Can Digitization be a catalyst for IoT ?

Digitization is fast transforming the way we live our lives and has spurred a dramatic revolution. No individual, city, company or country can escape its impact which will sooner or later reach all of them. IoT has already laid down its foundation for an era where connectivity breeds innovation and is bound to be a major defining factor as to how the businesses are done, services are delivered and customers are engaged. The modern day survival strategy to cope with this impending revolution is complete Digitization. The world where humans, machines and external environment seamlessly communicate with each other.

Businesses in every sector must now adhere to digitization to and use its channels to remain relevant and engage with their stakeholders. With that, the businesses are also looking at challenges that big changes often bring with them. The increase in competition, commoditization threat and the need to now digitally engage with customers, partners, employees and suppliers are some of the key implications. To actually make IoT pander to Digitization, huge changes in the realms of talent and infrastructure are necessary. It will be a time-consuming process but the end result makes all the struggle worth the efforts. Implementation of innovative ideas can help businesses make the transition faster and smoother to deliver quick results. The development of a fast IoT function that works with the current IoT function focussing on important areas such as web and customer management can be an ideal approach to this new digital era.

With the market of IoT growing day by day and Digital India mission, both will enable the economy to run effectively and efficiently and have a huge potential to bring fantastic changes in the way machines and humans interact with the bare minimum efforts. To make this more automated and efficient, artificial intelligence technology will be a major boost. But it will require a robust information system with assured transparency, security and privacy features.

This Digitization drive will impact a lot of things around it but IoT is said to be the biggest beneficiary. It is all set to bridge the gap between physical, digital, virtual and the cyber spheres. Cisco has estimated that by 2020, the world will be a home to more than 20 billion connected devices. Even home appliances like refrigerator, microwave ovens, door locks, smart mirrors and coffee machines will collect and churn out data just like our smartphones. These appliances will collect enormous amount of data to be fed to analytics that will shed some insight on how things work or break down the way they do and how improvisations can be brought to them. IoT is an integrated systems of connected devices where these devices communicate to each other and exchange data and information for controlling multiple activities like traffic control, health management, retail, smart city functions, media & advertising, manufacturing, oil, gas & mining, construction, agriculture, hospitality and all aspects of economy. Digitization enables data to be accessed by these IoT sensors and actuators for processing the information. Hence, digitization is an enabler of IoT.

Predictive data might also be able to proactively reveal when the devices would breakdown or malfunction, giving sufficient room to plan repair or downtime. This could substantially change the reactive customer service of the current times. Currently, consumers only initiate an action only when there is a need to fix things but in a world powered by IoT, the devices would be equipped enough to indicate well in advance before the malfunctioning strikes thus enabling the businesses to serve the clients in a better and more organised fashion.

Cloud services are the helm for IoT and enables a quick exchange and transfer of data. Its functioning is crucial to IoT because it forms the basis for the ecosystem of connected things that can transmit and decipher the data that is available on these cloud servers. IoT combined with digitization is a dream combination that can accelerate business growth and customer service models.

Prasoon Shrivastava
Founder & CEO,  HelpMeBuild