How to get started with Product IoT Transformation?

Identify the skills mix you need in IT

This means all stakeholders, from sales employees to the C-suite and everyone in between. When it comes to a dproduct IoT transformation – something that will affect the entire organization – you need all the support you can get in order for it to become a success.

Top management must ask themselves who are the people we need? What skill sets do we need to develop? It’s incredibly important to identify not just capabilities but competencies. On the capabilities front, of course, your organization needs data scientists, full-stack developers, user experience experts, and so forth.

Enterprises need to retool their IT department to move away from some of the commodity skills to more forward-looking capabilities that align with the company strategy. In addition, there is an ongoing need to build competencies that augment your skills, especially around business acumen. Your team may have the best UX person around, but if they aren’t competent with your business acumen, you won’t be successful.

Always start simple and small. Look at the areas of your product that could do with a digital makeover (product maintenance, product authetnication, product info, online re-purchase, promotion and so on). Talk about this with your employees and the members of the C-suite. Ask them what they think should be a priority.

No matter how little the transformation is, it is likely that it includes changing or breaking processes that have been in place and have worked well at some point, changing how stakeholders interact with their clients, even changing their roles. Finding ways of bringing the entire group on the same journey through major disruption is critical. Be sure to identify both obvious and non-obvious stakeholder groups. Even if it does not seem so from the outset, they are very important to the success of your digital transformation initiative.

Test it, Test it, Test it!

To get stakeholder buy-in, take the time to run proofs-of-concept and pilots before moving forward with any solid plan. If the technology you’re deploying is new to your business, it is always more difficult to anticipate how things will work. Be realistic up-front and build many stakeholder checkpoints into the plan to ensure transparent progress is being made. This will help ensure your stakeholders are actually ready for the journey, while your organization, team, and partners are learning how to implement effectively and successfully.

This will undoubtedly result in a long list of ideas. Prioritize them based on impact and effort. The former meaning the business impact of digitalizing the ideas and the latter meaning the time and money it would take to actually get the ideas to go digital.

Many companies are chasing digital products and offerings that don’t add business value at the end of the day – not unlike that fancy fondue set collecting dust on top of your fridge.

Start with the ideas that are high impact and low effort. They will help you build the business case for making an IoT transformation and get you going quickly.

To succeeded, you must link innovation to a big-picture vision, make experimenting easy for employees, and share responsibilities among everyone with a stake in the innovation.

Trying and implementing digital technologies is great, but doesn’t make much business sense if we don’t look at their results. Hence we need to critically assess what works and what doesn’t.

After all, the only way for us to advance is to solve actual problems with technological solutions that truly solve these problems.

Master risk management

Everything about digital transformation and disruptive business models seems to go against the traditional IT concepts of risk containment and controls. Digital transformation is about moving fast, challenging the status quo, and developing and scaling new technologies and operational mindsets.

Mangement who have mastered this aspect of disruptive change are more likely to be managing a successful transformation program

Digital technology alone is not enough for a product IoT transformation. Let alone a digital transformation of an entire organization. It’s just as much – perhaps even more – about the mindset of everyone involved. And that has everything to do with your company culture.

From the new people you hire, via your current workforce all the way up to the C-level, a digital mindset – in the broadest sense of the word – is essential for a successful transformation.

Culture change is the hardest part of digital transformation

Without addressing culture, transformation will probably fail. At its heart, this is a people challenge. Do you have the right culture to adopt change? To accept risk and tolerate failure? To embrace new ways of doing things, like new ways of working or new technologies? To accept speed over perfection for some (not all) initiatives? Overlooking cultural change is the biggest mistake in a digital transformation.