IoT has been the buzz word in technology and business sectors for nearly a decade or so. Big businesses and multinationals have already changed their facilities and capabilities to IoT friendly environment and many small and medium businesses are still in the initial stage of researching the possibility of such a transformation. Transforming businesses to IoT is not easy, because IoT is completely and utterly data driven. Thus the first step to IoT transformation is going digital and then the next step is purchasing the IoT connectivity depending on the business need. Once the capabilities are defined, then other aspects of IoT has to be taken into account, like cognitive science, machine learning and last but not least cloud driven data. But help is at hand. The transformation is being made easy by many IoT vendors, who provide the IoT platform in order to help businesses to make that transformation. These platform capabilities are mostly in the early stages and most of these vendors provide easy opportunities using drag and drop functionalities to achieve the required transformation, however the transformation that is discussed below is not how organizations adopt to IoT but how IoT motivates businesses to accomplish business transformation.
Transformation of any business can be achieved in three steps:
1) Strategy 2) Implementation 3) AdaptationThe strategy of any organization is defined in its business plan. The business plan is the consolidated efforts of many divisions in the organization. It involves the Objectives, Products, Technology, Growth, People, Processes and Customers.
The implementation is the step which leads to the right outcomes. The fundamental implementation approach includes development plans (sales and market share), the tools and the platform capabilities of the organization (includes cultural norms, leadership vision, technical competencies and change approach) and the personnel administration (training, recruitment and team building through rewards and recognition).
The adaptation stage provides the results and it involves profits, customer satisfaction, financial reports and organizational progress.
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The ‘Internet of Things’ is making this magic happen through many ways. A few of those techniques are listed below.
Innovation based transformation: IoT is changing the way businesses think and do their work. The strategy used by many businesses is changing its focus from analog to digital. This transformation helps in taking high level decisions based on data analytics and hence all the tech driven decisions will focus on the data collection and data analysis. This complete shift in focus might make many organizations to take strategy based transformation.
Lean based transformation: This concept is concocted based on the concept of usage of less resources in order to maximize the output. The concept of lean organization is another driving motive for businesses to undergo transformation. IoT concepts are all based on connected smart products which results in less waste and increased efficiency. Lean organizations are profit oriented and concentrates on using less resources in order to achieve maximum benefit. Say for example, an earth moving company like John Deere, can maximize its production output of engines and tractors by optimizing its material cost, operational costs and also the delivery expenses. Thus IoT helps in determining lean based business transformation.
Development Based Transformation: Seeing the development of one company in the IoT transformation front, other companies might follow leading to a chain effect. Growth is the focus of many organizations in the modern era. The company which adopt and evolve can only grow and survive and hence the extensive development of one manufacturing or tech industry which adopted IoT, might influence similar organization to do the same.
Transformation through decentralization: As businesses try to expand or innovate, there is always an opportunity for them to end inventing another related products than whatever they are working on, say for example, a VR game company is researching about the latest VR technologies to achieve greater efficiency, but eventually ends up with the innovation of a built in VR game console inside laptops and desktops or tablets, along with the intended product, then the latter product can be separately manufactured. This type of IoT compelled transformation is separation based transformation. This also helps businesses to decentralize their capital equipment and facilities and improve business strategy and in turn lead to decentralized business transformation. This also establishes the concept of ‘Microfactory’ which are small affordable, networked manufacturing and assembling environment to produce some pragmatic and sensible small products. Some of the products that can be manufactured in this 'microfactory' are ‘microrobots’, ‘3d microprinters
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