Digitisation and internet of things: How to make your network future-ready By Rob Merkwitza Managing Director RIoT Solutions
D
igitisation and Internet of Things are two buzz words of the current technological age that are
often used these days in the media, boardrooms and strategy discussions within every organisation. But are they interchangeable or is there a difference between the two notions? Digitisation by nature implies a market transition or a different approach to a market, enabling an organisation to improve an outcome in either productivity, process, lowering costs, accessing an adjacent market, improving client or staff experience or leveraging information from digital assets. Internet of Things (IoT) on the other hand, is more about devices and sensors that can assist in the digitisation of an organisation such as connecting people, data, process, and things together. Each in their own right is great but it’s not as powerful as when they are combined and applied together. For example, connecting people, data, and devices all at the same time can significantly change a process. And therefore, we often see the two terms used together in the same language. In short ‘digitisation’ is about the outcome and the ‘IoT’ is an enabler to the outcome. This is an important point as we find that organisations often see the IoT being possible through the connection of ‘widgets’ or technology in a
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bespoke fashion for a specific requirement or promise of an improved value. What needs to be leveraged is the existing assets such as the network, both Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT). The fact is that we are seeing more and more companies being sold on the hype that amazing digitisation outcomes will only occur when organisations dream and add new shiny devices to their networks. The temptation is there to make knee jerk decisions on the myriad of IoT solutions and platforms. However, this can and will prove difficult when looking to scale, manage, and secure additional solutions. There is an increasing trend in the process organisations are taking whereby large consulting firms are engaged to document a digital vision of what the future might look like. This leads to an explorative exercise through a proof-of-concept project of a one-dimensional solution that may promise significant digital outcomes such as water meters, digital lighting, smart bins, parking etc. It’s common that they will require new infrastructure or even non-standard communications that often cannot be leveraged for the next digital project as it was standalone or proprietary. This impacts overall security and the cost to maintain due to the many 1000’s of new vendor devices on the network and making sense of the data across disparate platforms. And unfortunately, cyber security is often an