The Internet of Things (IoT) is shaking up a lot of industries. The potential it offers in terms of accumulating of data is huge, and the possibilities it creates via analytics are equally massive.

>See also: Is 2017 the year the Internet of Things will die?

But, many companies, while aware of the power of the IoT, do not implement an effective IoT strategy. Ben Boswell, area vice president, Europe, at World Wide Technology discusses with Information Age in the latest Innovation Spotlight episode, how to implement an effective IoT strategy in the enterprise.

He said that the aim of ‘leveraging IoT as a strategy is to improve business processes or to be able to get better, more actionable insights on their customers, on their employees and on different ways of driving up revenue, improving business processes and taking out cost.’

>See also: How the Internet of Things is impacting enterprise networks

It is a trend that is very much underway with a variety of industries adopting the IoT. ‘We’re seeing the organisations who are successful at pulling these different types of strategies together are stealing market advantage from firms who struggling to bring these types of initiatives to fruition,’ he continued.

But, how can you ensure a business’s IoT strategy is successful?

‘A successful IoT initiative,’ answered Boswell, ‘is where you bring together individuals from the business, individuals from IT and individuals from the day-to-day operations of the type of business process that you’re trying to solve.’

‘It’s not really a technology problem per se, because there are lots of technology groups that have matured very, very quickly to be leveraged in these types of initiatives.’

‘More, it is a conversation around what is the process that you are trying to improve. (And) it becomes a process and a data science challenge, because you want to work out how can we leverage information from different types of items or pieces of machinery, or endpoints and then be able to combine that all together to determine a specific pattern that the business can actually make a decision and action against.’

>See also: The role of the Internet of Things in developing smart cities

Holistic

‘What we find is that the organisations that do it well have got a very holistic view of what they are trying to achieve.’

‘And rather than thinking about products they are trying to buy, they’re looking at the problems they are trying to solve, and then they reverse into the architecture at the back end.’

‘We also see a lot of firms who had significant investment in IoT initiatives that haven’t really achieved the optimised process or the cost savings, or the increase in revenue because they haven’t done that first part first.’

>See also: 10 predictions for the Internet of Things and big data in 2017

‘Firms who can be able to leverage this type of technology quickly [and who] don’t make it to complicated are able to bring out – what we would call a minimal viable product to start off with – that solves a particular problem and then gently incrementally improve it.’

It is all about incremental gains, concluded Boswell.

The UK’s largest conference for tech leadership, Tech Leaders Summit, returns on 14 September with 40+ top execs signed up to speak about the challenges and opportunities surrounding the most disruptive innovations facing the enterprise today. Secure your place at this prestigious summit by registering here