Who Should Drive Your IIoT Pilot?
You’ve explored the use cases, the technology, and the benefits. Your question now isn’t should you get started, but how to start—and who should be in the driver’s seat to ensure your industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) implementation is a success?
Implementing the IIoT will optimize your workforce, work methods, and workplace at every level. But because of these wide-reaching shop-floor-to-top-floor benefits, the IIoT can’t be approached as a standard software implementation.
Traditionally, manufacturers take either an IT- or OT-driven approach. For IT teams, they see the IIoT as a technology implementation and drive the pilot accordingly. OT teams see the IIoT as an operational change—and drive the pilot accordingly. But restricting pilot ownership to a single lane is a sure-fire road to diminishing ROI, non-scalable success, and frustrating roadblocks at best. At worst—an IIoT project that goes off the road into pilot purgatory.
The first step in IIoT success is to ensure IT and OT can work together through your IIoT pilot and beyond. These are the three biggest roadblocks to watch for when driving your pilot, along with expert advice on how to integrate IT-and-OT collaboration, so you can avoid each roadblock before it turns into a dead end.
"The main goal of every pilot is to verify if a certain use case or technology brings the expected added value to the customer. While most of the hard work will go into developing the technology around the pilot, it is of vital importance to know what and why you are building something. In this way, you will avoid surprises in the end of your journey.”
—Takeaways for a Successful IoT Project, IoT Zone
