The journey to managed enterprise IoT – Part 2 – Enabling the use case

<This blog was previously published at the Atos Thought Leadership website – it was written by Philip Griffiths>

In my previous blog, I shared our overview of the journey to managed enterprise IoT, which we divide into three levels of maturity. Here I’ll explain the first level: Enabling the use case. For each company to transform data – the world’s most valuable resource – into business outcomes, they first need to work out how data and IoT will improve the business. This could be by enhancing customer experience and improving your internal organization. Once the strategy is picked, a use case can be developed and tested with speed and agility to measure the outcome and validate its value. This is ‘enabling the use case’.

By taking advantage of data, companies can deliver a multitude of benefits by delivering IoT projects. Examples include:

  • Customer Experience: Using data to understand market demands, behavior and buying trends and develop new products and services your customer’s will love to use
  • Business Reinvention: Market agility with new business models, products, services and revenue streams
  • Operational excellence: Gain efficiency and agility with data-driven business processes
  • Trust & Compliance: Unleash the power of analytics to protect your assets

To realize these benefits, 3 key activities need to be developed:

  1. Strategy & Ideation(S&I): Explore market changes, customer needs, business problems, opportunities and available data to select IoT use cases that enable data insights and sustainable business value. This includes identifying the business processes, any applicable standards and users.
  2. Proof of Value (PoV): Execute rapid prototyping to test and prove that the use case delivers value – the best approach is a limited scope and time frame. If it holds value, you should also develop a high level architecture for the future.
  3. Business Case (BC): Define the BC for the next steps – including investment costs and a genuine ROI – and business model that will be used while actively looking ‘beyond the use case’ – see next blog piece.

Across each of these topics, agility and an exploratory nature are critical. We expect the use case enablement to take anywhere between 2-4 months from the initial workshop, detailed study and developing PoV with BC – if it is then rolled out as a project this could take another 6-12 months. There should be a few deliverables (non-exhaustive list):

  • Strategy & Ideation: Data strategy, process scoping, value assessment, connectivity definition, high level plan for PoV and BC, management presentation.
  • Proof of Value: Requirements, built and tested PoV with results, use case feasibility report, project solution architecture, management presentation.
  • Business Case: Strategy map, benefits profile (with KPIs), project costing, business case, investment performance analysis, project plan, management presentation.

The first step in getting more value from your business data is to brainstorm and assess the IoT opportunities that could enable real business benefits. In starting the journey you take one step closer to delivering internal and external changes within your organization based upon the data you already have. I recommend holding a discovery workshop to identify the benefits you will enable and your next steps. Sounds pretty simple and straightforward, doesn’t it?

My customers often find that some data is more valuable than others. Out of the hundreds or thousands of data points that could be gathered, only a small handful will give the highest likelihood of accurately determining a business outcome (following an 80/20 rule). Clustering, co-occurrence and classification analysis techniques can help you to determine which data points produce the greatest value and therefore what you should focus on.

Check out my next blog where I’ll address the 2nd maturity level: ‘Beyond the use case’.

I would like to add a special thanks to Philip Griffiths (@ThePGriffiths). Philip was until recently, the strategic partner manager for the IoT practice and took the initiative to write this blog-series that you are reading now.

The journey to managed enterprise IoT

<This blog was previously published at the Atos Thought Leadership website>

A lot has been said about the data-driven economy we live in and its effects on the people, processes, places and products of all businesses, but how many companies actually use their data efficiently? Every organisation should not only be driven by data or the Internet of Things (IoT – a term we will use to cover gathering, processing and extracting value from data), but also ensure that it delivers measureable outcomes into their core business processes. Few can claim to be at this level of maturity and, if you are not one of them, our overview of the journey to managed enterprise IoT can help put you on the right path.

A true data-driven strategy can deliver benefits that range from tightly integrating customer care into product usage and performance to being able to remotely monitor and improve product (or service) performance to enabling new revenue streams.

We can divide the journey towards Managed enterprise IoT into three levels of maturity (that will be further explained with their own separate blogs) including the six sequential activities shown in the picture below:

  • Enabling the use case: exploring and solving business operational problems in minimum time to value with easily understandable business impact on people, process, places and products.
     >> Benefits: Project – Business operations managing each use case
  • Beyond the use case: ensuring predictability for delivering value – i.e. high quality (from fewer errors), resiliency (higher availability and stability) and security.
     >> Benefits: Program / Portfolio – Business operations across all use cases
  • Managed Enterprise IoT: simplifying the complexity of IoT, which is now business critical, to be both agile and predictable as well as being proactive, prescriptive and automated to deliver positive and measurable benefits for your whole enterprise.
     >> Benefits: Enterprise – IoT underpins whole business

Businesses are made up of people, processes, places, and products which need to create value – the fundamentals of business that have not changed with a data-driven economy. As businesses derive more and more of their revenue from data (and IoT), they are required to resolve its inherent challenges – enabling business value, managing the quantity of things and data, dealing with the complexity of the ecosystem and reducing security and privacy risks.

This is critical to enabling benefits for companies, to their customers, shareholders and the wider data-driven economy – the outcome of Managed enterprise IoT. Rather than taking big leaps from one maturity level to another, put in place a road-map at the start of your journey to Managed enterprise IoT (particularly as forward planning will save lots of time and effort later).

The companies I work with often ask, “Should we manufacture a solution in-house or purchase it from an external supplier?” These are my high level recommendations:

  • Nothing exists in a bubble; consider your long term strategy and competencies (taking into account value and performance). Approximately, core ones should be made, marginal bought, supporting could be either – core is defined as high value and high performance, marginal as low and low respectively.
  • Do not think that you can only make or buy; you can customize a solution that fits your needs. Build a level of extraction (i.e. non-native) above the layer at which you buy; this will enable you to commoditize everything below it, to future proof and ensure cost reductions and quality improvements.
  • Open source gives you access to a larger pool of innovation and can be a low cost way to experiment (enterprise versions offer greater predictability).

In the next post, I will explain the 1st level of maturity of this journey towards Managed enterprise IoT: ‘Enabling the use case’.


I would like to add a special thanks to Philip Griffiths (@ThePGriffiths). Philip was until recently, the strategic partner manager for the ATOS IoT practice and took the initiative to write this blog-series you are reading now.