FIRST RULE OF IoT – NEVER TALK ABOUT IoT

BUSINESS AS THE DRIVER

Never talk about IoT when talking about IoT. Business should always be what is dictating the agenda of technology. 100% of the time. There’s absolutely no point in talking about technology for technology’s sake, except for the fact that is fun. We often fall into this trap ourselves, but it is a dead end. Business has to be the driver.

First rule of IoT is to not talk about IoT

Considering that our name is Go-IoT, this might make you think that we are crazy. And yes, we probably are. But let’s see if there is some method to this madness. Because even though it is counter intuitive and it directly contradicts both the title and the opening statement, people are talking about IoT. And we are listening in to the conversation and our mission is to enable others to easy access and connection to existing systems with IoT, which will make you just Go with it. This week, a person got into a conversation with us just because of the fact that our name spells out IoT. We will change it at some point in time, but not just yet.

“Go-IoT – We want you to just Go with IoT!”

Which is also the name for our modular Edge Gateway/BMS Controller, the DINGO. But that’s where it should stop. And that’s where we will stop as well and move on to what this blog post is all about. 

Talking to or talking with?

There are 5 simple, but valid points in this article about the questions you have to ask when discussing IoT.

  • What is the end goal?
  • How will strategy improve customer experience?
  • What will happen with the data?
  • How will you capitalize on the network effect?
  • What about security?

All of these points above are really important. Basically what the article says and what this blog post is all about is that there’s more to the eye than technology. After our CEO pursued his Master in IT Management the most important thing that he learned, was that you should never ever say the word IT. Never. This was directly related to “IT-projects” but it concerns technology in general. Everything about IT Management was to pursue business objectives. Yes, technology can become a driver for strategy but it is always the business strategy that needs to come first and how technology can help in achieving them in the best way possible.

Network effects are incredibly important

Us people, should talk to each other, and that is equally true for the things as well. Sending data to Corporate headquarters without doing anything with it, is not really that smart. It is when you create a summary from departments, after having talked to your co-workers, that you will be able to deduce what is truly going on and then send a summary report to your boss.  It’s not so much about getting data up to “the cloud” as it is in making things talk to each other. And as the article states, that requires a certain level of interoperability and transparency when it comes to capitalizing on the network effects. 

Even if you have APIs then what they can do is to shake hands. That’s it. It won’t make solutions or technologies interoperable. It won’t give them the same properties. It won’t let you do much, since there’s no common ground to stand on. It’s a little bit more complex than that, unfortunately .

In order to simplify the whole reasoning behind APIs, we broken it down into pieces here

The most important thing when discussing IoT is not to talk about technology at all. What are the goals, what’s the business all about, who should be in the meeting, roles, people, culture, existing processes and everything in between. Breaking projects down into pieces usually helps and it is always easier to prove value first, and then scale up. That’s the whole idea. To make it as easy with technology to just “Go-with IoT”

Go-IoT is on a mission to take buildings to the cloud in an easy, secure and scalable way, creating open future-proof ecosystems for smarter buildings and cities. The challenges often arise that system integrators / property owners and even users are locked in to the products and suppliers in the building. It is difficult to create customized solutions in other companies’ ecosystems and it is always costly and complicated. We solve this with a combination of hardware/software and cloud solutions as well as IoT consultancy and hardware development if needed. Modernizing buildings in a sustainable way has never been easier than it is now.

Contact: Nicolas Waern, CEO, mobile: +46 703 47 87 44, nicolas@Go-IoT.io

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