Five Eye-Openers That Make Your IoT Project A Success

IoT is central to organizations that want to collect and process data, so they uncover business insights. It presents a huge opportunity for organizations across many sectors, from retail, manufacturing, to logistics, just to name a few. However, even with the best proposal in place, and all the budget in the world, success with your IoT project isn’t guaranteed. In this blog, CTO Sam Vanhoutte will explain the five major reasons IoT projects fail – and how you can make sure yours don’t.

1. Get full support

IoT projects still often start on an ‘island’ in the IT or innovation department of a company. Without support from management and the entire company, they’re doomed to fail. So try out your ideas in all departments of your company right away, in sales and marketing too, for example.

2. Provide open applications

When you use an IoT platform or put an IoT application on the market yourself, you must ensure that the application is open to be linked to and integrated with custom work. To realize this, it’s crucial to open up and provide the data. The openness of applications demands due attention. Customers and suppliers often can’t access their own data, leaving them frustrated because they wish to see them and do something with them. Be sure that your platform is open from the beginning.

Can pitfalls be avoided? Absolutely. By starting the project with design thinking. Think of your users right away, and build a minimum viable product that works fully, but doesn’t yet have all the functionalities. This way your customers and suppliers can already use it. In the meantime, you continue to gradually expand your application until it has all the functionalities you want.

3. Good connection is a necessity

Connectivity of IoT devices is also underestimated. For example, with Edge technology, you achieve the necessary connectivity, depending on your needs. With IoT SIM cards, you use the 3G, 4G and soon also 5G network to guarantee fast connections.

4. Ensure that your IoT devices stay secure

The security of an IoT application sometimes ends up largely unattended. Wrongly, of course. Once your device is with your users, you can no longer access it. You don’t want to visit all the users to solve their security problems. Test the security of your software in advance and make sure you can update your device remotely.

5. Don’t start too big

Companies still often start too big and then can’t achieve what they want. This is the problem of over engineering. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with thinking big, but start small. Then you’ll have an application fairly quickly that already has value for your customers. You can continue to build on that.

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Thanks for reading!
– Sam

This article was originally published on the Proximus news blog section.