The CIO's guide to using IoT for creating business value
IT spending in South Africa is projected to increase by a marginal 4.1% in 2016 reflecting the general depressed economic situation. One bright spot though will be spending on Internet of Things (IoT) which is projected to grow at 18.6% in 2016, though from a low base, reflecting strong interest from South African enterprises in harnessing the business value of IoT.
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IDC defines IoT as including a network of networks of uniquely identifiable endpoints that communicate without human interaction using IP connectivity. As the IoT environment continues to mature, the role of the CIO as both business innovator and architect leader will become crucial for the success of the business. The International Data Corporation (IDC) offers these five key guidelines for CIOs to create business value using Internet of Things (IoT).
1. Know the end customer of your IoT outcomes
What is the ultimate IoT outcome, and who is it for? IoT can mean different things for different business segments as well as different individual businesses. Application of IoT also differs depending on vertical or industry. It is, therefore, important to identify what sector and segment the end IoT customer will be from e.g. Public/government, enterprise, or consumer segments.
2. Ask the right IoT questions
What computing resources are needed that will inform the processing stage? At this stage, it is important to understand the sort of infrastructure that is available. How many Petabytes will IoT use, how many servers will it need, will it process data in real time, is it compute intensive and how many times will it be used?
3. Know the impact on your business model
Customer experience is now instantaneous: What impact is this going to have on the business model and customer experience, and is it enabling better decision making? The various data types will inform the system of relationships you're going to enable for better customer experience, the system of decisions-enabled analytics and finally the system of the transaction by deciding where the data is going to be processed – in the cloud or in-house. These decisions are all going to affect the impact IoT will have on your business model.
4. Ensure the CIO is the leading IoT decision maker
The CIO needs to be a leader in guiding the organisation on IoT decisions. The CIO needs to guide the enterprise digital transformation journey and ensure that the digital strategy is aligned with overall business strategy. The CIO should be the business innovator in chief and needs to challenge the status quo especially with legacy IT environments and take risks. If the CIO does not provide the required leadership in digital transformation, lines of business will step in the vacuum and further weaken the influence of the CIO in the organisation.
5. Understand where IoT content will be created, and then processed
Where will the IoT content be created and processed (within the enterprise or at the edge) is critical to the overall performance and success of the IoT implementation and will be different for different industries? How will the organisation manage data generated by the IoT generator? Will this information be collected and processed at “the edge” or collected and transferred to the data centre? How will this affect decision making and response required for the better business outcome?
