WHY your IoT initiative is failing to scale?

#Discussion(General) [ via IoTForIndiaGroup ]

Raja Shanmugam, Global Head- IoT Business Development at Tata Consultancy Services

WHY should one start IoT initiative? WHY should the business stakeholders be happy about? WHY should it be funded? WHY should your end customer buy this from you? Whether it is customer, or business or CEO.. WHY should they be excited about this?

Off course business value! And all agree on that, but something is preventing all to come to a common ground and achieve it in real!- WHY?

IoT is seen as revenue generation or operations transformation initiative and Business stakeholders really need that value reflected in their P&L statements. It is not a technology or a support function. This understanding is not the same across the functions of the organization.

1) As the technology teams get to know about the details on all layers of IoT before their business peers, they start their POCs without direct ownership from business teams. Slowly these initiatives face challenges of restricted budget and henceforth die.

2) Sometimes Business owners take the decision on IoT on their own as it is anyway new in the market and why should I depend on slow IT department? Let me work with a partner and get the value on my own. Or hire bunch of data scientists and do on my own. These are the thoughts and gaps within the organization that creates multiple POCs across the same organization and almost on same use case as well.

3) Sometimes it is due to inter political climate within the organization, sometimes it is due to lack of clarity on what objectives we are trying to achieve and what is the return of investments, and who is going to manage the risks associated with it. There is a race on who starts first but less of a race on who will stand tall and deliver the value.

Any IoT initiative for the organization needs to be qualified well for business outcome before starting it.

Why stakeholders don’t align on Business Outcome and roadmap?
Whole point of performing PoC is to test the concept, validate the possibility of business value outcome, then scale it quickly. However, most companies fall into a trap post the POC. Technology teams say that it has been proven as a success and now Business owners need to fund and scale it further. But Business owners don’t see the value that will reflect on the P&L.

For any initiative to bring P&L impact, it cannot be achieved with a 100 K USD POC. It needs a business owner to create the roadmap and right teams to enable him on the launch and KPIs associated with this initiative clearly tracked and governed. It is not a technology initiative.

A high-level roadmap with functional architecture and requirements with a timeline view can help put digital train on track. And definitely it is not to outsource this activity to some powerpoint factories. But it is to engage right trusted partner who can create this together with you and stand by it to deliver till the end.

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