The second is process and workflow. Most of the analytics that you will build on top of your things will have to alert people or systems to do something. As it will be very likely that the number of things under management will grow over time, as well the number of analyses, the alerts that will be generated can be staggering. Adopting a business process management approach with a business rules engine can help to channel the actions properly by ruling out duplicates and put them in the right priority. Depending on the complexity of your organization and the industry you operate in, you might want to adopt preconfigured business processes such as ServiceMax if you need, for example, to support field services or build your own bespoke system by using a BPMS platform.
Regardless of the choice you make, it may be a good idea to map out how your new system is, or will be, influencing existing processes. Recently, business process modeling tools started to add the necessary functionality to do this. In this way, you can support the evolution and adaptation of your IoT-enabled business process while at the same time ensuring tight collaboration between your teams.
What’s Ahead
Mind boggling? Yes, the complexity of implementing an IoT project is vast and can be daunting at the beginning. Just keep in mind, if it were easy, it probably would have been done before. Can you do it alone? No. You need commitment from management—preferably at the top. One way of getting management to buy in is to make it clear that IoT projects are one of the most profound ways to transition your company into a digital enterprise and propel it into the next decade.
If the right use cases are chosen, they can exemplify to your company what it means to become digital. All the hassle and hardship will be worth the effort, from an enterprise perspective as well as from a personal career standpoint. Professionals that have a shown track record of successfully implementing IoT projects will be in high demand for many years.