Internet of Things

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How Smart, Connected Products Are Transforming Companies

The evolution of products into intelligent, connected devices is revolutionizing business. In a November 2014 article, How Smart, Connected Products Are Transforming Competition, Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter and PTC president and CEO James Heppelmann looked at how this shift is changing the structure of industries and forcing firms to rethink their strategies. In this companion article, the authors look at the effects inside firms, examining the impact that smart, connected products have on operations and organizational structure. The new capabilities and vast quantities of data that smart, connected products offer are redefining the activities of the core functions of companies—sometimes radically. As software and cloud-based operating systems become integral to products, new product-development principles emerge, manufacturing components and processes change, and IT security becomes the job of every function. Companies need different skills and expertise, which creates new imperatives for HR. In the marketing function, the ability to track a product’s condition and use shifts the focus to maximizing the product’s value to the customer over time. Customer relationships become continuous and open-ended, service becomes more efficient and proactive, and new business models are enabled. The rich data on location and environment that products provide take logistics to a whole new level. Smart, connected products also alter interactions between functions, in ways that hold major implications for organizational structure. Intense, ongoing coordination becomes necessary across multiple functions, including design, operations, sales, service, and IT. Functional roles overlap and blur. Entirely new functions – unified data organizations, dev-ops, and customer success management- begin to emerge. What is under way is the most substantial change in the manufacturing firm since the Second Industrial Revolution, and the effects are spreading to other industries, like services, as well.

The Framework of Business Model in the Context of Industrial Internet of Things

The purpose of this article is an attempt to develop the concept of a business model dedicated to companies implementing technologies of the Industrial Internet of Things. The proposed concept has been developed to support traditional companies in the transition to the digital market. The study was based on the available literature on the impact the Industrial Internet of Things has on the economy and business models.

How Smart, Connected Products Are Transforming Competition

Information technology is revolutionizing products. Once composed solely of mechanical and electrical parts, products have become complex systems that combine hardware, sensors, data storage, microprocessors, software, and connectivity in myriad ways. These smart, connected products – made possible by vast improvements in processing power and device miniaturization and by the network benefits of ubiquitous wireless connectivity – have unleashed a new era of competition. Smart, connected products offer exponentially expanding opportunities for new functionality, far greater reliability, much higher product utilization, and capabilities that cut across and transcend traditional product boundaries. The changing nature of products is also disrupting value chains, forcing companies to rethink and retool nearly everything they do internally. Smart, connected products raise a broad set of new strategic choices for companies about how value is created and captured, how to work with traditional partners and what new partnerships will be required, and how to secure competitive advantage as the new capabilities reshape industry boundaries. For many firms, smart, connected products will force the fundamental question: What business am I in? This article provides a framework for developing strategy and achieving competitive advantage in a smart, connected world.

Enterprise Architecture for The Sensing Enterprise: A Research Framework

Internet of Things (IoT) will change many things, open up opportunities and enabling something that was not possible before. IoT provides sensing capability so that enterprise has better global context awareness. This is the Sensing Enterprise, an enterprise that obtains multidimensional information from physical or virtual objects in a connected environment. This sensing capability is expected to increase the capacity and capability of the enterprise in responding to sustainability challenges. This paper proposes a research framework as an alternative guide for researchers to produce various artifacts or theories to realize The Sensing Enterprise for sustainability achievement. The method used in developing the framework is modification/adaptation of transdisciplinary research model and information system research model. This framework has three main area consist of scientific base, enterprise architecture research process and sustainability achievement.

The industrial internet of things (IIoT): An analysis framework

Historically, Industrial Automation and Control Systems (IACS) were largely isolated from conventional digital networks such as enterprise ICT environments. Where connectivity was required, a zoned architecture was adopted, with firewalls and/or demilitarized zones used to protect the core control system components. The adoption and deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies is leading to architectural changes to IACS, including greater connectivity to industrial systems. This paper reviews what is meant by Industrial IoT (IIoT) and relationships to concepts such as cyber-physical systems and Industry 4.0. The paper develops a definition of IIoT and analyses related partial IoT taxonomies. It develops an analysis framework for IIoT that can be used to enumerate and characterise IIoT devices when studying system architectures and analysing security threats and vulnerabilities. The paper concludes by identifying some gaps in the literature.