Is Internet of Things (IoT) for your business? How to use it?

A new buzzword has exploded in the last 2 years: IoT. Behind this acronym, everybody recognises know the very wide family of connected devices, from portable ones like watches, sensors of any kind included in many industry products, to vehicle/shipping tracking systems. The object of all these devices is to deliver continuous data to their owner to facilitate gathering of information via GSM on a certain topic like body health status, fields hydrometry, or GPS localisation. With the massive decrease of cost of these small sensors, their usage has recently increased massively and opportunities to use them are developed every day.

Among them, there are for sure few business applications that could be of use for any company in the world. But once identifying the right idea, how to put it in place? And what are the pitfalls?

Yes, we can use customer (big) data!

One of the main challenge of a successful digital transformation is customer centricity: understanding what the customer wants at every second and be ready to deliver him the best service accordingly. To achieve this, companies need to know better their customer, implying for them to gather more information about him, or at least in a more effective way.

That is where the famous “Big Data” idiom pops up immediately, bringing with it at the same time the challenges of volume handling and data quality on one hand, and the privacy aspect on the other hand. Recent news about China hackers having stolen indentifying information of 4 million US federal workers makes the topic very actual by the way. As a consequence, a company using obviously customers data could be very quickly seen as “big brother” and would suffer of a negative image.

On the other hand, we see the value of Big data while improving daily life of smartcities inhabitants like in Songdo or savings lives by using social media info to react more accurately during natural catastrophies. So, why not profiting from them as individual in our daily consumer life as well?

We then reach a dilemma: should we use customer data to offer him better service, or shouldn’t we? Is it by the way profitable?