Digital Business Enablement of IoT

In my last post we talked about Digital Leadership and I gave some simple glances on various top level roles, and what changes need to happen to master the digital age.

Let's pull out a specific Information & Communication Technology (ICT) Companies' and Communication Service Providers' (CSP) role: the CTO.

And let's put that role in context with a potential new business: IoT (M2M).

Leading analysts state that IoT is moving from vertically integrated solutions towards platforms, which provide horizontal capabilities that can be shared among vertical applications.
To enable that you need smarter networks that lay the foundation to enable that business, the same time moving to the network of the future that can shift costs in both infrastructure and operations. We all know what that means - leverages standard IT visualization technology, reduced cost and power, decrease time to market of new functionality, speed up delivery of new services, and many more .

So here the CTO is the Digital Enabler for new business, ie IoT or M2M.
Without the right network those great ideas of IoT will simply not fly – neither from a technology standpoint, nor from a business PoV.

Furthermore the CTO needs to be a strong communicator, working jointly and seemless with the CIO and (remembering my previous post) possibly the CDO (or CDIO? - joking...).
Why is that?
Because the enabling factors of IoT overlap with IT and overall Digital Transformation topics, such as declining airtime cost, lower provisioning, billing and support costs and low ARPU. It must be assured that threads like lack of end-to-end M2M solutions, unclear or insufficient defined business models, lack of adopted standards or security and privacy concerns will not kill the new business approach and just leave massive unprofitable investments.

CTO will enable the new Digital Telco as a seller of digital services, if it is ensured that his role and self-conception changes to an orchestrator of infrastructure, technology and business demands. And of course his – usually large – departments, teams and organization need to evolve and change simultaneously!

And don't forget that every change needs to be embedded in and follow your your “vision –> strategy – > program” to keep your Digital Business Transformation on track.

Digital Business Transformation is a complex challenge – planned and executed rightly you unleash huge business potential!

Have also a look on a very simplified chart of relevant areas in IoT and M2M for ICTs and CSPs and a nice article around the network IoT enabler Topic.

Building your own IoT network`'

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