Venkatesh Upadrista - IoT Standards with Blockchain: Enterprise Methodology for Internet of Things

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Digital transformation is the transformation of business and organizational activities, processes, competencies, and models to fully leverage the opportunities of a mix of digital technologies and their accelerating impact across industries in a strategic and prioritized way, with present and future shifts in mind.

Digital transformation is not about technology, but it is a way for enterprises to do business and operations differently to remain competitive and be disruptive in their marketspace. To achieve this change, technology is utilized. Being digital requires enterprises to be open to reexamining their entire way of doing business and understanding where the new frontiers of value are and how technology can play a key role in bringing this value faster. In practice, end-to-end customer experience optimization, operational flexibility, and innovation are key drivers and goals of digital transformation, along with the development of new revenue sources and information-powered ecosystems of value, leading to business transformation and new forms of digital processes.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the most widely spoken digital technologies that promises a lot of benefits to enterprises. IoT is all about connecting devices and factory equipment over the Internet. In other words, it is the convergence between Operational Technology (OT) and Information Technology (IT).

OT is about (heavy) machineries, safety of people, and so on. There is almost zero tolerance toward downtime, errors, and safety. This is one of the core reasons why OT has always operated in a highly risk-averse manner. Another aspect of OT is that the machineries deployed at the factories cannot be upgraded or replaced at the same pace as IT systems, and these are the ones that will remain for years once purchased. This becomes a hurdle to deploy new innovative ideas on these machineries to make them more efficient. From a people perspective, these two departments (IT and OT) have traditionally and culturally not spent a lot of time together. A typical IT department is measured on system uptime, availability of applications and IT infrastructure, number of security breaches, and reducing costs of IT. On the other hand, the OT department constitutes of the factory managers, production managers, and even agriculture farmers. These are the folks who produce food, control the oil and gas process, or pump oil from the ground. An OT department is measured on entirely different success criteria, such as what is the yield of the crop, how much water is being used to create that yield, what is the production uptime of the factory, and so on.

IT and OT departments are two different worlds, and each department is measured very different on success. With IoT, both these departments need to come together, and this is where connecting people becomes equally important along with connecting things. Successful IoT use cases have provided several benefits to enterprises such as opening up new business opportunities and increased revenue along with powering enterprises with an ability to perform better operations and become more productive, more protected, and more profitable. A classic example is the smart fridge. Using IoT, a fridge could tell us it was out of milk, text us if its internal camera saw there was no milk left, or that the carton was past its expiry date. The benefits of IoT to enterprises are enormous if applied carefully, and this is one of the reasons why IoT has become so popular. However, IoT is in a very early stage of maturity, and several guidelines and ways of working are still being defined to bring standardization in IoT projects.

Though IoT is a relatively new area for many enterprises, this cannot stop us on our journey toward excellence with IoT. The good news is that there are several guidelines, mature practices, tools, and technologies that have already been developed, and by carefully choosing the right ones, enterprises can achieve success with IoT. This book is one such step toward standardizing an end-to-end IoT implementation approach and is based on several best practices and successes in IoT that have been achieved in the past across multiple industries.

This book defines an enterprise digital transformation framework for IoT, called IoT Standards, that will enable enterprises to do business better and achieve operational benefits using IoT.

This book is intended for all chief executives, technology leaders, and business leaders who intend to successfully embark on an IoT-led digital transformation journey with business as the core driver for the transformation for their enterprise.

This book is an outcome of multiple successful engagements in IoT which I have led during the last several years. Finally, this book is also an outcome of my learnings and those of my colleagues on failed IoT projects a combination which had helped me to define a solid methodology to execute large-scale enterprise-level IoT use case implementation.

Before officially releasing this methodology into the market, IoT Standards were implemented at several organizations. The methodology has demonstrated superior benefits when compared to any other guidance available in the industry today. There are several case studies described in the book, all of which are from experiences with real companies, but their names have been changed to disguise their identity.