s a management
consultant, youll already
be familiar with such
buzzwords as the Internet
of Things (IoT), Industrial Internet and
Industry 4.0. But what staff resources
do businesses need to implement an
IoT solution? How do you deal with the
clients security fears? And, maybe more
fundamentally, who in the organisation
actually owns IoT? Well answer each of
these in turn and hopefully leave you a lot
more enlightened
Lets start with who the client is by
dividing the world into enterprises that
build Things and businesses that use
them. So AGCO builds combine harvesters
but August Farms uses them. GE builds
MRI scanners but the Childrens Hospital
of Orange County uses them. Goldwind
builds wind turbines but Sempra uses
them to generate electricity. And so on.
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As-a-service model
The internet has enabled the as-aservice model for IT infrastructure and
software. The IoT enables machines-asa-service or equipment-as-a-service
business models for all kinds of products,
potentially allowing many types of
company to shift from selling products to
selling services based on these products.
This model can transform large capital
Reducing consumables
Lets move on to the enterprises that
use Things: hospitals, farms, airlines,
manufacturers and utilities. Why should
they care about web-enabled precision
Application
So what technologies and skills does
a business need in order to implement
an IoT solution? Such applications can
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/internet_of_things
be very complex because they cross so
many different domains. In my recently
published book, Precision: Principals,
Practices and Solutions for the Internet
of Things, we simplify the domain into a
five-layer framework: Things, Connect,
Collect, Learn, Do
Things are becoming smarter. Driven
by the widespread use of sensors in cell
phones, costs have plummeted, allowing
next-gen machines to include numerous
sensors a recent oil drilling platform
in the Gulf of Mexico has over 40,000.
The continuing reduction in computing
and data storage costs allows any Thing
a crop sprayer, blood analyser or solar
grid to be driven by increasingly more
sophisticated software. As any Tesla
owner can tell you, they tend to get new
features more often than the rest of us.
Connecting Things require a diverse set
of technologies based on the amount of
data that needs to be transmitted, how
far it needs to go and how much power
you have. You also have many choices on
how to manage the connection and how it
is protected and secured.
Collecting this huge volume of IoT data
will be a challenge. Currently, data might
typically collected and stored using
SQL, NoSQL and traditional time-series
from companies such as IBM, SAP, Oracle
and Teradata. Your data architect will
be dealing with a different kind of data
than a traditional transaction processing
systems. Learning and analysis products
will also be required to make sense of
this flood of data. Each product will
include query technology as well as both
supervised and unsupervised machinelearning technologies. Because, until
now, we have mostly focused on IoP
(Internet of People) applications, most of
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A matter of security
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