Companies should first examine the usefulness of the Internet of Things (IoT) within their organisation and not put sensors in everything, because it is the current trend. That’s what Dirk Didascalou, vice president IoT at Amazon Web Services (AWS) thinks.
Sometimes we’re a little buzzword driven: IoT will solve all my problems or artificial intelligence (AI) will solve all my problems. Now we have the new buzzword, AIoT, a combination of AI and IoT. That’s why we usually start all our conversations with the question: if you would know the status of all assets, all assets, in your company and you could reason on top of that knowledge. What problems would you solve and why?, says Didascalou in a reaction to ZDnet.
Identify problems first
According to Didascalou, companies should also put more emphasis on questions such as: what is complicated, where does the company lose money and what is a headache file? Once we understand what really big business issues are for our customers, we work from there to find out what we can do with IoT technology to resolve those issues, said Vice President IoT. For example, companies should ask factory employees what they encounter every day, what they actually know about the product itself or why end users are not satisfied with the product. Didascalou: The moment you know what the problem is, it’s already half the success.
Value in use
Didascalou believes that this is the only way in which IoT delivers real business value. As an example, he mentions that companies should investigate whether it is really necessary to equip a water bottle with a sensor to measure how much water is left over. According to him, such examples have never been put into production. There would simply never have been a reason to do so.
The VP therefore concludes that IoT is in principle valuable in two areas: it enables organisations to create products and services that were previously impossible, and the technology gives companies the opportunity to do what they were already doing better.
Vantage Power
He briefly describes a case about the UK-based company, Vantage Power. The company’s CEO, Alexander Schey, is said to have set himself the goal of reducing the number of people with a respiratory disorder. Vantage Power designs and manufactures drive technology for electrification and connectivity for heavy vehicles. It provided the red buses in London with electric engines, which broke down one by one in the course of time. In order to identify the problem, AWS helped by first investigating how the company worked. Didascalou would have been so impressed by the fact that the company had stored a billion data points. All measurement data from all batteries were collected. It’s amazing, they can predict a month in advance if a small cell in one of their batteries will fail and then they can arrange preventive maintenance, says Didascalou.
Related: Open source becomes the key to IoT
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