Digitisation has been identified across every industry as both a major opportunity and a significant threat. There can be little doubt that some of today’s digital success stories have come at the expense of traditional counterparts.
And it would be no understatement to say that the Internet of Things has the power to revolutionise every business.
IoT is about the evolution of a new ecosystem – one that brings together new disciplines, including connected devices, data analytics, automation and artificial intelligence amongst them.
It’s an ecosystem that will not only impact your products and services, but your staff too, bringing new skills and opportunities.
We are barely scratching the surface of what is possible, but for businesses, the priority is to identify these first opportunities, and gaining a foothold at the forefront of this change.
For nearly 20 years, scientists and beekeepers have been barcoding bees, allowing them to track the movements of individual insects.
The results have been used from everything to assessing the impact of pesticides to tracking the spread of diseases which have decimated the bee population worldwide. It has even led to the discovery of new species.
At the centre of IoT sits data: historical data sources; new data sources; open and transparent data; gaining data in realtime; advanced analysis of data; predictive data modelling.
More and more data is available to inform strategy and decision making if – and only if – it can be turned into intelligence.
In fact, not all data is equal and deciding which data you need to solve your problem is essential to informing an IoT strategy.
We can know more than ever before about a device or the environment in which it has been placed, but it isn’t always cheap or easy to connect a device, so the first step is to understand the potential value of the data that will be provided
Local councils are placing sensors underneath bridges to monitor water levels and provide early flood alerts not only to the local area but downstream too.
Deployment of an IoT strategy is not a traditional project with a clear end. Instead it will be about incremental changes, a series of journeys that you take as you introduce new infrastructure, measurement and analysis. This can be problematic for a business focused on immediate and tangible ROI. In the early stages of IoT, when considering the cost of deploying a connected device, if the business case is made in isolation it will often make the opportunity unviable.
Yet if the same connectivity asset could be used for multiple devices – immediately or in the future – the decision to invest becomes much more sound.
New customers, new markets, new business models – ultimately IoT has the capability to transform your business. At Capita, we can help you begin that journey.
Housing Associations across the UK are using IoT to provide non-intrusive support to vulnerable tenants. Sensors monitoring decibels, heat and movement have been deployed, allowing support teams to spot unusual behaviour and quickly identify tenants in need without infringing their privacy.
In one case, an elderly patient who had fallen in the night was identified when there was no noise in the kitchen at 6am – his usual breakfast time.