[This article was written by David Spark.]
"It’s not around the technology, it’s around what the technology enables you to do as far as new offerings," said Dave Wagstaff, VP & Chief Architect at Bsquare on what an IoT deployment can do for your business.
In our conversation at the 2014 Cloud Expo in Santa Clara, California, Wagstaff and I spoke about leveraging data for better decision making for both yourself and for your customer.
To determine the “why” and “how” of IoT, Wagstaff advises, “Don't start with the technology and then derive a strategy. Start with the business objectives and use IoT to enable it.”
Wagstaff’s presentation “From Data to Dollars, A results driven approach to IoT” offered some insight into identifying customer objectives and then determining how you can derive revenue from that.
Common Customer Objectives
- Predictive failure information: e.g., knowing when a machine will go down.
- Optimization: Looking at all data coming in from devices and then selling that information back to customers so that they can improve their operations.
- Improved usage information: Understand how your customers are using their product. Enhance what they like, and de-emphasize what they don't want.
- Improved failure and diagnostic information: Make sure devices are operating and generating revenue.
- New services packages: With more information about customer behavior you’ll be able to sell better to your existing and future customers.
Common Business Drivers
- Increase revenue
- Identify new business opportunities
- Improve operational efficiencies
- Reduce costs
- Improve customer satisfaction
- Stay ahead of the competition
Quoting the famous Henry Ford line about if he asked customers what they wanted, they’d just ask for faster horses, Wagstaff noted that the customer often doesn’t know what they want, so asking is fruitless. IoT will often unveil what both you and the customer don’t know.
The IoT process for business is as follows:
Acquire: Onramp data into your system
Interpret: Transform the data to information
Analyze: What does the information tell you
Act: What actions should be taken
Share: Make the information available
“There is gold in the mounds of data you collect, but data may need to be enriched,” said Wagstaff. “’Acquire’ and ‘Interpret’ is what is possible, ‘Analyze’ and ‘Act’ is what’s valuable.”
Other Cloud Luminary Interviews:
“Everyone thinks they can define or change culture. That they can formulate the culture they want in their organization after years of this thing growing organically,” said JP Morgenthal (@jpmorgenthal), Director, Cloud Computing Practice for Perficient.
“Organizations that don’t have any automation should just start getting developers and operations together and working together,” said Andi Mann (@AndiMann), VP of Strategic Solutions in the Office of the CTO at CA Technologies. After his presentation “DevOps and Cloud: Tips and Techniques to Revolutionize your SDLC” at the 2014 Cloud Expo in Santa Clara, California, Mann and I spoke about DevOps fundamentals.
“The heart of what DevOps is about is having developers and operations work really close together and not have such contention between one another. I think NoOps, the term, kind of facilitates that contention between the folks,” said David Tesar (@dtzar), Senior Technical Evangelist at Microsoft in our interview at the 2014 Cloud Expo in Santa Clara, California. In Tesar’s keynote address “NoOps != No Operations,” he rallied the audience to eliminate "NoOps" from their vocabulary
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