John McDonald is the Chief Executive Officer of CloudOne, Inc. Magazine’s fastest-growing IT company in Indiana, USA, and winner of the 2015 IBM Beacon Award, the highest honor given to a business partner. Formerly a technical sales executive at IBM for over 20 years, he is one of the founding members and on the steering committee of the 450+ member Cloud Customer Standards Council, a member of the Association of Information Technology Professionals, the IBM DeveloperWorks Advisory Council, and the Industrial Advisory Board for Computer and Information Technology at Purdue University. John earned degrees in Management Information Systems and Computer Information Technology from Purdue University.
John, along with James Pietrocarlo and James Goldman, recently authored a book – How IoT Is Made.
John has written this article exclusively for The Internet Of All Things.
By: John McDonald
As amazing as it might sound, if you’re in business now, you are already making products and services for the Internet of Things. The items rolling off your production line, through your stores, or off your servers onto the Internet already are, and will increasingly throughout their lifespan, be used in the Internet of Things, because it’s already here. You already have systems that build and support these things, and seeing and appreciating this is the first step to IoT action. The raw truth, though, is that although you are probably making IoT right now, chances are that you are doing it very badly. Here’s a story to illustrate that.
Dave, the maintenance leader for a well-known manufacturer of automotive components sits in a small, dimly lit conference room. It’s an industrial scene. The table’s edge is worn away. A well-used whiteboard hangs from the steel wall holding a single faded marker. Most of the chairs lean off-center. The smell of machine oil hangs in the air.
The discussion is about data, a topic as foreign to him as navigating the Nile River in a boat. The salesperson flips through charts describing the insights and knowledge that can be gained from collecting and analyzing data about the reliability and performance of factory machines, a topic now called Asset Performance Management or APM. He goes on to share some stories of companies that have saved money by adjusting manufacturing to account for what they have noticed in the analysis, and about how they can now make real-time fixes to products still on the line.
The salesperson pauses as his target leans in and says, “I appreciate what you are saying, but it’s just too risky to pull out everything we’re doing. It works. We’ve been doing it this way for the past 20 years. My job is to make sure it keeps working. Maybe we can look at this at the next upgrade cycle in 2 or 3 years.”
The salesperson sighs, leaves his card and thanks the man for his time. He’s seen it before: narrow vision, limited power, conservative approach and resistance to change. He knows that two other companies in his automotive territory have given him the same cold shoulder, but a fourth one has a completely different attitude, and excites him.
That company is known for being edgy and different. It’s a new entrant into the stodgy automotive space and run by a bit of a maverick who left his solid job at a much bigger company to start up this one. The other salespeople in the territory know that his company is often the first consumer of new technologies, and has an entire unit devoted to kicking the tires on new things to see how they might put them to work successfully. It’s no surprise then that the guys running their factory are eager to tap data streams coming from their operation and even to change that operation based on what they see.
In the end, the salesperson knows that the company he just left will eventually fade, because they are stuck doing only what they know and avoid adding risk by making changes.
So which company are you? Right now, there is a meeting happening in your plant between your maintenance leaders and someone offering APM analytics and insight? What is your team saying about what your company will or will not do? Has the topic of IoT been mentioned at your company in management meetings? At what level? Department level? In the C-suite?
The truth is that you’re already making things for the Internet of Things. The products and services that you are building now will exist in a world where everything must connect, where the devices speak for the customer, and where correlated streams of data become actionable business opportunity to provide new goods and services in the context of what the customer needs in the moment.
But do you realize this at every level of your organization? Do those who build the software that goes into your product or supports your product understand this? Do the people that run your plants and factories appreciate their role? Do the people in your IT department understand the critical function they provide in evaluating and recommending the best technologies? Or, do they still believe they need to provide every technology service themselves, no matter how awful their track record?
Failure 1: Collecting, Not Connecting
First, even though you may be gathering lots of data, you’re not correlating and studying that data for what it tells you about your operation. You are failing to reap the value from the goldmine on which you sit. Essentially you are collecting, not connecting. For example, you may run extensive tests on your product both in development as well as during the production process. Much of that data is used to understand if the product is functioning as designed, and is being produced as intended. But, what happens to all that data once the product is released, or makes it to the end of the production line? If you are typical, that data is either flushed or is stored in some database without any clear objective or method of review and analysis over the long term. Consider a worse scenario. Even if you are performing some sort of analysis of the data, is that analysis escaping your development team or your factory? Are you connecting the dots between what you see in one place, and what it may mean to other business processes or functions?
Failure 2: Analyzing, not Acting
Second, even if you are doing this analysis, are you in a position to make real changes in your business based on what you see? If not, you are analyzing, not acting. Taking action within the silo that owns that data being analyzed is one thing, taking action across other departments affected by that data is quite another thing entirely. A real milestone of IoT maturity within an organization is when that IoT project spans multiple departments. For example, if you routinely pour over reports looking for trends and anomalies, but not convening a regular, cross-functional leadership team to adjust processes and share insight over organizational lines, the insight you gain is useless because it cannot affect the change necessary in the constantly competitive environment in which you operate.
Failure 3: Deteriorating, not Developing
Lastly, even if you are sharing insights across the organization, is it really causing change? If your team is not ready to challenge everything they do, including evolving what the company’s core competencies even are, you are deteriorating, not developing. For example, if the data you’re viewing is telling you clearly that customers are evolving in how they use your product at different times and in different ways, are you able to translate those usage patterns into new features, new distribution channels, or new differentiations from your competitors? Are you able to quickly make and introduce changes in the firmware/software at the heart of you product? If not, you stand to have your best sellers eclipsed by others who start fresh with current needs and customer preferences or to others who adapt their offering more dynamically. As the old saying goes, “If you’re not growing, you’re dying.” That has never been truer than when it comes to the Internet of Things.
Summarily stated, if you are just collecting, but not connecting and if you are just analyzing but not acting, then you are deteriorating, not developing. You are wasting the most valuable bits of information you have, which is the data from your own organization and processes and from the things you already make. You are not leveraging them to position yourself competitively for the world of the Internet of Things. It’s time to fix that.
(All views/opinions/analysis are the author’s and may not necessarily be in consonance with those held by this Website.)