I am a recently retired control systems engineer in the US with 45 years experience. In every project we worked on we made sure the end user owned the custom programming, system configuration, and all the process data. I think it is a mistake for a customer to accept anything less.
In the 1960's, my brother and I would walk about three miles (over Red Mountain in Birmingham AL) to the closest Radio Shack. We would each get a free battery using our cards and usually we didn't buy anything. Eventually we became pretty good customers.
I got my third MRI after having a titanium plate put in my neck, and wow was I more nervous that time than the earlier two times. I made the tech let me test the panic button to prove it worked. Of course there was no problem with the MRI.
Twenty years is a mighty short time period for expecting a huge paradigm shift in industry. In 1973 I was touring industrial plants and got to see an automated retrieval and delivery system operating in a plant warehouse. (It might have been the Copolymer plant in Baton Rouge - hard to remember.) So even 50 years may be a bit too short.
Looking back a few hundred years it is easy to see that we have made progress. In the mining industry, for example, the need for large haul trucks is reduced by long conveyors. The longest I have seen is two miles. Those conveyors are barely attended to by operators and their operation is monitored by control systems connected wirelessly and reliably.
The real leap will come, not from increased automated operation, but from automated maintenance. That won't happen until well after IOT is more fully implemented. By that, I don't mean more devices connected to the Internet. In my opinion, IOT's potential lies in the future of the "Things" making decisions based on information from the connected devices.
I can agree with that. It was about fifteen years ago that a colleague (he was a reliability expert) and I did a presentation on using remote monitoring (I'm not sure that the IoT terminology was widespread at the time) to perform predictive diagnostics on our products in the field. And it was probably another five years before that when I led the first team at the company to implement the remote monitoring project that his data was based on.
I don't work there anymore but I'd bet that not much has changed since then.
I was lead developer on another IoT project about 3 years ago, and besides using cell modems instead of Ethernet, because the machines in this case were in geographically remote regions, the state of the art had barely changed.
I started working in the IoT field a few years ago as well and I am surprised by how hard it is to get an IoT project going compared to other cloud computing stuff...
A lot of people think that Industrial Automation is subset of IT, but there is a big difference between IT and OT and where are only just beginning to see any real convergence emerging.
If I remember correctly, some have called it the "Zone" and it is described in the book "The Inner Game of Tennis" by W. Timothy Gallwey. It has been a long while since I read it.
Coming from the Controls Systems Industry, I have seen a few flavors of the SRS. Sometimes we call them Functional Requirements Specifications (FRS). The IEEE has a decent standard for how to put one together, although they call it Software Design Description, "IEEE 1016-2009 IEEE Standard for Information Technology--Systems Design--Software Design Descriptions."
The two industries where I worked where these are well recognized and their use enforced are Nuclear Power and Pharmaceuticals.
Some personal wisdom that I picked up is "If it can't be verified, it isn't a requirement." As an example, I was one told to change the tagnames in a program to "something meaningful." I went through several iterations before I realized that, with this particular customer, that was unachievable. None of the tagnames I built had meaning to him, and he would not give me guidance as to what would be better.
The mere fact that revolution exists disproves this statement.