The Industrial Internet of Things, or IIoT, marks a phase shift in management of physical productivity. It’s sometimes referred to as the fourth industrial revolution, or Industry 4.0 (in nomenclature that clearly owes much to web terminology).
The Industrial Internet of Things, or IIoT, marks a phase shift in management of physical productivity. It’s sometimes referred to as the fourth industrial revolution, or Industry 4.0 (in nomenclature that clearly owes much to web terminology).
Software launching requires strategy, but strategy alone is not enough. There must also be a system to match up strategy with day-to-day activity, managing development and launch as a project. This must be sufficiently adaptable as to function as a constantly-revised, living document, not a series of instructions that cease to be relevant as products evolve and plans change.
Minimum Viable Product, or MVP, is a way of launching a product without having to build every detail. Instead, the smallest (minimum) version of the product that will still work (viable) is built and launched, to provide the basis for future iteration and development. Customer feedback, business metrics and customer usage data are used to refine, improve or redesign, and extend the product, and the MVP approach can be used for new features as well as new products.
The process of taking an idea for a new tool or feature, or a solution to an existing problem, and turning it into something people actually want to use, is not always simple or easy. It’s easy to make mistakes in planning. So we need prototyping to test ideas. The trouble with prototypes is that they involve a trade-off between how useful they are and how costly and time-consuming they are, which means that in the past they’d often be used to validate designs rather than invalidate and iterate on them.
End users don’t care much about the technologies we use or the methodologies we rely on for development. But they do care about their experiences. Everyone knows this, and when it’s time to market products and services, we remember. But when we’re designing solutions, whether they’re consumer-oriented or B2B, it’s often forgotten.
The Internet of Things (IoT) goes a long way beyond consumer-level technology like smart toasters and doorbells. It’s being adopted across manufacturing, warehousing, supply chains and logistics worldwide. Good results often follow: 80% of IoT projects achieve better-than-expected results, according to Gartner. The same survey found that the involvement of the CIO was crucial to the success of IoT projects, not surprisingly.
