"A stone from another mountain is a stone that can be tapped." Learning and understanding Amazon's IoT path can lead to many insights. If a team is to succeed on a complex project, it needs to understand the steps and deliverables to achieve, the necessary resources and practical roles, and the risks and dependencies inherent in each.
In the case of Amazon, there are three key stages to building a successful IoT strategy. Many of the steps are actually taken simultaneously and can be approached in many different ways.
First, it is important to prioritize how to narrow down your options. While IoT offers a wide range of opportunities, success depends on understanding the market, and so-called opportunities need to be carefully evaluated and considered to cut in at the right places.
[Image upload failed... (image-5e32dc-1528106368588)]
Everything starts with an environmental analysis. A thorough understanding of the industry and competitors ー Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) is required, which will help us see the megatrends and real energy in the market. Technology has revolutionized virtually every industry, from film production to healthcare to retail and more, and no business has been left untouched.
What are people saying about IoT in our industry? Really understand what the worst user experiences are: where are customers frustrated? What data or events can improve the customer experience? What are the sensors or IoT opportunities that provide that data?
This should be a broader view of the industry, don't be limited by your own narrow vision, don't have a narrow view of your current business and don't let poverty limit your imagination. In some cases, this may involve doing business in one part of the value chain in order to understand the rest of the value chain and identify business opportunities accordingly.
Create a map of where other solution providers are in their domain space, have a clear understanding of development, what exactly everyone does, who their key customers are, and their IoT usage. Interviews help to understand the needs of the customer, and in turn test whether those needs have been met in an intelligent way, and whether there are gaps.
Document specific customer needs and identify friction points that prospective customers are currently experiencing. Following the desired outcome from the start can help define details and priorities that might otherwise be overestimated or ignored.
Crafting a strong customer persona is hard work, and may require starting over several times to get it right. The biggest mistake that can be made in all of this is to show up rather than work, and not to worry about the beautiful camouflage of these deliverables unless it's already really being done. Worry about your own insights, the state of the conversation with the client, and having to validate the findings with others who can bring insight and challenge to the work.
No measurement, no management, need to devise ways to evaluate the results of the work.
This includes figuring out the feasibility and transition points of the program, and how it will relate to the rest of the company's strategy. Sometimes, especially if the organization is new to the connected device space, the success of a project should be measured in terms of what can be learned from the project, rather than success in the traditional sense. It may be possible to implement some early IoT programs purely for the sake of gaining experience, without the expected ROI.
Once all of this analysis is out of the way, it's time to share what was learned with the rest of the team. Articulate these lessons by modeling the flywheel of the business system and the business model.
Once the strategic idea and why it needs to be realized is clear, an IoT roadmap is needed, which helps with planning and communication, clarifying what is already in the build process and how they will work.
When creating a roadmap, Amazon's favorite strategy is to ーー think big and start small.
In other words, have a big vision, but really just take a small gamble and test your ideas. This could include creating a prototype, a minimum viable product or a project developed with existing customers and partners***.
There are four ways to clearly articulate a roadmap:
The final step is to identify and map the requirements for the IoT ーー define those technical capabilities that are needed to enable the solution to succeed. Requirements can be documented using many different types of approaches, such as use cases, user stories, processes, personas, architectural specifications, and so on. Regardless of the approach, questions about insight (data and events), analytics and recommendations, performance, environment, operations, cost, and so on need to be answered.
With respect to insight, it may be important to answer questions such as:
With respect to analysis and recommendations, requirements questions might include the following:
With respect to performance questions might include the following:
Requirements questions with respect to environment and operations might include the following:
Cost questions might include the following:
When it comes to developing a plan, while IoT can provide a key piece of the puzzle, it is not a voucher. Simply creating an IoT solution is generally not successful. However, success is more likely when focused on delivering greater value to customers through newer or innovative products and services, improving company operations or creating new or more efficient business models.
1) /blog/develop-iot-strategy/
2) putting.com/embedded-computing-design/putting-the-end-first-of-the-amazon-way-on-iot
< p> 3) /Amazon-Way-IoT-Principles-Strategies-ebook