by Exosite, on December 13, 2016
For your long-term IoT strategy to be effective, you need to have your departments synchronized and working towards creating a cohesive whole, much like collaborations between musicians. There are some helpful tools and guidelines that can be used in order to be successful and, as an industrial IoT platform provider, we understand how effective they can be to laying the groundwork.
In order to promote a culture of collaboration from both a technological and organizational perspective, successful organizations:
- Identify reusable components. A standardized process to review and select connected-product ideas, as suggested in the blog Getting Everyone Involved, will provide insight into the key technology pieces that are similar across multiple projects. This information can then be used to develop standardized, reusable components to enable an IoT framework the entire company can leverage. As a result, organizations are able to maximize effort and investment, while minimizing the need for costly, one-off solutions within individual divisions. Future blog posts will provide a more in-depth discussion of this concept.
- Centralize key functionality. IT integration, documentation, support, continuation, and IoT security are key areas that should be developed and maintained centrally at the corporate level. Individual divisions and departments then have the autonomy to innovate, while working within collaboratively developed parameters for important solution aspects like security, user experience design, and brand standards.
- Identify a corporate sponsor. As mentioned in Planning the Dive, executive sponsorship is key to success, and selecting a leader dedicated to championing IoT is an integral piece of the puzzle. McKinsey Global suggests that change initiatives are twice as likely to achieve success when the leaders of those initiatives spend more than half of their time on the transformation. This is particularly relevant where IoT is concerned–where gaining buy-in and ensuring participation in collaborative efforts is increasingly difficult because of the inherent complexity of the subject matter. IoT may also require organizations to look to a different leader than has been typical; instead of the CEO, a CIO or an entirely new IoT-based position may be a better fit.
- Inject processes that engage relevant parties. Adding connectivity to a product impacts every area of an organization, requiring new engineering skillsets, business models, distribution channels, support options, and sales processes. Successful organizations develop and implement processes early on that require all relevant parties–from marketing and sales to manufacturing and support–to actively engage with each other to understand the functional impact of connectivity on their roles, responsibilities, interactions, and deliverables.
To gain more insights into how to create a cohesive IoT strategy and evolve as a unified company, feel free to download the white paper below. If you’d like to gain new insights to how your business can handle it’s technical evolutions, sign up for Exosite's IoT platform Murano and get your company connected today.
