Pundits are out there suggesting many things that
technology could offer, some even went little too far to advocate that
Information Technology (IT) will drive business growth and organizations should
be mindful of technologies. I even saw such assertions in some of the
prestigious Journals: wondering what led them to ignore the fundamentals that
business needs drive the IT goals, not other ways around.
Being mindful of technologies does not mean one
should diverge from basics of doing business. I would rather suggest that be
mindful of technology trends and solutions but understand what all these means
for advancing your business goals and objectives. One perspective would be to
look at technologies and the need for business solutions in a tiered format. At
the top of the tier is your business or users’ applications, at the middle is
Networks & IT and the bottom of the tier is IOT/M2M or similar endpoint
technologies (please refer to figure 1).
Figure 1. Tiered
architecture of business applications and technology solutions.
Let us dissect in each section of the tiered format
to understand, how to drive technologies to solve business problems and/or
advance business aspiration.
Users and Applications
In figure 1, I have depicted various industry
segments for users and application. Take a moment to think each of this
industry segments or for better, consider the industry segment of your
organization. Let’s say your industry segment is healthcare. Mapping your needs
to technology solutions in such industry begins with regulatory concerns, e.g.
HIPAA or PCI-DSS as appropriate. Compliance to HIPAA is useful for many
reasons, first it assures that products you and technologies you are about to
implement safeguards users identity and protect your entity against security
vulnerability associated with certain technologies such as Wireless transports.
However, please note that these regulatory measures may not suffice the need
for further security safeguards yet those instruments provide fundamental
guidance. Similarly, people in the banking industry must consider PCI-DSS
guidance for their IT deployment. Here is a list of application instruments,
please seek appropriate guidance of their industry specific use case: GLBA,
FFIEC, FISMA and NERC CIP etc. However, some regulatory standards such as SOX (though
created for financial audits in public corporations) have IT components for
audit specifically if you are using ERP systems. Other generic guidelines such
as ISO27001 are very useful for IT governance and security. It may also serve
as credential of doing IT services business for mission critical deployments.
More importantly, use of compliance instruments is a good step forward to safeguard
your IT investments and for good reasons. Irrespective of what vendors claim,
you may find surprises that are costly if not careful.
Secondly, drive your business applications from
strategic consideration. A fundamental principle of work would be creating a blueprint
of your “As is” and “To be” states. The “As is” condition
would be where you are in terms of technologies meeting your business needs:
your current state of IT. Conversely, “To be” would be the future technological
settings that meet or exceeds your long term business goals and objectives. The
gap analyses between “as is” and “to
be” are essential to forge ahead.
Third, determine your platform, security and service
availability needs. When you think of platform consider both internal business
automations and service to customers. For example, you may plan to implement
ERP systems to have better data visibility and integrate business processes to
better serve your customers. However, to do so you need to plan out carefully
since many disparate systems may not integrate well resulting costly
undertaking. Similar notion also applies to data harnessing, predictive
analytics and other platforms. Bottom-line, your IT platform must consider
business needs and mandates as it relates to IT solutions and must have
appropriate process, architecture and governance to serve organization’s
digital aspiration.
Networks & IT
As I emphasized earlier, IT deployment planning must
consider business aspiration both short term and long term. With adequate
planning and business foresights, investments in IT could transform your business
advancing competitive positions, innovation and better decision making. More
importantly, you should able to utilize tangible and intangible assets with greater
efficacy. Today, IT experts have the ability to choose from a variety of
technologies to build their IT infrastructure and solutions services. However,
some may have more hype associated with a technology or technological solutions
than substance. Let us take the example of Cloud. The good part about cloud
notion is that it allows you to virtualize your compute, storage and network
resources. You can choose to go public, have your own cloud infrastructure or choose
a combination thereof, “hybrid”. Selection, planning and risk tolerance are
important when considering various cloud solutions. If you are a small business
that lack adequate IT staffs, a better option would be to go with public cloud.
In contrast, a bigger enterprise must weigh cost vs long term benefit before
venturing to the path of pubic cloud. More importantly, some industry segments
may find public cloud solutions are quite cumbersome due to regulatory hassles
and the fact that day to day business is solely dependent on the third party
services.
In contrast, depending upon affordability a business
could take into consideration of deploying POD (Point of Delivery) base IT
Solutions. Today, you can design a POD using off the shelf hardware or buy a
POD from different vendors. A typical pod includes compute, storage and
networking gears and able to serve 200 to 300 users per pod. Additionally, you
could simply add another pod to serve more users as the business grows.
Figure 2. POD based IT solutions.
Interestingly, pod will make your future data center essentially
flat. Today, customer has choice either to use TOR (Top of the Rack) L2 switch
that offers 10/40GbE connectivity or low cost fabric extender to expand network
connectivity. As for virtualization,
depending upon your preference you may choose Vmware, Windows, Redhat and OpenStack
(open source) to manage cloud infrastructure. Each of these cloud management
software has modules to manage different aspects of your pod integrations:
compute, storage and networks. The cloud infrastructure management software also
offers tenant services for your internal of external clients so you could offer
and manage services according to their respective business needs.
These backend cloud infrastructure could serve as your mini
data center until you grow to a point of several pods to claim your install
base as a data center. Even for such growing needs, you could modularize and
have your modular data center. A number of vendor offer containerized data
center that are configured to need for plug n play. The containerized or
modular data center includes a number of pods within a container that is tested
for self-contained data center. Similar
to figure 2, you simply add modular data center through extended fabric interconnect
and the system is ready to serve.
IOT/M2M: Endpoint Technologies
Today, you can simply sense the physical world and
measure/view its attributes through digital platform. For business, it opens up
new possibilities from assets monitoring to behavioral marketing. In one of my
articles at linkedin, I mentioned the trend of smart convergence where networks
will be more intelligent. Today, IOT (Internet of Things)/M2M
(Machine-to-Machine) technologies are blending physical and digital world
delivering endpoint intelligence to networks making it possible for analytical
platforms to display meaningful information. The term IOT and M2M are often
used synonymously; however, IOT simply means sensors or things for which M2M is
the communications means between endpoint devices.
Figure 3. IOT/M2M communications.
There are numerous benefits of IOT/M2M solutions to business:
literally every segment of industry can be benefited from the implementation of
IOT/M2M solutions depending upon the business needs. Cognizant (2014) presented
a table depicting various benefits of IOT by industry sectors. This is not an
exhaustive list but may serve as the prelude to understand hidden possibilities
of smart connectivity through IOT/M2M.
Industry
|
Key Change
|
Potential Benefits
|
Automotive and
Transportation
|
Traffic monitoring including
driving behavior and vehicle diagnostics.
|
Improved
revenue stream, customer experience, reduce pollutions and safety
|
Healthcare
|
Remote monitoring
of patients, staffs and equipment status
|
Improve
productivity, healthcare decisions and efficiency of service.
|
Manufacturing
|
Quick
response, industrial safety, monitoring, efficiency, reliability and cost
savings.
|
Reduce
energy, carbon footprint, agility, flexibility and speed of delivery.
|
Retail
|
Connected supply
chain, effective inventory use and consumer behavioral data
|
Improve sales
through analyses of consumer behavioral data and better inventory control.
|
Supply Chain
|
Real
time tracking at all stages of manufacturing and supply.
|
Cost
savings, unnecessary service interruption.
|
Infrastructure
|
Smart control on
lighting, water, power, cooling, alarms and infrastructure health systems
|
Significant cost
savings, environmental benefit and safety.
|
Oil and Gas
|
Smart
connectivity, safety and monitoring
|
Reduce
production cost and safety.
|
Insurance
|
Pay as you go:
innovative services
|
Cost savings for
insurer and consumer.
|
Utilities
|
Smart
grids and meters
|
Responsive
and reliable service, effective monitoring and demand based pricing
structure.
|
However,
finding IOT/M2M solutions is not easy: though there are many smart things out
there not all can be connected and monitored due to lack of platforms
available. Hence, you need to rely on third party contractors to develop
platform for you at a price. Consecutively, some big corporations offer
industry specific solutions that may meet your business needs. Recently, few
startups started working on open platforms for customized IOT solutions but
nothing concrete is available till date. Bottom-line is that ubiquitous connectivity
presents tremendous opportunities for businesses but to reap benefits one must
ensure that such aspiration is aligned with business goals and objectives.
I have
presented a tiered framework for understanding how business goals and
objectives can drive technological solutions to advance your organizational
aspiration. If you find this article interesting and would like to transform
your business through what best
technology could offer, please feel free to contact me.
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