IoT is not about IT...

….I know that some people will cringe upon hearing that but in reality, IoT is really not about IT. In the enterprise world, it is about solving a business problem and thus adding value to the business and its operations.

Historically, and to some extent still, IoT has been handled or managed by the enterprise’s IT department. However, since the use of IoT technologies for most enterprises is not about IT, but to solve a business problem, it tends to get lost in the shuffles.

The enormity and fragmentation of the IoT space has up until now also been and continues to be a true challenge for most enterprises, both small and large. Several research studies on the use of various IoT technologies confirms that existing IoT projects are challenging and difficult. On May 24, 2017, The Economic Times, reported that a study commissioned by Cisco confirmed that nearly 75% of all IoT Projects are failing.  Why?  The article states that "60% of respondents stressed that IoT initiatives looked good on paper but prove much more difficult than anyone expected."

As I stated in the beginning, in order to be successful in any IoT deployment, you first must clearly identify what the problem or problems that you are trying to solve are, and only after that, start to look at what needs to be done solve it.

Easily put, first identify the following:

-         What

-         Why

-         Where

-         When

-         Who

-         How

1.      What is it that you are trying to solve for?

2.      Why are you or should you try to find a solution to it?

3.      Where is the problem?

4.      When does it occur and when do you need the solution

5.      Who will benefit from the solution to the problem and support by allocating resources?

6.      Finally, how will you do it?

When you can answer the first 5 of these questions, you have come a long way into defining your first steps into a successful IoT project.

In this series I will highlight a few different examples, or use cases if you will, where we look at the problem statement, the possible solution and the benefit. But also, look at possible future add-ons to the solution to enhance it further.

The use cases that I will be looking at will be in the Transportation, Predictive Maintenance, Logistics and supply chain, Asset Management, and finally Video Analytics in the world of IoT.

Please stay tuned for more this week…