Analytics: Time to Pull Back the Curtain in the IoT

Back in my Voice over IP days, we used to make a big deal about billing. The expression we used to say was if you don’t bill for it, the VoIP is just a hobby. While we can make the case that WebRTC is proving that adage wrong, the better place to look at the misguided nature of that statement is in IoT Analytics.

When I look at our readership and conference delegates titles I see three very different sets of decisions makers.

The largest is the operational attendees, which is roughly half of the decision makers. As GE and the Industrial Internet Community have stated, 1 percent gains in efficiency equate to billions in savings. These folks have workflows and processes in mind when they listen to others’ implementations and ask themselves, “could their success be applied to my line of work?”

The easiest way for them to find out is to take advantage of analytics that can take them beyond their existing key service indicators and allow them to see if they can find the equivalent opportunities in the parsing of the process data elements.

Next comes the Information Technology team, which represents about a third of the decision makers. Normally they come from the business intelligence side of IT and they are looking at how to maximize the data to make it actionable.

Once again, Analytics comes into play here, often with the inclusion of unstructured data from peripheral resources to ascertain what predictive data can be applied to prevent work stoppage or other failures. Again: this is about efficiency.

What’s left of the decision makers is about 6 percent right now, but I expect there will be standouts in the other groups that belong to this fringe of people looking to make their IoT implementations into services.

Here, analytics start to make the old adage about billing look okay because this crowd is looking at the services that the things can provide. Analytics then is an indication of which operational processes can be changed into recurring services like maintenance, supply and logistics management, or operational support.

The indication is that we may think IoT decision makers are wizards, but it’s the analytics that drive the decisions when we pull back the curtain.