector’s large presence, said Digitalist senior vice-president Pertti Hannelin.
Digitalist is not the only company recognizing the opportunity for change in the sector. Earlier this year, Vancouver-based Llamazoo Interactive Inc. launched its MineLife VR software, which creates a life-size 3D representation of a mine plan from exploration to closure. It helps improve mining project planning.
Mining companies are beginning to embrace the importance of user-friendly design in adapting new technologies to the industry. Among them is Outotec, a multinational mining tech company with offices in Toronto and Vancouver. It’s collaborating with Digitalist to make its mining technology more intuitive.
“We think [digitalization] is a real key in our development,” said Heikki Laurila, Outotec’s director of concentrator solutions for the Americas, “so we have to keep up with it.”
Laurila said digitization has generated additional service revenue streams for Outotec and allowed the company to use resources more efficiently.
An EY report highlights the problems the industry has had integrating new technologies into its projects. The Digital Disconnect: Problem or Pathway notes such industry pitfalls as a lack of training in digital technology and a culture of decentralization that has prevented effective communication among operations and departments. While the report does not draw direct parallels with a lack of usability and design, EY’s Canadian mining and metals advisory services leader, Iain Thompson, said all business-to-business sectors, including mining, could benefit from a focus on design and usability.
“If the mining industry focused on design and usability, it would have a better opportunity to drive adoption, but that would be common in other [industries],” he said. “It’s probably more important in mining in a sense, because you have to go that extra mile to get the user to adopt new technology.”
While better-designed user interfaces can help employees adopt digital mining technology, it is not the only aspect of mining technology that may require a redesign.
Mining companies gather and store large amounts of data.
But according to the EY report, that data is often dispersed across departments within organizations. This decentralization means that both data and digital strategies often go underused.
The report also highlighted a lack of maturity in the mining industry’s data systems as the biggest contributor to a large gulf between the industry’s vision and its digital strategy.
Hannelin estimated that roughly 90% of data gathered by mining companies goes unused.
By designing systems to share data, mining firms could better exploit a largely untapped resource, he said.
“The way we see it, just huge amounts of raw data is kind of pointless. Data has to become information and information needs to become knowledge so it can be applied to changing something in the industry. Data is just numbers; what you do with that data is the most important part.”
Digitalist’s director of technology, Andre Erthal, added that data could allow companies to be more confident when choosing a site to mine and more effective when extracting the resources.
