{"id":324,"date":"2019-01-25T12:41:29","date_gmt":"2019-01-25T20:41:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sparkspoke.com\/blog\/?p=324"},"modified":"2019-01-25T21:43:04","modified_gmt":"2019-01-26T05:43:04","slug":"are-your-iot-systems-focused-on-what-really-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sparkspoke.com\/blog\/are-your-iot-systems-focused-on-what-really-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"Are Your IoT Systems Focused On What Really Matters?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Determining What is Mission Critical<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Zeki Gunay, the CEO of CRATUS Technology<\/a>, once told me of an restaurant owner who wanted to use a collection of sensors to manage his operations. The owner imagined putting location sensors on staff name badges to track their workflow progress between table and kitchen, temperature sensors on plates to make sure food was warm, and other sensors throughout his facility that would help him monitor various aspects of his operation. His goal was to find ways to better manage his staff and make their processes more efficient, presumably to cut waste and improve the throughput of customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was reminded of this story a few weeks ago when I got together with a group of friends in a semi-annual gathering held at a sports bar. As my friend George tried to get the attention of our waitress, he commented:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Any time the pitcher is empty, they are losing money.<\/p>– George J.<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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How many people in this picture might be ready for a refill? How could you tell?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

At first I chuckled to myself, for a moment feeling like we were a bunch of college students who felt the most important thing on the table was the pitcher of beer. As I thought about it, though, I realized George had boiled down the customer experience to something very precise. As our group caught up and socialized with each other, George didn’t want to stop what he was doing — enjoying the conversation — in order to flag down a waiter to refill the pitcher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zeki, too, understood the need to focus on the customer experience rather than the backend processes. He advised the restaurant owner that he really only needed to put a sensor in one place \u2013 on a connected beverage coaster. Zeki reasoned that all the process parameters the owner wanted to track were in the service of a key consideration: making sure the customer did not feel like they were waiting for service. Other aspects of the experience — availability of seating, quality of the food, location of wait staff — while important, did not require the same level of sensing and monitoring enough to justify the added system complexity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Many restaurants already invest in wireless coasters to notifying customers their table is ready. Adding force sensors to detect when a glass is empty would add to their value, making them a powerful sales tool.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

When IoT Projects Go Off-Track<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

A 2016 Gartner report forecasted that 50% of business processes will include IoT by 2020. It further claimed that in 2018, 75% of IoT initiatives would take twice as long as originally planned. In May of 2017, a survey by Cisco<\/a> indicated that only 26% of IoT projects were considered successful; that’s a 74% failure rate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Admittedly these data points are old, and there have not been followup surveys to update the numbers. Updated numbers aside, it’s significant to note there was no definition of what “success” means in terms of these initiatives. Deploying a system that successfully collects data according to its design parameters is significant in its own right. It’s an entirely different proposition — and one that is more helpful to an enterprise — to ensure a system leverages data insights in some way that dramatically improve organizational performance. Better performance is the goal, data analysis and responsive intervention should be a means to that end. The practical reality can be much more difficult than it appears, however. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One senior executive at Gartner spoke to the challenges of planning and executing projects that truly impact strategy and can open new opportunities:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Product-centered enterprises will be the worst affected. They will seek to launch smarter, connected products, although this will often be a reactive, tactical approach that seeks to address their competition’s IoT product. <\/p>– Alfonso Velosa
Research Vice President, Gartner Inc.<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The promise of IoT lies not in collecting massive amounts of data to make ongoing activities more efficient. The breakout opportunity lies in determining how information available through IoT sensing systems can enable new ways of delivering products and services, as well as developing new products and services that meet unmet needs for new and existing customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Identifying the Right Data and Drawing Appropriate Insights<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The unstated reality of IoT is that it is arguably now possible to \u201cdo it all\u201d in terms of tracking lots of things through sensors. It has become perhaps too easy to sense many things and collect massive quantities of data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n