The Doppler Quarterly Special Edition 2019 | Page 60

a technology perspective, this involvement is ideal because the technology side has a
line of sight into the business problems they are looking to solve with IoT. Furthermore,
they know that if their solution is successful, then it has a clear path to production
deployment. This is big for cultures looking to promote agility, innovation, risk taking
and making sure team members can see the benefits of their efforts.
Managing Your IoT Transformation
Innovation leaders want to see what IoT can do for their business, while ensuring their
investment dollars aren’t simply delivering them expensive, one-of-a-kind prototypes
that don’t lend themselves to real world deployment. To do this effectively, you need to
build an enterprise IoT enablement and deployment framework. This means engaging
with leadership from business development, legal, sales, finance, operations, IT, etc. to
get alignment and ensure that each stakeholder can ask questions and have their feed-
back incorporated in the acceptance criteria and deployment processes for these IoT
projects.
For example, IoT deployments can cause huge headaches for legal and finance, based
on their need for both capital and operational expenditures in various countries, data
collection and distribution regulation, global data privacy compliance, deployment labor
costs and many more complex aspects. This can quickly derail or delay a promising IoT
solution when tangential teams are surprised when they get a laundry list of requests
and requirements that force last-minute, heroic efforts to tackle or alter practices that
are counter to their preferred process. By involving these departments earlier in the
framework creation process, you are able to discuss concerns preemptively and work on
mitigating them before they become a huge barrier to your IoT project’s company-wide
adoption.
This may seem obvious, but often technologists forget that legal and finance teams are
some of the most influential gatekeepers and can make or break your project’s success.
Once they have approved your framework for building and migrating IoT solutions there
won’t be any surprises. Although IoT initiatives may run into many of the same issues
that other technology projects do, the novelty of IoT sets it apart.
From PoC to Deployment
Aside from ensuring that the business has early and frequent contributions to your IoT
enablement and deployment framework, there are a number of things that many tech-
nology organizations can do to further reduce the effort required to propel a PoC into
an actual deployment.
First, create an IoT sandbox with proper guardrails and controls so that anything built
within the sandbox is known to comply with your company’s data governance, security
and privacy policies, and can be migrated and scaled without having to do significant
refactoring and compliance auditing. Second, tackle the non-functional requirements
from the get-go so you can greatly increase the speed of your IoT efforts. It will require
58 | THE DOPPLER | SPECIAL EDITION 2019