Building the Industrial IoT ecosystem that is right for your business
In my last blog, I talked about how, in order to truly capitalize on the promise of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), enterprises need to take a new approach, a higher level of thinking if you will, to more freely innovate on processes and discover new sources of revenue without boundaries—including IT.
A new value proposition
As we continue our journey to an end-state of true transformation, it’s important to note that it is not just about technology, but it’s about how you do business across your operations, employees, partners, and customers. It’s about becoming ready to take a bolder approach at reengineering old operational processes. It’s about seizing the opportunity to redefine the customer journey and change the products and services that you offer.
We see that disruptive leaders tend to be nimble decision makers who go after new business models and adopt technology faster than others. These might be your upcoming competitors: the 48% manufacturers that are already armed with capabilities to support seamless human-machine interaction. Or the ones that already see 10% larger revenue and 30% larger profits than others through their digital proficiency. (source: Microsoft and McKinsey – Disruption)
The ability of these disruptive leaders to share information across the value chain partners is proportional to their rate of success to co-create value. In partnership, this new IIoT ecosystem can focus on freeing up trapped business value by helping to evolve product offerings into service offerings.
Building a strategic, open IIoT ecosystem
So how do you get started on your digital transformation? First, you need to understand the specific business problems you will address. Then you need to collect meaningful information to help your business improve with a clear dimension of change in mind to excel, differentiate or disrupt markets. As you begin to address these two things, you will start to build a solid digital strategy.
Your strategy will dictate how and when to apply technology to accelerate the pace of your transformation. Technology enables an unprecedented opportunity to disrupt old business practices. But to truly be successful, you need to ensure that your processes and technology landscape are open. Your end-to-end technology stack needs to be accessible at all tiers. Your cloud platform needs to be able to talk to other cloud platforms. Devices need to be compatible and flexible as a continuum of information flows. Protocols need to interoperate seamlessly together to connect people, things, and services to that information flow. And across this entire infrastructure, your flow of data needs to be secure.
To help accelerate this kind of value proposition in your IIoT ecosystem, you’ll find that you need to start building a new set of partnerships. And not just software partners or systems integrators, but you will need to build or leverage existing IIoT ecosystems with new kinds of collaboration already established, such as semiconductor partners, industry standards bodies, and even telecommunication companies. As an example, you can leverage Microsoft’s newly established partnerships for IoT with Intel and ATT, as well as industry standard bodies like OPC and others.
Keys to success
These are all key factors to an open IIoT ecosystem that can put you solidly on the path to digital, whether you are disrupting markets with new business models, excelling above your competition based on your existing core advantage, or differentiating with new products or services.
Every company is becoming a software company; pursuing digital transformation is the first sign of it. In order to succeed you want to build your business platform with an open technology approach. This is the key to be able to succeed quickly at building the digital ecosystem that is right for your business.
Not too long ago, in a simplistic conversation I was having about sports, I was told that in the field it is not the best team who wins, it is the team that scores the most points. While it is a simple statement, it is true. So, let me paraphrase that thought in industry terms and leave you with this one question to think about while I blog again: are your competitors beating you because they have a better product than you do, or because they play in a better IIoT ecosystem, with a more agile business model that makes them more profitable?
To help you get started, please join us at the upcoming Hannover Messe industrial event, April 25-29 in Hannover, Germany, where you can experience Microsoft’s IIoT ecosystem for yourself. I also encourage you to read my new article in OnWindows magazine and Sanjay Ravi’s blog here to get a preview of the key themes that we will be focusing on at the event.
