“What’s critical to understand about the IoT is the notion that everything happens somewhere. You cannot do the Internet of Things or the Industrial Internet of Things without real-time location awareness. It’s not possible.

That’s the missing piece that will catalyse growth,” says Greg Van den Heuvel, Chief Operating Officer at Pitney Bowes Software. “However, consumers won’t opt in for this type of data collection if businesses can’t return value. That’s why location-based data, aligned with data analytics, is critical when it comes to businesses taking advantage of the IoT.”

A Forbes/Pitney Bowes Report identifies critical IoT success factors.

  • Be an early adopter- the early bird catches the worm
  • IoT generated data a treasure trove of valuable business insights
  • Aim for significant productivity gains and costs savings 
  • Embed analytics in the IoT platform
  • Organisations need to become analytics driven
  • Senior leaders must take a long term approach

When it comes to aligning & analysing location and enterprise IoT data there are various options.

  1. Take the traditional GIS/Mapping/Location approach of traditional vendors like Pitney Bowes, ESRI
  2. Embed IoT analytics in workflows and enterprise apps from vendors like Logi Analytics and CARTO
  3. Think the big competitive differentiation picture - plan this in the context of digital transformation with platforms like 360Globalnet

Digital platforms tackle both the IoT and digital transformation challenges facing organisations that cannot afford to replace or re-engineer core systems of record. 

These platforms offer the best of both worlds; digitally transform:-

  • the customer journey
  • the supply chain delivery of product and service
  • big data analytics from the new platform and the core systems which are linked through a secure and unique URL.

In the context of insurance and the IoT you can plan for:-

  • Smart homes with planned, & emergency preventative maintenance enabled by IoT
  • Healthcare exploiting wearables, video and sensors in rooms
  • Healthcare triaging nursing homes, sheltered housing, GP/Ambulance/Hospital
  • Connected pets
  • Connected people on the move- device and digital risk management
  • Connected supply chain partners

IoT is important- it is the key to the closer and personalised engagement between service provider and customer. IoT should not, however, be considered in yet another silo. It is the connected infrastructure of the complete customer life-cycle and should be planned for and implemented in that way for optimal effect.