The Internet of Things (IoT) is here and now. It is the first step to make your business truly digital. And it starts with your things – your line – of – business assets and the data they produce, your cloud services, and your business intelligence tools. By implementing a strategy to take advantage of the opportunity that Internet of Things offers, you can go beyond sustaining your business and make it a disruptor that shakes up the entire field.
Start with Your Things but Avoid “Big Bang” Approach
The IoT can be overwhelming because of the hype and confusion around it. Instead of being panicked by the huge universe of things made up of billions of assets, think about it as the Internet of Your Things. Focus on the right areas of your business that provide quick and tangible return. If you have operations, you can start with it – connecting systems and line-of-business assets to deliver better performance visibility – driving toward predictive maintenance and helping reduce downtime.
Related: Embrace digital transformation, remaster your business, stay ahead of the curve.
IoT starts with identifying the one process, product line, or location that matters the most to you, then making small and incremental changes for a big impact. For example, connect robots on the factory floor with back-end systems and create a production line with more continuous up-time. Add expiration dates to the data set for pharmacy inventory and save thousands of dollars in wasted medications. Connect one handheld device to your inventory system and suddenly you’ve got real-time customer service on the sales floor.
Build on Your Existing IT Assets
Start with your existing IT assets and build upon them. Add a few new assets, connect them using IoT services – Microsoft Azure Internet of Things (IoT) – and the cloud, and enable them to talk to each other, to employees, and to customers. The rapid proliferation of connected assets and devices raises challenges due to the variety of platforms and protocols. Connect your current and diverse line-of-business assets using Azure IoT services which also enables you to pull in data from very large numbers of devices and other business systems.
Use Cloud Computing To Manage Data Deluge and Derive Insights
Cloud computing offers scalable data collection, processing, and analysis capabilities that are flexible to the needs of your business. Cloud solutions give businesses the ability to store and process significant amounts of data, whether it’s latent or in real time; store that data; and apply rules and structure to it for consumption. Cloud computing technology and a flexible consumption-based price structure associated with off-premises hybrid, private, or public cloud compute models have created the ability to deliver new offerings to market, which were simply not achievable in the past.
The cloud also enables more data to be unlocked by enabling you to pull data in, from different sources, and across different line-of-business assets and devices. This data may arrive structured, unstructured or somewhere in between. It may arrive regularly or intermittently. Despite this variability, by providing a framework for the data, it can be automated—through filters, rules, triggers or other means—the intelligent processing of that data.
Partner with a IoT Service Provider For IoT Talent and Skills
To fill the IoT knowledge gap, companies are taking the most common steps – up-skilling existing staff through training on IoT-related skills, recruiting talent with IoT aptitudes, and partnering with IoT service or solution providers.
Companies moving from research to the planning stage need employees who understand the technology underlying the IoT, such as wireless systems, networks and sensors. Once products are in development, sales and marketing employees will need to be able to sell the benefits of the IoT in terms that consumers can understand, and companies will require armies of “data scientists” to analyze all the sensor-generated information.
So, How Do I Accelerate My IoT Journey?
Successful IoT requires significant expertise both from a solution delivery and business advice perspective. You need an IoT partner who can empower you to transform the raw data from your line-of-business assets into actionable insights and business results.
With unique expertise across Cloud, Digital Transformation, Analytics, and Big Data, Trigent can partner with you from ideation to implementation and provide your team the tools and frameworks to help arrive at the perfect business solution
