Internet of Things Strategy: It Will Determine Your Organization’s Future

Few technology developments will ultimately have the global cultural, business, and economic impact of the Internet of Things (IoT.) While today IoT still looks like an industry largely concerning itself with factory automation, connected light bulbs, air conditioning controls and so on, the eventual objective is clear even to a casual observer: Nearly everything in the world is about to become connected and data-driven, from the most trivial object to virtually every significant item in our personal and work lives.

The implications of this shift are profound: We’re about to be able to measure and quantify just about everything that exists. While there will be the requisite debates about whether this is always a good thing, the implacable march of technology development will ensure it’s going to happen anyway. When a new enabling technology arrives and is useful, it finds its way into just about everything.

The implications alone for IoT and the healthcare, insurance, financial services, logistics, manufacturing, and energy industries — to name just the most affected — are profound: For the first time in human history, most aspects of our business will be measurable, and therefore to paraphrase the famous Peter Drucker saying, they can actually be managed in a more direct and effective way than ever before possible.

Internet of Things: The Next-Generation Customer Experience

IoT will also be critical to the next generation of customer experience, allowing us create more personalized and far more useful experiences while maintaining direct and continuous connection — and most importantly, value exchange — with our customers like never before. Customer experience is the product we must all produce in the future and IoT is how we’ll realize it. As Stuart Lombard, CEO of Ecobee, noted last week during his appearance on DisrupTV.

As the current wave of Internet of Things emerged on a scene a few years ago, I wrote an analysis on whether IoT is truly strategic to the enterprise (short version: it is.) Though the exact growth projections continue to be debated, given the inevitably vast numbers of devices and the staggering data volumes they’ll create (large enough that it’s even driven the need to push cloud capabilities back to the edge of the network), it’s now evident that IoT will be the largest new technology industry to date, far eclipsing even mobile computing.

In other words, tens of billions of connected IoT devices, many streaming rich media and other high volume data types around the clock, are already in the process of arriving today and steadily over the next few years. In the process, they will remake the digital and business landscape as they do, as they represent enormous opportunity for new disruptive new products, services, and business models. At the same time, IoT will also pose very significant infrastructure, operational, management, governance, and security challenges for most enterprises due to scale, skill shortages, build-out, and related issues. Organizations must prepare at the highest level for this and put IoT in the middle of their digital value chain as they digitally transform. The resulting IoT strategies will determine their future as a business in profound way.

It’s evident that IoT is a core part of the future of digital and is the next customer experience mandate. We will simply have to be connected to our stakeholders in this way, holding them close across myriad digital channels, providing value in a way that only real, sustained, and live connectedness and engagement can.

Deep Digital Connectedness Requires a New Mindset

To help frame up this story, I was pleased to contribute recently to a significant new IoT strategy ebook produced by SAP, along with many of my industries colleagues. The book does an excellent job teeing up the mindset and thinking required to capitalize on the historic opportunity of the Internet of Things. Thanks to Amisha Gandhi, Jim Dever, and the SAP team for inviting me to contribute. Note: My contributions start on page 7.

The Future of IoT ebook itself is free, has a nice digital customer experience of its own, and covers the following topics:

Future of IoT ebook: Insights on the Future of the Internet of Things (IoT)

1. Focus Forward on the IoT and Business
2. The “Intelligence of Things”
3. The evolution of smart devices and how business will leverage the IoT
4. The Customer Journey
5. How will the IoT affect the daily lives of consumers?
6. The Internet of Truth
7. Concrete data leads to better decisions
8. The Forward Focus of Business
9. Strategic advice on the IoT for business leaders

Other contributors were an all-star cast and include Ronald van Loon, Yves Mulkers, Maribel Lopez, Bob Egan, Christina “CK” Kerley, Bill McCabe, Ahmed Banafa, Joan Carbonell, Jim Harris, Daniel Newman, Evan Kristel, Chuck Martin, Dez Blanchfield, Isaac Sacolick, and Giulio Coraggio. Brian Solis also shared his thoughts about the ebook as well.

Additional Reading

The Essential Digital Strategies

SAP Leonardo, IoT, and Digital Transformation: The Strategic Implications

Visual: The Top Digital Shifts the Enterprise Must Take On Today

The enterprise technologies to watch in 2017 | ZDNet

Tech Trends AstroChart for The New C-Suite, Q3 2017 | Constellation Research