The AndPlus Software Development Blog

IIoT is the Industrial Internet of Things: sensors and analytics devoted to monitoring, analyzing and managing industrial processes. It’s not limited to factories and transportation — think property and asset management, business process automation and more. It promises to be transformative, and the process of transformation has already begun: initially, we’ll see sharp improvements in the efficiency and reliability of structures and processes already in place, but within a decade we can expect to see industry operating primarily as an interlocking web of IIoT implementations.

Big data is the technology that underlies many of our most important advances. Enabled by machine learning and connectivity, large tranches of data can now be mined for insights rapidly and used to improve effectiveness, reduce waste or accelerate processes.

Technical debt affects almost every organization, cuts into productivity, drives down profits and inhibits efficiency. Worse, it represents an often unquantified and unconsidered risk that can cause outages, direct financial losses and reputation damage. Fortunately, it can be fixed — and usually money can be saved fixing it. In this post, we’ll introduce the concept of technical debt and consider what it looks like on the ground, as well as considering the forms it can take. Then we’ll talk about how to remedy it.

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.