A Practical Framework to Turn IoT Technology Into Operational Capability
applications to support business workflows.
Integration is a critical success factor for
highly technical IoT solutions that need to
support the work operations personnel
perform on a day-to-day basis.
based business processes are based on real-
time events (event-driven business process
management). Schulte and Chandy 22
describe the event-driven approach as a
combination of complex event processing
(CEP) and business process management
(BPM). “CEP software can identify a threat or
opportunity situation that triggers a new
business process instance.” Their work only
focused on the IT applications domain and
IoT integration brings an added dimension of
complexity to IoT-based processes or
workflows. IoT data sources require some
form of preprocessing to reduce the volume
and velocity to only those events that
require business process intervention. This is
not traditionally done by business process
management tools in organizations.
Framework to Agree on Integration of IoT
into Existing Business Workflows
The McKinsey report referenced earlier,
shows that integrating IoT solutions with
existing business workflows is the area with
which most organizations struggle.
The notion of integrating IoT into business
processes is not a new one. Meyer 21 et al
presented an extension of the BPMN
(business process modeling notation) at the
International Conference on Advanced
Information Systems Engineering in 2013
that describes IoT devices as business
process resources. “Typical enterprise
solutions such as ERP systems could benefit
from the integration with the IoT, if business
process-related devices such as RFID,
sensors and actuators could directly take
over responsibility as process resources for
individual process tasks.”
Secondly, new IoT business models require
composite processes that are orchestrations
of actions rather than monolithic processes
on a single process platform such as an ERP
or BPMS system. These systems now
become elements of new macro processes
that support business model innovation and
other opportunities that come with
leveraging IoT.
The BPMN extension provides a mechanism
to model these new process participants in a
machine-readable model, but it doesn’t deal
with the two IoT process characteristics that
result in organizations struggling to
implement IoT-based business processes.
The I2OC framework recognizes these
challenges and suggests a higher order
mapping of the business processes that
include applications like ERP and BPM
systems as components rather than the
process platforms.
Firstly, traditional business processes are
mostly initiated as requests ( request-driven
business process management) whereas IoT-
The following example describes this higher-
level approach.
21 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-38709-8_6
22 Event Processing: Designing IT systems for agile companies - McGraw-Hill 2010 (page 171)
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