The journey to managed enterprise IoT

<This blog was previously published at the Atos Thought Leadership website>

A lot has been said about the data-driven economy we live in and its effects on the people, processes, places and products of all businesses, but how many companies actually use their data efficiently? Every organisation should not only be driven by data or the Internet of Things (IoT – a term we will use to cover gathering, processing and extracting value from data), but also ensure that it delivers measureable outcomes into their core business processes. Few can claim to be at this level of maturity and, if you are not one of them, our overview of the journey to managed enterprise IoT can help put you on the right path.

A true data-driven strategy can deliver benefits that range from tightly integrating customer care into product usage and performance to being able to remotely monitor and improve product (or service) performance to enabling new revenue streams.

We can divide the journey towards Managed enterprise IoT into three levels of maturity (that will be further explained with their own separate blogs) including the six sequential activities shown in the picture below:

  • Enabling the use case: exploring and solving business operational problems in minimum time to value with easily understandable business impact on people, process, places and products.
     >> Benefits: Project – Business operations managing each use case
  • Beyond the use case: ensuring predictability for delivering value – i.e. high quality (from fewer errors), resiliency (higher availability and stability) and security.
     >> Benefits: Program / Portfolio – Business operations across all use cases
  • Managed Enterprise IoT: simplifying the complexity of IoT, which is now business critical, to be both agile and predictable as well as being proactive, prescriptive and automated to deliver positive and measurable benefits for your whole enterprise.
     >> Benefits: Enterprise – IoT underpins whole business

Businesses are made up of people, processes, places, and products which need to create value – the fundamentals of business that have not changed with a data-driven economy. As businesses derive more and more of their revenue from data (and IoT), they are required to resolve its inherent challenges – enabling business value, managing the quantity of things and data, dealing with the complexity of the ecosystem and reducing security and privacy risks.

This is critical to enabling benefits for companies, to their customers, shareholders and the wider data-driven economy – the outcome of Managed enterprise IoT. Rather than taking big leaps from one maturity level to another, put in place a road-map at the start of your journey to Managed enterprise IoT (particularly as forward planning will save lots of time and effort later).

The companies I work with often ask, “Should we manufacture a solution in-house or purchase it from an external supplier?” These are my high level recommendations:

  • Nothing exists in a bubble; consider your long term strategy and competencies (taking into account value and performance). Approximately, core ones should be made, marginal bought, supporting could be either – core is defined as high value and high performance, marginal as low and low respectively.
  • Do not think that you can only make or buy; you can customize a solution that fits your needs. Build a level of extraction (i.e. non-native) above the layer at which you buy; this will enable you to commoditize everything below it, to future proof and ensure cost reductions and quality improvements.
  • Open source gives you access to a larger pool of innovation and can be a low cost way to experiment (enterprise versions offer greater predictability).

In the next post, I will explain the 1st level of maturity of this journey towards Managed enterprise IoT: ‘Enabling the use case’.


I would like to add a special thanks to Philip Griffiths (@ThePGriffiths). Philip was until recently, the strategic partner manager for the ATOS IoT practice and took the initiative to write this blog-series you are reading now.