Latin America. The perceived benefits of IoT are numerous and highly compelling. There are warnings about the euphoria of the IoT. A recent Business Intelligence report forecasts that there will be 55 Trillion IoT-connected devices by 2025.
With an IoT investment of nearly $15 trillion projected for the same year, there is a huge opportunity for businesses to make costly, complicated, and potentially fatal mistakes. With all that is at stake, how can your company build on an IoT strategy that succeeds?
Let's start by looking at five top reasons why your IoT strategy may fail.
1. Your IoT strategy is not based on a business reality
The potential of IoT is limited only by imagination. All ideas seem the most appropriate, however, ideas that know no limits usually result in blindness and organizational paralysis. And that leads to wasted resources, missed deadlines, and frustrated people.
Let's first consider finding ideas that solve your customers' problems, inside and outside your company. For your customers, this could be an IoT-based extension of a current product. It could be a new service or product that offers leverage data from its users to create personalized interactions and communications.
Internally, identify opportunities and generate support for IoT projects that enhance key facets of your company's user experience.
2. Your IoT strategy is not tightly integrated with an execution plan
Execution without a solid strategy is a path that leads nowhere. You must align your strategic direction with tactical execution. IoT success requires a cohesive and transformative global image strategy with executive support from the top to the bottom and a business process execution from the bottom to the top.
Recruit staff who can build a bridge between intellectual resources (talent) and business (budget). Some IoT experts even create a high-executive level position and have a multidisciplinary team dedicated to the IoT initiative approach, which is of great importance.
3. IoT strategy does not adapt to capacity, culture and organizational processes
The design, architecture and implementation of modern technologies such as IoT, cloud and data analytics are now an imperative for all companies. Skills and knowledge gaps related to IoT and advanced technology are numerous in many organizations.
IoT initiatives are often connected across multiple departments and business units. Success in IoT requires collaboration across organizational boundaries, which is sometimes completely new for many organizations. Existing organizational structures and processes are usually organized as silos to support specific products, which can be an obstacle to IoT.
Organizations will need to plan strategically and prepare to quickly close these gaps. Consider multidisciplinary teams enabled and goal-driven to build new forms of collaboration and dynamic data-driven business processes within your business. Consider hiring new technology experts, establishing agreements with established technology providers, and/or hiring consulting capacity. This will help develop new internal knowledge which leads to cultural and business process changes that are a requirement for success.
4. The IoT strategy you manage does not recognize data as a capital for success
IoT is about the ability to collect, analyze, and make decisions based on the right data and from the right sources. However, the massive, blind collection of large amounts of data from a wide variety of devices and sensors is the right formula to reach the IoT disaster. To think that the data analysts you hire can create magic from an ocean of faulty data is a fruitless pursuit, assuming you even have access to such analysts, whether they're in-house staff or contractors.
Comprehensive data capture, inclusion, and integration with your enterprise systems, analytics, storage, protection, and security are all critical variables in IoT architectures. Data processing on edge devices is a fast-growing component in successful approaches to making actionable intelligence the lifeblood of an organization. Technology data processing accelerates responses by eliminating delays when data traverses wide area networks to and from public clouds.
Build a distributed digital data brain that connects data processing on edges, within corporate data centers, and in the public cloud. Data becomes agile and actionable to make your IoT system successful.
5. Your company's IoT strategy fails to make agility an essential capability
It's extremely early to talk about the IoT. You must enlist to embrace the accelerated pace of change. IoT, like any technological paradigm shift, is extremely difficult and complex to try to predict exactly where systems will be located in two, three or four years. The key to embracing IoT is to create an open, scalable, and digital architectural foundation. An agile approach helps you scale quickly and allows you to connect to new technologies when they're ready.
Build a digital IoT foundation
The potential for IoT success is real. You just need the right business-centric idea that delivers real value to the customer. Interconnectivity and collaboration accelerate learning and organizational innovation. Brainstorm with your team, your customers, and your partners. Communicate with your community by participating in industry organizations, events, and partnerships. Establish an agile, creative, and execution-focused organization. Only then can you build an IoT strategy that is sound.
Written by Mimi Spier, Senior Director of Marketing and Strategy for the Internet of Things (IoT) at VMware.
