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IoT and transforming the digital enterprise

As IoT becomes integral to engineering and heavy industry, Michael Segal, the director of marketing at Netscout, discusses the digital transformation experienced by companies in these sectors and how the CIO will lead the transformation and ensure business assurance.

There’s no escaping the IoT revolution. Connected devices are impacting practically every sector of business, from smart metering to driverless cars and smart cities. It won’t be long until IoT has touched all aspects of the enterprise, especially the engineering and heavy industry sectors. We will soon see entirely new IT infrastructure emerge to support IoT applications and mission critical systems. This digital transformation will be rapid and will have far-reaching implications for the companies operating in this space. Yet it will also create additional operational complexity, and it will be the CIO’s role to guide them through this period of transition and lay the foundations of a successful business, driven by IoT.

The speed of change in business has been immense over the last few years, led by the wealth of data enterprises now have access to. This has led to a period of digital transformation, supporting the shift from physical to digital assets and the adoption of new data-driven business models. Countless internet brands – including Amazon, Netflix, AirBnB and Uber – have already redefined business models in their respective industries. Yet this model is not easily adopted by a large construction company or manufacturing giant that’s dependent on manpower and heavy machinery. These types of organisations are being revolutionised by the IoT, or rather the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).

Accenture estimates IIoT will add $14.2tn to the global economy over the next decade, largely led by the need for industrial sectors to take advantage of the latest in automation and robotics to drive efficiencies, increase productivity, and improve worker safety. New and advanced operational capabilities will extend the life of machinery, which will become more and more complex over time, while also enabling efficient energy usage. One thing is clear – no matter what status or level of IoT adoption, companies in industrial sectors cannot afford disruptions to service delivery or operational failures that impact worker safety.

The CIO gets serious about IoT
However, IoT-led or otherwise, enterprises need to be aware that every system upgrade, new connection, or new third party application added to existing IT infrastructure increases service delivery complexity, infrastructure scale, and adds to corporate risk. Combined, these changes could have serious implications to the successful running of the business. It’s down to the CIO, therefore, to manage the transition, maintain a sense of order, and lay the foundations for the future. The CIO is best placed to supervise the digital transformation strategy due to their understanding of IT infrastructure and how it can evolve to better serve the business. That said, the CIO will still have to deal with new pressures placed upon them and will find themselves pulled in all sorts of directions.

In the industrial space, the pressures will come from engineering and construction teams looking to access new automated systems and IoT applications. They will also be under pressure to adopt new SaaS based platforms to support CRM, ERP, supply chain management and other enterprise functions. The CIO needs to pull together all the disparate initiatives that slip under the radar, bypassing corporate IT, to lead a consolidated and structured DX programme. They should also have the power to veto initiatives that do not comply with the overall corporate IT quality assurance strategy.

This is vital because, within the space of a few years, IoT and IIoT networks will become large, complex IT infrastructures, supporting mission critical systems and billions of devices. Companies cannot afford failures or incidents that will impact communications, processes, productivity or the security of workers. What’s more, many of these IoT connections generated by sensors, devices and machines will be supporting mission critical systems – everything from automated production lines to air conditioning and heating units.

Time to get real about IT governance
Taking all of this into account, the CIO leadership role becomes clear. Someone has to oversee this entire process; someone has to make the right decisions about what direction the organisation should take to fulfil its new digital objectives. But they can only do this effectively if they have a real-time and historic view of business services and their infrastructure. This is only possible through continuous monitoring of all aspects of IT across the estate, which will spot and isolate any anomalies that may present a hindrance to business performance. This aspect of business assurance, which encompasses both service performance and security management, is bolstered by real-time data that translates into actionable insight, which is of huge strategic value to the enterprise both in terms of productivity and revenue. Monitoring and data analysis have to be conducted in real-time. This is vital when you consider the need to identify IoT-based threats quickly in order to resolve service performance issues and neutralise network incursions.