One Vision to Lead Them All: Organizational Alignment for IoT Success

One of the major first steps in preparing for IoT success is making sure that you have organizational alignment around a clear vision for your connected product.

Making the shift from a product company to a connected-product company requires a multitude of organizational components, including people, processes, market knowledge, new skills in new areas, and effective communication. In order to make this shift successfully, your entire organization must clearly understand the IoT vision and be empowered to execute it.

Provide Strategic Clarity and Executive Sponsorship

Piercing clarity from the top about how IoT affects the strategic triumph or failure of your company will lead to an increased probability of success. Executives should create a clear, compelling, and actionable vision for the future that explains core differentiators for your business. 

Encourage Cross-Departmental Participation

Adding connectivity to your product will impact every area of your organization. Early on, develop and implement processes 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.

Create an Adaptive Culture

Although change is hard, your corporate culture must be able to adapt quickly to new market pressures, new technologies, and new ways of doing business in order to make the shift to a connected-product company. Foster a culture of innovation by focusing on early successes with IoT, identifying new processes, learning from market failures, and empowering IoT leaders within your organization.

Examples of collaborative alignment:

• Accounting handles recurring subscriptions
• Engineering manages cloud computing
• IT deploys software updates and triages security breaches
• Support teams diagnose connectivity issues
• Marketing understands true customer needs
• Sales sells the product

If you’d like more examples on how to encourage organizational alignment within your company, you might want to checkout our free enterprise IoT framework white paper.

To learn more about how to make sure you’re prepared to launch and support your connected product, download our full IoT Readiness guide.