IoT-C: the Under-served Universe

With all the fuss about IoT (Internet of Things, if you are keeping score), consumer-oriented devices are getting a lot of pampering. Indeed, IoT promises to make the objects in our world 'aware' of us and each other, in fact almost sentient.

However, there is a community of 'things' that continues to be under-served. These entities are awaiting the breath of life, as it were. These are the entities in the corporate world - not the devices and sensors, but intangible things that, while they have a life of their own, are not sentient. At least not yet.

What would these entities be? Think of all the things that companies deal with: projects, strategies, goals, services, technologies, applications, capabilities, metrics, architectures, designs, knowledge artifacts, and so on.

This corporate ecosystem also includes things that are a bit more substantial, such as people, customers, suppliers, partners, stakeholders, physical products, regions, and lines of business.

Each of these arguably more substantial entities have their intangible counterparts, which are abstract categories arranged into some taxonomy.

The set of all customers, for example, can be divided up into subsets based on tiers, such as Tier 1 customers, Tier 2 customers, and so on. Or, we could divide them up by type, such as retail customers, corporate customers, government customers, etc.

Regardless of how we view and classify these entities of the corporate ecosystem, they are all represented in the company as records, documents, or rows in a spreadsheet.

All this is known. What we haven't done yet, though, is to make these entities aware of each other. Talk to each other. Keep each other informed.

In fact, give them a mind of their own!  This is what I'd like to call the 'Internet of Things - Corporate (IoT-C)'.

Each of these entities must be taught to communicate, to send messages about who they are and what they are doing, to inform the rest of the ecosystem about their state of health.

The components in our cars do that. Why not the components of our corporate ecosystem?

How would our corporate universe become transformed if these entities could communicate with each other without human intervention?

For a start, human beings would stop behaving as hand-maidens and errand boys to these entities, running messages and interference for them. It would free them up from 'administrivia' which, in my opinion, is a holy grail.

This is not a new idea, of course. One could argue that a lot of integration, B2B, and supply chain technology are designed to do exactly that.

Partly true.

However, traditional technology implements much of this as linear and uni-dimensional transformations that trace direct cause-effect relationships.

Orchestrations, which are multi-layer interactions, are restricted to the immediate set of business transactions, all of which are direct cause-effect relationships.

All of this requires significant machinery, effort, and expense to implement.

In reality, communication between corporate entities should occur as multi-dimensional and sometimes non-linear transformations. Everything is connected to everything else through some pathway. The strength of the influence between any two entities obviously varies, but it is always present.

IoT-C makes it possible to trace a path systemically between any two entities in this ecosystem.

For example, assume the two entities in question are Project Alpha and Customer Category C. We can ask, "How are Project Alpha and Customer Category C" related?

The answers can take various forms:

• Project Alpha implements a metric that measures customer-centricity specifically for customers in Customer Category C.
• Project Alpha implements an enhancement for the customer service platform which directly impacts customers of Category C.
• Project Alpha enables corporate strategy S by contributing to strategic objective S5; strategy S changes the pricing structure of the company's product line PL2200 whose customers belong to Category C.

Obviously, it doesn't take IoT-C to answer questions like this. When I was in a corporate role, I was able to provide these types of answers. It only took my team a week (or more, depending on the underlying detail that was demanded) to extract data, clean it up or calibrate it, perform analysis, and report it.

What IoT-C does is to enable these 'things' to be intelligent so that they can communicate their own health and behavior without human intervention. Just as IoT makes physical things intelligent by embedding sensors and transmitters, IoT-C embeds representational 'sensors' and 'transmitters' into the entities of the corporate ecosystem.

In an IoT-C enabled organization, the following scenario can be completely automated:

"Project Alpha is delayed. Update the 'measure of enablement' metric on strategic objective S5, determine if strategy S's overall enablement is sensitive to this change or not, notify stakeholder Jim (the executive in charge of strategy S), communicate to customer account manager Tom, update the status of development tasks T23 and T47 of Project Beta (that depends on Project Alpha) in its Kanban board."

IoT-C is about making automated, intelligent, and industrial-strength flow of interactions where currently such interactions happen through the medium of overworked humans.

IoT-C is about making these interactions efficient, repeatable, scalable, and sustainable.

With IoT, we can instill intelligence into our universe. With IoT-C, we can make this happen specifically for the non-physical entities in our corporate world.