by Josh Simi, on November 10, 2015
For companies launching their first connected product fleet, there is significant infrastructure and organizational alignment that must be achieved in order to design, development, launch, and support a successful IoT strategy. Much of this organization alignment can be leveraged for future connected product offerings and so represents more of a foundational shift for an organization to invest in. If not addressed properly, the business case for a connected product fleet can accidentally conflate business-wide concerns and product-specific concerns, which ideally would be modeled independently.
For example, in a multi-divisional company, launching a connected furnace requires engineering, marketing, and sales to collaborate on the furnace product, but may also require investing in a common IoT cloud-based data platform that is leveraged by the furnace product and is also available for future products, like a connected air conditioning unit.
Connecting and monetizing the furnace product carries a different ROI time scale than the data platform it connects to. Misunderstanding the furnace product plus data platform ROI as a simple sum of the parts is missing the point that investing in a lasting IoT platform is a long-term investment and should be modeled as such.
To learn more about building and deploying a successful IoT business model, download our Monetization Strategies for Connected Products white paper:
