IoT Checklist| Industrial, Consumer, & Manufacturing CTOs, CIOs, Engg VPs!

To Be Said Upfront - This checklist focuses on the probable pitfalls that would affect manufacturing facilities and non-IT companies' path to IoT adoption! 

Haste != Quick Ergo Stay Calm

Yes, IoT is already driving positive and tangible business results; case in point - the industrial internet of things (Industrial 4.0).
But this does not mean you get hasty! On the contrary this is when you do NOT get hasty.
Solution -

• Breaking down and resolving your existing business model to correspond to a skeletal digital model.
• Validate this with an established IoT practitioner.

Going Piecemeal? Please Do Not!

IoT is now an indispensable part of our daily lives, irrespective of the industry or the verticals it serves.

There is a lot of technological debt involved in an unsystematic implementation/trial/adoption as Dilbert tries to explain here,

Courtesy Scott Adams, Dilber.com

 And as with any new technology its adoption will be step-by-step, phase-by-phase, budget-by-budget!

And in a scenario where newer and more powerful tools are being developed and designed on a day-to-day basis, this is bound to create more 'nice-to-have' options.

• Solution - Implementation scalability!

The Recruitment Question - En Mass vs In-house!

There is a serious lack of skilled talent in IoT. And this means that your recruitment team placed under tremendous stress.

And add to this on all the training, induction sessions, and the time needed to negotiate your company's industry, vertical, and offering!
 
Streamline the on boarding process with participation from the in-house IT team.

Solution -

• Training the in-house staff toward shouldering mentoring responsibilities to team additions.
• Building an engagement with engineering service providers who specialize in IoT and your industry.

Not Bringing IT Infrastructure to Speed

The power of technology lies not only in making our lives easier but also for the entire office to go bonkers on the IT infrastructure guys.

They inadvertently become accountable for past, present, and future mistakes across implementations.
Solution:

• Ensure that the critical team leaders are trained and certified.
• Ensure knowledge share through one-to-many (cascade) sessions.

Fixing Accountability!

Ok, so now you have outsourced the contract to leverage an IoT solution. Hurrah!
IoT is simply the material or cloth, it is you who are tailor. The implementer the sewing machine.
How the end product that could be a multipurpose jacket or all-weather overall turns out, is entirely on you!
Solution:

• Delineate stakeholder responsibilities and accountability, with the latter skewed to your side, and SLAs incorporating effective validation.

Why this Checklist?

 IoT is by no means a new technology, the phrase was coined in 1999. So, it has been around for sometime..... for quite sometime. Especially when taken in the context of how the IT industry and the science behind it has been evolving.


BUT mass adoption is just on the way - Aruba estimates this to be by 2019.

With IoT being a safe bet to drive change and benefit businesses and the business world being proactive; we have and will see HUMONGOUS investment across industries in IoT solutions. McKinsey sees a $ 6.2 T sized IoT market in the future. 

This post was first posted in my LinkedIn Pulse Handle

Get in touch with me @ viswanath.padmanabhan@gmail.com


Expert Watch: (a.k.a the person I bugged to get information from)

Siva Karthikeyan is an IoT implementation expert specifically dealing with implementation of IoT for manufacturing companies.

You could say hello to Siva here.