IoT Adoption Should Follow the Technology Adoption Cycle
Embracing IoT can be rewarding but complex. IoT Design Automation can now overcome these challenges to improve the quality, efficiency and scale for our businesses today.
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Connectivity, data, and intelligence promise to improve the quality, efficiency, and scale of our businesses. Organizations that fully embrace IoT can achieve significant improvements in business model, business operations, and competitiveness [1]. However, this process is not simple and requires organizations to commit to an iterative technology adoption cycle.
The Challenges Of IoT Adoption
As most organizations are experiencing, IoT adoption is proven to be more challenging than anticipated. Bain IoT survey shows that less than 10% of enterprises are able to proceed beyond the proof-of-concept stage [2]. Primary adoption challenges include:
Security. IoT security is the #1 concern of enterprises adopting IoT. Most enterprises don't have the technology-know-how to implement proper IoT security.
Technology complexity. The complexity of IoT technology leads to a number of challenges: technical expertise, IT/OT integration, and data portability.
Unclear ROI. The benefits of IoT and the impact on business model and business operations are often not well understood during the early adoption phases. Therefore, ROI risks and transition risks are high for IoT investments.
The Right Process to IoT Adoption
Like any new technology adoption, IoT adoption should proceed in small but quick steps. It should follow the technology adoption cycle: design, deploy, learn, and improve. This process is especially important for IoT because not only the impact of IoT is unknown ahead of time, but IoT technology itself is evolving rapidly. For example, just a few years ago IoT is about reading sensor data at low data rate, but today a lot of IoT is about analytics, AI, and computing at the edge.
In the IoT adoption process, organizations should pay special attention to how IoT affects its business model and business operations. If IoT adoption is successful, the disruption is inevitable. Therefore, organizations need to follow an iterative process in which both IoT adoption and business evolution support each other. This is challenging because each organization’s needs are different, so there is no one size fits all formula. Because of this, the core IoT adoption process requires learning and iteration.
Another important consideration is integrating IoT across divisional teams. While each team or division may implement its own solutions, a common IoT framework should be used across the organization because data will need to be shared and aggregated at the organizational level. Furthermore, IoT needs to be merged into the enterprise IT infrastructure, so again a common organizational framework will simplify this process.
Extensive Adoption with IoT Design Automation
Due to the complexity of IoT technology, most IoT solutions today are turn-key solutions. While turn-key solutions are good at solving a particular problem, they are not designed to customize toward an organization’s specific needs. They are certainly not designed to integrate with an organization’s business model or business operations. This is why it is difficult for most organizations to achieve extensive IoT adoption today, let alone creating unique competitive advantages using IoT.
Enabling IoT Design Automation with Prescient Designer
This is where Prescient Designer's IoT design automation technology can help. Prescient Designer is a SaaS platform which enables continuous integration and customization without requiring IoT technology expertise. Using low-code distributed programming technology, Prescient Designer can help organizations design, deploy, learn and improve their IoT solutions to produce better implementation results quickly and cost-effectively. It enables organizations to experiment and tailor their IoT solutions to achieve an optimal business outcome. By taking away the burden of building a complete IoT technology framework while enhancing the design capability and flexibility, we help organizations maximize their ROI in IoT implementation.
References
[1] “The IoT Business Index 2020: a Step Change in Adoption”, The Economist Intelligence Unit, https://learn.arm.com/rs/714-XIJ-402/images/economist-iot-business-index-2020-arm.pdf
[2] “Beyond Proofs of Concept: Scaling the Industrial IoT”, Bain & Company, https://www.bain.com/insights/beyond-proofs-of-concept-scaling-the-industrial-iot/