A good friend was telling me that the stats on M2M living up to its potential is a ghastly number below 40 percent The problem is that the integration is not truly understood and the deployments often happen without proper IT prototyping. In other words it’s a stakeholders issue.
Its somewhat understandable since M2M when deployed in the enterprise is such a cross-functional experience. Here are some of the places where problems can occur:
Operational Obstacles. The attaching of sensors and use of readers and other gathering data tools, often represents a change in the job flow. This can cause some resistance if the measurements for job success are slowed by the addition of this work or can be an issue of poor understanding of scope and the team applies the solution incorrectly.
Thresholds and Monitoring. It’s often the case that the general vision of what can be done with M2M is not connected to the metrics available. In other words, the sensors have been added without a sense of what will come about in the way of action. This is a situation where workflows have not been scoped out properly and often is the case where the needed metrics are available, but weren’t incorporated in the scope of work.
Platform Envy. When IT first started networking, Network Operation Centers [NOCs] became all the rage. Companies bought Timeplex, Tivoli, and a host of other tools and made a center of excellence around these NOCs. The problem was that the fiefdom became the story more than the work, which much of the way M2M deployments work, the element manager NOC tendency is there to monitor it because we can as opposed to what we need. So the ROI gets lost because the measurement is no longer the value to cost reduction and productivity.
Scope Creep. As a large telco executive said to his IT partner, no one ever tells their integrator nice job. That’s because the mission always expands and gets bogged down in new requirements that often kick out the on time, on budget and to specification.
So its important that the learning curve be changed for M2M solutions and that agile development and prototyping that is based on work scenarios are thoroughly tested before the project starts. As the new M2M evolution Magazine launches, I intend to bring some of the focus to how project management and IT can get us to a productivity number that makes the enterprise want to continue integrating more solutions.
We certainly have enough things to monitor, now lets get IT right.
Edited by
Stefanie Mosca
