Engaging and leveraging the tremendous advances that IoT brings to enterprise solutions can be challenging. The 2016 Strategic Innovation Symposium: The Intelligent Enterprise at Harvard brought together leaders from across industries to discuss the opportunities and challenges in engaging in the Intelligent Enterprise. The following are the key actions that the leaders at the Symposium felt were paramount to a successful adoption and deployment of IoT solutions.
Business Unit Engagement: Is there an ROI for the IoT program?
Unlike internal programs where the ROI on IT projects can be well understood, launching complex IoT initiatives often requires a clear business case for both the investment in infrastructure and also the greater investment in change management, education and process re-engineering. Most successful IoT initiatives have a clear ROI and business case, often lead by the business unit itself.
Technology Solution Partner: Who will provide sensors, RFID, software and integration solutions?
Intelligent IoT solutions require a holistic, or ecosystem perspective. Does your plan have all of the key pieces integrated:sensors, software, and integration? Without a high-level perspective, many projects fail to yield the expected benefits.
Change Management Plan:How will new solutions be adopted by current systems and employees?
Key to the success of IoT projects is not only the technical hardware and software but also the adoption and utilization by the end users. One of the largest impediments to success is not having su cient planning and e ort regarding training new users,developing an adoption plan, and reorganizing processes to integrate the technology in an e ciency and user-friendly manner.