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How To Scale IoT Projects

Consider These Five Building Blocks In An Effective Scaling Strategy

Congratulations! You’ve made it to the next level in the IoT sphere; growing and scaling your IoT projects. Now, as much as we’d like to gamify the whole process, we, unfortunately, need to take a closer and more serious look at the overall flexibilities and possibilities of significant undertakings.

Initiating an IoT plan is a daunting task, to begin with, and growing that original project involves a lot more than simply adding in a few hundred, or thousand more IoT devices. Even if it does include scaling your devices, that in itself is a huge task, and no stone should be left unturned.

Now that you’ve successfully developed an IoT proof of concept, you see exact value in your execution… it’s time to move up in the world. It’s important to remember that you’re trying to either improve operational effectiveness, decrease costs or increase productivity at the end of the day. But your business won’t run unless you have happy customers, so focusing on your product delivery over how to grow your IoT project should be at the crux of this development.

5 Points To Consider When Scaling Your IoT Project

1. Define Business Goals

As with any business project, the more defined and transparent you are on your project goals, the less likely it will fail or move in the wrong direction. What’s excellent about scaling your IoT project is that you’re moving from proof of concept to proof of value; you’ve already proven that IoT can be a success in your company.

Reflecting on your first IoT initiation will give you plenty to think about; what went wrong, what could be improved upon, and how long it takes to get work done. Creating a clear roadmap will ensure you don’t stray from your goals and increase the chances of providing value both quickly and incrementally to your processes and customers.

2. Consider The Areas You Will Be Scaling

• More IoT projects in different use cases: take what you know from previous IoT developments and the abilities to grow in new areas of your organisation. What architecture can be transferred across? What teams do you need to bring in to grow?

• Developing each IoT project from the concept to the full development: Laying down the foundations for each project, from data management, security and analytics, to the outcomes, will ensure you follow the right path.

• Gaining more value from the IoT project: What are you currently drawing from, and how can that be improved? Adding more devices to your platform will only prove fruitful if the data provided will help you make better business decisions.

3. Scalable data management

As well as aiding better decisions, the device data also needs to be organised in an infrastructure that can support the data in the first place. Otherwise, your system will not operate effectively because the data isn’t cleaned correctly, or the system becomes overloaded. Is the information that the devices provide beneficial enough, or do they need to go through further processing? They might even be slow at bringing it through the system, in which case the overall network will need to be assessed.

4. Asynchronous Data Processing

Asynchronous data processing will be a crucial moving cog in your IoT system to ensure end-users can generate meaningful reports on the fly without having to wait for the computer to do intensive task management. To prevent the user from waiting around for their timely reports to generate, the backend will deploy web workers to do this heavy work for them, ensuring swift outputs and quicker decision making.

5. Understand the Project Leverage Across Departments

Departments will have a variety of tools that they’ll want to utilise this new information and be at different stages of IoT implementation. Understand how your IoT project will impact each department, as well as their levels of maturity and how they will react and use this new information will ensure everyone is on board and reap the full benefits of its outcomes.

It will also save you time as you understand what legacy systems may need extra time to onboard and collaborate with new data management strategies.

When you decide to scale up your IoT project, it can be an exciting time to put all the lessons you’ve learned into practise straight away. But as always, with new growth comes new expectations and the urge to speed up the process. Leaning on a reliable partner who can guide you through the possible pitfalls and motions will ensure you don’t accelerate too quickly, only to find you’ve focused on the wrong business lines. If you’d like to scale up for success, please get in touch with us today.