One thing is clear: IoT isn’t waiting on your company
LINKDIN
Digitalization is changing our lives and, as we all know, having a huge impact on all types of companies. Market and technology cycles are becoming shorter, and the global competitive environment is becoming more varied. Technology trends such as Industry 4.0, Mobile Enterprise, and Cloud are being utilized strategically.
New technologies are driving dramatic growth in data volumes, and customer demands are changing constantly. The Internet of Things plays a particularly important role in this change: Several innovative companies are already implementing numerous IoT projects, mostly to explore whether and how IoT generates benefits for their companies.
Other companies are addressing this issue from the perspective of implementation, security, and agility – as shown by an interesting study by CIO and Computerwoche. Keeping up to speed on the industry’s innovative technologies and implementing them in companies as early as possible is particularly important. For one thing is clear: IoT isn’t waiting on your company; you have to take action yourself!
Fast Movers will win
Germany, however, seems to be lacking some sense of speed and urgency here. American companies are significantly faster than the Germans when it comes to implementation of IoT projects. There are many reasons for this: IoT-related challenges facing German companies include security, costs, and the still low success rate in many IoT projects. In my opinion, the often tedious perfectionism, which is so typical of Germany, the desire for standardization, complete blueprints and system architectures, is another factor hampering prompt implementation of such projects at IoT’s current stage of development. I consider it essential that companies don’t analyze ideas to death beforehand but simply get going and implement individual measures at a small scale but at a rapid pace – in small but important steps towards the IoT future. A trend in that direction can be observed in a majority of German companies, with around 72% of IT and management decision-makers surveyed believing that the Internet of Things will be tremendously important within the next three years and 45% knowing that this topic is already highly relevant for their companies and market competition.
Encourage a winning team
Partnerships play a very important role in the Internet of Things, and I think they’re indispensable to the implementation of successful IoT projects. Hardly any industrial vendor can succeed in the world of IoT on their own. Ultimately, it depends on different systems working together and platforms communicating with platforms. The search for suitable partnerships is a major challenge for small and medium-sized businesses in particular – and selecting the right partner is especially important for them. This does not mean, however, that large companies have it easier; to the contrary, they usually need many different partnerships to bring together the various aspects of IoT. In terms of qualified IoT partners, it is important that they actively contribute ideas to the projects and commit investments.
Appetite comes with eating
Once a successful IoT project has been executed, others will certainly follow. A step-by-step approach that gradually yields small successes is a great thing indeed. It is recommended that an IoT project starts with the existing processes and then gradually works its way forward.
So what are you waiting for? Get the first IoT project going in your company and celebrate small successes! I promise you won’t regret it – except, perhaps, that you didn’t start earlier!