IoT Strategy Assessment
(2.5 months)
Summary
A global manufacturing company focused on niche markets needed guidance on their organization-wide Internet of Things (IoT) transformation. Insight provided IoT expertise by evaluating the client's current IoT strategy, identifying gaps, and making strategic recommendations to drive success.
Most business units are still producing traditional products (on the left of the IoT journey). Only a few have launched true IoT products.
The client grows by acquisition and oversees 80+ independent business units. These business units serve niche markets and are often considered the best-of-the-best in their respective markets. They are brought in under the client's corporate umbrella, but allowed to remain independent and autonomous, without interference from "the parent" company, allowing them to continue their best-in-class operations.
The client’s business units are at varying stages of maturity when it comes to IoT - a few have actually launched full scale IoT products into the market, but most are still producing traditional products. The root of the client's challenge comes from the fact that many of their business units are beginning to explore IoT, but each has very different needs and goals.
The question posed to Insight was:
“How can we support our business units as they start to build and launch IoT products, while also allowing them to stay agile and entrepreneurial?”
Project Details
Approach
The Insight team was made up of senior-level Strategy & Design and Data & IoT Architects. Our approach focused on understanding the current state & then working closely with the client during a series of virtual workshops.
Assess Current State. Through interviews, meetings, and reviews of existing documentation, the team established a baseline understanding of the current state.
Interviews. Conducted business and technical interviews with five business units in varying states of the IoT journey, the client corporate team, and client leadership. From a business unit perspective, we sought to learn what was working well and what wasn't in regard to IoT. From the client corporate & leadership teams, we focused on understanding the client's organizational structure, current IoT strategy, and vision for the future.
Current State Review. Evaluated the client's current IoT documentation and started identifying gaps and opportunities.
Collaborative Workshops. Workshops were integral to the success of the project - by bringing the client into the process, they better understood the outcomes.
Interview Findings. The team used a workshop format to share and discuss key points from the interviews and findings from the current state assessment.
Service Design / Journey Map. Through a series of workshops, we used the service design and journey mapping frameworks to capture information related to the IoT journey.
Service Design / Journey Map
Based on the information gathered from the interviews and documentation review, we created and validated the IoT journey in the form of a service design / journey map. The map illustrates the most complex IoT journey that a business unit could take, starting from a traditional product all the way to a digital product ecosystem. Information is organized across columns and rows:
Key Phases of an IoT Journey. The columns identify the key phases that an organization must go through when starting an IoT journey. Phases include things like, “Define Business Goals” through “Identifying Telemetry Needs” and “Assessing Organizational Readiness” all the way to choosing an “Implementation Path”.
Recommendations. The rows capture recommendations related to each phase - the Activities that should happen, the People who should be involved, and the Technology questions to be considered.
Outcomes
Based on client goals, the current state assessment, and service design map, the team created three main deliverables:
Proposed New Organizational Roles.
Based on the client's desire to remain lean at the corporate level, while still guiding business units through the IoT journey, we recommended four new roles - a Product & Design Strategist, Cloud & IoT Architect, DevOps Architect, and Data Architect.
These new roles would form an IoT Center of Excellence team - senior level experts who would guide business units and provide tailored advice.
At the business unit level, the team captured required and optional roles that need to be filled when starting an IoT project. Roles include, but are not limited to, Product Manager, Software Architect, Data Scientist/Analyst, UX/UI Designers, Software Engineers, QA, etc.
IoT Journey Guidebook.
The IoT Journey Guidebook expanded on the service design / journey map and the client’s existing documentation, culminating in a 70+ page document detailing every stage of the IoT journey, including:
Foundational information such as Azure Account Management, Identity, Security, etc.
Detailed information on each phase of the IoT journey, including questions that a business unit should be asking itself at each stage, and the roles/people that should be involved at each stage.
Sample architecture patterns.
The Guidebook will be a shared resource for the new corporate roles and business units to use together.
Governance Strategy.
The team also built out a governance strategy that the new IoT corporate roles (once hired) could use to jump start the process. This included:
The new IoT team’s responsibilities and recommendations for how the new IoT roles would work with each other, with their other corporate counterparts, and with business units.
A plan for conducting an initial pilot phase with a selected business unit interested in IoT.
A Communication Strategy for introducing the new IoT roles (and IoT in general) to business units. Things like an IoT roadshow, quarterly lunch and learns, etc.
An Engagement Strategy for how the new IoT corporate team would engage with business units, and how they interact with each other throughout the IoT journey.
And a plan for continuous improvement of the process, e.g. taking into account feedback from the business units and adjusting accordingly.
Project Challenges & Learnings
This project hammered home the need for very tight collaboration between technical and strategy & design roles. The team meshed well together from the beginning, which led to a successful solution for the client, who has started implementing our recommendations.
Although I’m very familiar with IoT through my previous project work, I learned a new and important lesson during the course of this engagement: IoT is simply a technology that facilitates data collection - true success in IoT requires that you evoke value from that data to map back to your intended business outcomes. Too many clients are interested in IoT because it’s new and exciting, but they fail to step back and ask themselves why IoT? What value am I deriving from the data?