HK companies told to start small with the IoT

Computerworld Hong Kong staff
07 May 2015
00:00

Hong Kong companies are advised to take on small-scale projects with immediate tangible benefits when they start to embark on their IoT (Internet of Things) journey.

“There are a lot of opportunities all around us. Small-scale IoT projects are always feasible and [companies] can scale it up after they’ve gained experience. Ultimately in this process, you need to show immediate tangible benefits,” said Dr. Toa Charm, chairperson of the BI and Big Data SIG of the Hong Kong Computer Society, during one of the panel discussions at the recent IoT Symposium 2015, held at the Hong Kong Science and Technology Park (HKSTP).

He reminded an audience of local technology executives that success is elusive for pioneering IT projects as they take time to build and often involve complete change management from top to bottom of an organization.

“About 95% of these projects will fail. There will be more failure than success,” he added by way of cautioning companies against being overly ambitious about their IoT aspirations in the initial stage.

Furthermore, it was pointed out that for IoT solutions to take off in the enterprise, they must be able to address and solve specific business problems.

“Technology for technology’s sake is not going to cut it. I think that is the biggest challenge for IoT,” said Alex Valkov, business intelligence competency center manager at Cathay Pacific Airways.

He added: “There has to be a compelling business case. You need to know your business objectives and how potential projects can align to that. So, if your business objective is for your customers to be happier, how would sensors enable us to do it better? It could be from understanding passenger queue time to understanding comforts on the aircraft. It is about finding those opportunities in a specific way – I think this will enable projects to happen. We have to work in partnership with our business units to decide on these opportunities.”

According to Kelvin Koo, business development manager at Cluster Tech, it is “critical” that the person who will be leading an IoT project has the ability to talk to the business teams to “pinpoint very specific business case”.

He also added that project team’s ability to have access to a company’s different business units will enable them to define KPIs needed

“We need to really to be able to work with them to know what data are available across the whole company. For example, we can use the data from the retail side to enrich the marketing data to define KPIs that will help build the business case. The usual problem is that we usually work with a particular department but the data are located elsewhere.”

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