by Josh Simi, on September 3, 2015
Connected product fleets are a new endeavor for many enterprises. While designing a connected product offering is hard enough, preparing an entire organization to market, sell, and support it is even harder. Many organizations face similar challenges when designing their enterprise IoT strategy, including:
• How the product (or services derived from that product) should be marketed to other businesses or end consumers and what value propositions it should promise.
• How the sales team should sell a connected product. Training on new features and modifications to the sales process may be necessary.
• How support teams answer questions if something goes wrong with a connected product, including remotely diagnosing issues, resetting a device, or changing ownership of the device and/or data associated with it.
• How IT operations teams deploy software updates, handle rogue devices, or prepare for and respond to security incidents.
• How the R&D and product-marketing teams can access data streams to fine-tune future versions of the product or optimize data rates and measurement points.
• How the product management team thinks about return on investment (ROI), builds IoT business models that may be service-based or hybrid product/service-based, and successfully retires devices at the end of the product lifecycle.
Based on these challenges, it is clear that preparing an organization to support connected product fleets is no small task. However, by aligning organizational arrows on value creation, enterprises can change industries by being agile as opposed to merely being big.
For more information on organizational readiness for IoT solution deployments, see Exosite’s IoT Strategies for Diversified Businesses white paper.
