IoT is a revolutionary, new-wave technology encompassing artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, sophisticated automation, connectivity, and other features. IoT solutions are heralded as the next horizon for major firms seeking to increase their performance and productivity in the face of global problems. Many companies have begun experimenting with IoT platforms to boost productivity and efficiency, acquire a competitive advantage, and uncover new revenue potential resulting from faster time to market, customization, and new services.
Don’t let your IoT success become a cautionary story! To assist, we’ve identified some of the most common mistakes that businesses experience while embarking on their IoT solutions:
- There is no clear business impact of IoT.
IoT technology is excellent, and your IT department will want to implement it. Many things can be measured with IoT solutions and learned from the examined data. But is what you’re doing affecting your business? Is it able to give the actionable insights required to optimize processes, boost efficiency, productivity, or income, or improve customer service? Or are you just carrying out an expensive scientific experiment?
Identify a genuine business need inside your organization. Then, create IoT solutions to meet that demand. You must specify an apparent business effect to get the most value out of an IoT implementation. You can then establish real-world benchmarks against which your IoT solutions can be measured. Only then will you realize the real power of IoT and the actual value it can bring to your firm.
- A lack of sponsorship from the C-suite
Because IoT platform is still relatively new to most businesses, the resources required to complete a meaningful project are frequently underestimated. Sure, you may easily stay under the radar and undertake one-off projects here and there. Still, many components can quickly make a significant and beneficial project complex and expensive, especially if you don’t have the knowledge or correct advice. Lack of a corporate owner or C-suite backing can result in a lack of finance, which can spell the end of an IoT project.
Be aggressive in gaining C-level support and determining who will pay upfront to keep your idea alive. Involve the relevant people from the start — business and IT — and make sure you build and articulate a clear vision to acquire corporate sponsors with significant funds — preferably your CFO.
- Inadequate Foundation
A strong technical foundation is essential for the success of your Internet of Things projects. IoT solutions are a backbone architecture required to acquire and measure valuable data and insights. So, before you can even begin, a lot of technical work must be completed, including integration, connectivity, networking, business information and analysis, data integration, security, machine learning, and more. This could include managing relationships with a variety of vendors. However, many businesses lack the in-house resources — people, know-how, and time – to understand and integrate these complicated concepts and manage vendor relationships.
Expertise is required in this scenario. So, if you don’t have it in-house, the experts at Akenza recommend looking outside for someone that specializes in putting everything together. Ascertain full-service systems integrators capable of contributing value to your project by understanding your business, developing use cases and solutions, managing vendors, and understanding IoT software and hardware, operational technologies, and IT services. To reduce time to value, it would be excellent if the organization also had extensive experience with data science and analytics.
- Inadequate Platform Standardization
Because it is a new technology, IoT standards have a lot of ambiguity. They are, nonetheless, gradually emerging and evolving. A standards platform is essential for speed, efficiency, and scalability when executing an IoT platform.
A standardized IoT platform enables you to use the pilot and apply IoT to the business for real-world use cases, insights, and value. We often propose Microsoft and our IoT Service Hub as a standardized platform. Whatever you choose, you must have an elemental architecture that adheres to a standard that is simple to understand and communicate with. Once your platform is up and running, utilize it as the infrastructure and framework for your pilot.
- A scarcity of data science
The data is what makes IoT solutions so appealing. The collection and analysis of data provide insights and aid in discovering opportunities for enhancing your processes, services, and business. You should concentrate the majority of your IoT investment here. However, for the data to be most useful, it must be contextualized, which requires data science knowledge. Most IT departments lack this level of data analysis expertise. They can collect and examine data in isolation, but if it isn’t part of the bigger picture, the data becomes trivial and meaningless. It might put an end to your IoT initiatives.
Unless you have in-house data science knowledge, partnering with someone who does is your best option. The ideal partner will have domain and data science knowledge, allowing them to relate measurable data to the business, make sense of it, and extract trends and insights that give actual value.
Lastly,
The experts at Akenza that the companies most successful at adopting and deploying IoT pilots and solutions don’t do it alone. Contact Akenza today for more information on how your firm can maximize the benefits of IoT solutions.
