Digital Transformation in Practice : Learning from IIC Deployments
Achieving success with digital transformation is a challenge to businesses . Many factors come into play from business objectives to technology readiness , organizational goals and alignment . How can an organization begin to understand the issues and aspects associated with achieving positive outcomes ? One way is to take learnings from practice to provide meaningful guidance .
Industry IoT Consortium ( IIC ) members partner to put theory to practice . They experiment , assess , and pilot new technology , solutions and business models in testbeds and test drives . Results from testbeds and test drives inform members ’ go-to-market strategies and offer guidance to industry about how to solve real-world problems . Learnings can be shared with industry to help businesses form and fulfil their transformational goals . Industry guidance is extracted and applied leading to less risk and more rapid deployments .
Testbeds are platforms for experimentation and innovation . They explore the technology and business models that enable a trustworthy industrial IoT . Each testbed is deployed outside the lab , in a real-world environment where the testbed faces a different set of challenges . Facing these real-world challenges builds insight and knowledge about how the testbed technology and business model perform . This leads to meaningful guidance and an impact in the marketplace .
Testbeds produce technology and new learnings , but they are not solutions to be deployed as operable solutions . Test drives do that . Test drives are solutions created for deployment as pilots . Test drives leverage technology from testbeds and industry to the benefit of technology users and their businesses . Test drives enable technology users to take technology for a test drive , similar to how a prospective automobile purchaser may do the same . Test drives that achieve digital transformation outcomes result in learnings that inform industry about what works .
Learnings that affect success factors for IIoT projects were documented in the IIC white paper , “ A Compilation of Testbed Results : Toward Best Practices for Developing and Deploying IIoT Solutions ” 1 . This current report describes a set of IIC testbed and test drive deployments and extracts learnings from them pertaining to digital transformation . It makes observations to inform and guide digital transformation initiatives generally .
Learnings from practice create meaningful guidance for businesses and teams engaged in or considering digital transformation initiatives . While testbed and test drive deployments may be constrained in their size and scope , each is deployed into a real-world environment and faces real-world challenges . As a result , learnings from the deployments are credible and extensible , with caution , to full scale projects .