IoT promises to unburden people of tasks through automation, freeing them up for higher level work that can move a business forward. We have connected devices that can monitor inventory, control environmental conditions, mitigate security risks, handle compliance and much more. There is no doubt that automating devices can relieve people of many tedious tasks, but does this kind of automation provide real worth to a business? Does it provide significant increases in productivity, profitability or organizational evolution?
The answer is no—not on its own.
For an IoT network to provide high-level worth, it needs to provide insights that can inform the way the business works. The real promise of IoT is its ability to enable not just task automation, but business process automation.
Whether a company adds a single IoT device, 1,000 devices or 10,000,000 devices, it can automate that number of tasks. But when a company implements business process automation, it streamlines all tasks into the bigger picture of the business operations as a whole.
Why is that important?
Business process automation combines task automation with meaningful data that is delivered and can be acted upon immediately. When a CFO has line-of-sight across all automated devices, tasks, rate plans and carriers, there is an entirely new level of fiscal control. When a CIO can see a complete picture of devices, downtime and data across carriers, they can make better decisions about what to do with networks and devices. When a CEO and COO can immediately view big picture metrics that illustrate efficiency by market sector and ROI, they can make real-time, data-informed decisions about how to steer the business toward growth.
Why are companies not achieving this?
The reason that most companies haven’t reached their full potential with IoT isn’t because the world lacks a single-source device or carrier solution. It’s because the company lacks a single view of all connected devices across sources regardless of carriers or networks. It isn’t the device or carrier that matters, it is having a view of the complete ecosystem that matters.
Business process automation isn’t a huge investment, either. The most valuable process refinement happens in increments, not in giant systems upgrades. The power behind this information is that even the tiniest optimizations become entirely possible and repeatable on a daily basis. A small tweak on a global scale, across hundreds or thousands of connected devices, makes a massive difference to operating budgets and productivity. It is these micro adjustments that can unlock trapped value within the business, without changing a single device or carrier.
When it comes to IoT, an organization is either in the business of automating tasks, in which case they have a long, expensive path ahead; or they are in the business of automating processes, in which case they will continually compound profitability through constant data-driven decision making.
In the competitive IoT marketplace, true business process automation can only be enabled with an agnostic solution—one that gives real-time insights into devices, tasks, efficiency, downtime and anomalies. Without such a tool, IoT will remain something that is just another cost of doing business in the digital world.
We at Simetric can help you achieve business process automation. You can turn it on and start seeing results immediately. We deliver value on day one. Let us show you what you’re missing.