Internet of Things (IoT) – It’s not only about the sensors!

By Sid Verma and Sameer Verma

Physical world is connecting to internet now at a very fast pace, every other person has a Nest or Ring or Fitbit on their hand and God only knows how many sensors are there in bigger assets like Cars are, Airplanes, Tractors.

Whenever we discuss Internet of Things (IoT) within the business/tech community, discussion always lead to a magical sensor that can solve all the problem. Most of the enthusiastic beginners influenced by IoT Marketecture, will start with “you know IoT, tell me which sensors I should use.

I know it feel common sense but like all good business managers, the answer is still let’s start with the Business problem.

The true value of IoT is not to find the perfect sensor but enabling Digital Business transformation by assessing existing Operations/Product from all the regular angles such as People, Process, Technology. Based on the finding and existing architecture recommend delta change or a major innovation leap using the tenants of IoT. Idea is to understand critical operations / product data blind spots and shed light on it using by collecting meaningful data from the physical devices that were unconnected so far.

Organizations can achieve the true Business value, if they focus on the business problem. If you are one of the businesses who are concerns about the following:

•     Track, monitor, and stay up-to-date on your products and inventory in real-time

•     Extend your service, support and deepen customer relationships thru smart products

•     Gather and learn your equipment's vitals thru small, wireless, and multi-stats sensors to anticipate failures before they happen

•     Turn real-time sensor data into actionable insights through big data tools, cognitive analytics, and machine learning

•     Apply mixed reality to transform your “super engineers” into a remote team of experts accessible from anywhere via video through phone, tablet, or specialty glasses

Yes, these are the Business problems where IoT can add value. Simple is always the best. Hopefully the flow diagram below might show the steps to take as one start their IoT journey. We simple call it the IoT Cycle.

• The Create Layer -- Commonly referred to the physical world: the layer creating and communicating the actual data. Where sensors, devices can connects to humans (walking statistics), machines (cycle counts, production volumes), and digital entities (Tweets) and be can communicated over network via LTE, Wi-Fi and more.
• The Manage Layer -- Commonly called as database or data lakes, pods, oceans, you get my drift. Currently cloud storage (AWS, Azure, GCP, etc) is easily accessible and very cheap to store and manage the data. From consumer to commercial to Industrial, there are platforms are available to manage the data.
• The Analyze Layers -- Data give us the power to analyze and make use of the data. This is the layer where analytics, Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence concepts comes and show meaningful information from the raw data. 
• And lastly – The Insight Layer – The visualization or business intelligence layer: allowing the users to monitor progress, KPIs and intelligence reports. Yes, make recommendation and action, which add truly add value to your organization.

One important lesson we learnt from our fellow/mentor IoT leaders that, you don’t have recreate what’s already out there. Use the current hardware or software to find synergy among themselves and use Blue Ocean type strategies. That’s why once Business problem are identified, then you can follow the IoT life cycle to implement your solution faster and smarter.

Good luck!

Sid Verma

Global Head and VP - IoT Services at Siemens Corporation

San Francisco, California, US

Sameer Verma

Consulting Manager, Deloitte Canada

Toronto, Canada