CTO Straight Talk - Issue 1 - 40

When we talk about the IoE, we are
implicitly talking about building
or strengthening a decision
management system and providing
a structure for data.

gradually become more instrumented, but
the IoT will lead to tremendous expansion.
Any processor or activity will be monitored
in near real time and become a new source
of data. The data will need to be shared
and analyzed so that it can help you make
better decisions.
Once you develop a plan identifying the
best opportunities for deploying the IoT, you
need to discuss it at the highest levels of the
business. The IoT is a strategic investment
decision that cannot be made from the bottom
up. It should affect the entire business, not
just individual functions or units.
Next comes implementation. Typically,
when we engage with customers interested
in the IoT, we work through a long list of
questions. For example: What is your cloud
strategy, and how will the IoT impact it?
If you could access this type of data, how
would it change how you manage your
business? Could this specific application of
the IoT enable you to improve operations,
develop a new revenue stream, or achieve
greater efficiencies?
Those kinds of questions can elicit
information that builds awareness about
opportunities that might be hidden and how
we deploy the right resources to go after them.

The Immediate Transformative
Opportunity
Uncovering opportunities that may improve
decision making in your organization down
the road is important. But you should also
consider what's lying in plain sight. From
our perspective, the transformative-and
immediate-opportunity is the billions of
devices already deployed over the past 30
years in various sectors such as the energy
grid, manufacturing, and infrastructure and
traffic management. A very large percentage
of these devices and sensors have been based
on proprietary systems and have not been
connected to anything. We refer to that as
the "brown field" opportunity for the IoTthe opportunity to connect devices that are
already installed.
The thinking is that no one is going to rip out
and replace all those existing devices, which
in many cases have a long useful life ahead of
them. That would take a very long time, and
it's not really necessary if you can simply
attach a secure gateway device and start
collecting data.
As an example, we have worked with
Daikin, a large Japanese air conditioner
manufacturer. They install many systems in

CTO Straight Talk | 40
CTO Straight Talk - Issue 1

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of CTO Straight Talk - Issue 1
