Nature of the Opportunity

A Closer Look at IoT Project Goals

Weighing IoT's Potential Rewards

What benefits do you hope to achieve?

For many enterprise organizations, moving forward with new IoT use cases represents two sides of the same coin: Equal parts opportunity and risk.

This section looks first at the benefits expected from potential IoT use cases.

Propelled by the massive increase in compute power, most IoT use cases rely on Machine Learning (ML) models and algorithms to help process the large volumes of data now transmitted from the edge and other data sources. Still other emerging use cases rely on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help them achieve tangible business outcomes.

From a big-picture objective, what do most businesses hope to achieve with IoT on its own or in conjunction with other ML or AI initiatives? According to survey respondents in the Microsoft Hypothesis Group 2020 IoT Signals report, some of the most common benefits organizations hope to realize include:

More efficient operations.
Greater employee productivity.
Higher production or lowered operating expenses.
Better safety and less human error.
Greater customer satisfaction and/or better competitive advantage.

Defining the Ultimate Goal of IoT

Moving from data to wisdom

In his seminal TED Talk on "The Internet of Things", noted Technologist Dr. John Barrett chose a simpler-yet-grand way to describe IoT’s ultimate benefit and its emerging use cases. He tied the aspirations of IoT to the traditional data science pyramid that grows from data and information to knowledge and wisdom. He then said the collective effort to achieve wisdom with IoT could spur concurrent societal efforts toward the Common Good.

[Source: Ted Conferences, LLC.]

Sounds a bit lofty for a bunch of lowly, connected IoT sensors and devices, right? Yet, with the large volumes of data now generated from IoT devices (represented by the foundational “Data” row of the pyramid), Barrett stressed the ultimate need to work together to achieve what he called that higher level “Internet-of-Things wisdom.”

(Learn how a global private/public collective has started harnessing the power of the cloud and a network of IoT sensor data to help solve one of humanity’s biggest logistical challenges: The rapid distribution of COVID-19 vaccines around the world.)

How well do your organization’s internal groups work together to achieve IoT wisdom and insights?

Excellent. Our Lines of Business (LOBs) work closely with key business stakeholders and IT to define business needs for IoT, ML, and AI use cases. Where IoT makes sense, we have also gained great insights through the successful deployment of IoT use cases at scale. We’ve also mapped such use cases back to specific business and IT goals and requirements.
Good. Sometimes our LOBs charge ahead of IT and business stakeholders with their own IoT pet projects and use cases. Still, we often succeed at realizing good insight from our IoT use cases now in production.
Mixed. Some of our IoT pilots progressed to successful deployments at scale. We’ve also had some IoT failures and breakdowns somewhere between pilot and production. We don’t always succeed at translating IoT data into meaningful insights, let alone working well within our internal teams.
Poor. Our IoT use case pilots don’t often go past the pilot stage. We don’t always have a clear idea about our business goals, the insights we hope to gain, or how best to proceed. Our internal groups don’t work well together.