by Exosite, on November 29, 2016
In order to build a company-wide IoT strategy, you want to create a process that plays into your company's strengths and functions as whole. In the creation stages, you want to make sure that every division is participating in the ways that they know best.
Creating a standardized project process to encourage IoT innovation across the entire company seems like a daunting task, but stimulating action within your team can be easier than you think. The following best 4 practices are used by leading industrial organizations to survey, select, and fund IoT project initiatives that have a high chance of success:
- 1. Encourage IoT innovation. A process that catalyzes internal innovation around IoT can help encourage individual divisions or departments to creatively think about how connectivity can improve internal efficiencies, generate new revenue, or streamline the customer experience. This can include internal competitions, like a call for papers or a hackathon, that compare and fund winning projects to not only generate potential connected-product ideas, but also garner corporate-wide participation.
- 2. Develop a framework for data-driven decisions. Connectivity for connectivity’s sake rarely leads to success. Established guidelines should be created that require product teams to prove they have considered the viability of their connected-product ideas from both a technical and business perspective, including business plans, revenue models, customer needs, etc. Vigorous research and vetting up front will enable more intelligent, informed decisions to be made about which projects will be successful based on tangible aspects like cost, technical feasibility, time-to-market, revenue, and customer demands.
- 3. Establish a corporate-minded task force. A core group of cross-functional individuals who can make collaborative decisions about which IoT projects should move forward, while keeping the larger, strategic goals of the organization in mind, is key to the success of a standardized project selection process. This group should include a mix of executive, business, and technical representatives to ensure connected-product ideas are considered from a variety of angles.
- 4. Identify near-term wins. The initial focus of any standardized project-selection effort should be to identify connected-product ideas that have the potential for fast time-to-market or significant ROI. These types of projects contribute to quick wins that will build trust in the long-term commitment to IoT, encourage hesitant divisions–or departments–to join in, and provide the type of immediate results needed to finance the longer-term IoT goals of the organization.
If you’d like to read the full IoT framework white paper, click below and gain more information to kickstart your company’s IoT adoption. To gain a free trial of Exosite's Industrial IoT platform that will support devices within any industry, click to sign up for Murano.
