IIoT strategy and management

More importantly, it's crucial you understand exactly what IIoT ("Industrial Internet of Things") is and the role it plays in business strategy and management. 

The “Industrial Internet of Things” is an innovation consisting of internet-connected machinery and advanced analytics designed to optimize operational excellence toward increased throughput, productivity and efficiency – a model certainly making a dent in the business world. But believe it or not, industrial manufacturing – such as with warehousing, shipyards and factory floors – is just one field benefiting from the technology.

Many others benefit from IIOT integration for good reason: with so many  divisions, many groups, many sectors, many buildings, many moving parts in the massive spaces in the enterprise, it really is no secret that even you can benefit from the innovation taking the corporate world by storm.

All the more reason why an IIoT project isn’t just a haphazard run-of-the-mill implementation ticket for your business. You’re looking at a wide scale of changes and integrations requiring your utmost observance and commitment; so before you seal the deal, ask yourself these key questions:

Often we don’t realize that when we implement the Internet of Things into our devices and structures, we’re essentially digitizing our business assets. From the get-go, that’s an instant advancement in business strategy – streamlining information, data and resources in a way that makes us that much more agile than our competitors.

So why not look at IIoT solutions as exactly that? – a business strategy. Consider it a project to enhance goal attainment in everything from marketing to sales to customer service. What strategic portfolio management can then specifically do is identify those continuous improvement measures at a much more granular level, and the ultimate result is improved efficiency clear across the board.

This cements the goal we all want with IIoT integration in that it’s not just a technological implementation but a valuable tool, allowing us to be aware of all the connections we have with our back-end IT systems.

Read more in our white paper on how IT portfolio management supports IIoT.

Seems like an unnecessary question to ask, but often there’s a disconnect between where industrial IoT fits in the IT. Traditionally our IT manages IT assets – applications, technologies, data, IT hardware – whereas IIoT is about operational technology (bluntly put, mechanics) with, of course, the distinction that this operational technology is actually communicating data.

Until the advent of IIoT, IT professionals at the corporate level and technical experts on the plant, facility or building level operated independently. Due to different backgrounds and job requirements, there were and still are cultural differences between those two groups, inevitably leading to tensions. In the past, such a conflict could be somewhat tolerated and caused relatively little harm. IIoT however makes effective cooperation of those two groups a necessity.

From an architectural standpoint, every single IoT end point is an application. For them to operate within the IIoT spectrum, they also need to be managed within a portfolio just the same as with our business applications, their supporting technologies and devices.

If not managed the same way, what happens when a piece of the IIoT puzzle falls off? The same thing happens as when a server goes down – a critical piece of the value stream goes missing. That’s something we don’t want when implementing IIoT throughout our entire organization.

In short, be sure your extended IIoT strategy and management footprint has visibility beyond that of the “normal” portfolio of assets, accounting for even the smallest issues causing disruption and disconnection.

The classic divisions between IT and OT are blurring nowadays. However, technical, organizational and human IT/OT convergence enablers are not enough to facilitate faster, successful rollouts of IIoT-based pilot solutions. What  is missing is the architectural foundation for IT/OT integration or convergence.

Moreover, such an architecture must also take the business side of the whole company into account. Therefore, the ultimate recommendation to expedite transformation progress is to jointly design business and IT/OT technology architecture. Such an architecture would be indispensable for evaluating and dealing with the complexity of the IT/OT foundation and would make it easier to deal with cybersecurity concerns at the corporate, business unit, plant and facility level.

You can certainly call that a bonus benefit for your business.

Find out more about the interaction of IT and OT in IIoT in this white paper.

Old habits die hard. Old methodologies and systems might die even harder. Sometimes it’s difficult thinking you have to overhaul an entire institution with an integration meant to change technology from the ground up, but the fact is edge systems do change at a high rate of speed. Regardless you have to keep up with those systems just as much as with your new devices.

IT portfolio management can provide alignment with those lifecycles across the back end, thoughtfully planning retirement of any edge systems and understanding the commercial implications of that. Preparing ahead of time makes it that much easier to implement something new. Additionally, you’ll end up understanding the consequences of backwards compatibility, recognizing the cost and development resources.

Be aware of cyber-security threats, of course, with edge systems being the center-point of vulnerability. You can then catalog that knowledge and be prepared in the event of a crisis with IT portfolio management measuring everything from usage to reach. This would then allow you to gauge the risk, creating mitigation strategies to force shutdowns if necessary.

Check out this short webinar on how to manage APIs as a portfolio.