Using Data You Already Have

Many businesses, enterprises, and other organizations have invested in data analytics. Data analytics goes by many names including data science, analytics, statistics, data analysis, and data mining. Businesses have invested in the talent and the systems and software to arm that talent in order to gain greater insight from the data those organizations have already in-house. That data includes operational data, HR data, customer data, financial data, and more. That data may contain information that has value other than the originally intended purpose. That value may be found in organization inefficiencies revealed in simple statistics like attrition rates for various employee types, operational patterns that reveal redundant organizations or processes, customer purchasing patterns that may be used for improved engagement and sales, and many other things. That’s been the focus of the data science push in recent years.

Letting Your Imagination Run Wild

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a natural extension of an organization’s analytics efforts. Or seen otherwise, analytics using in-house data is a natural extension of an IoT investment. Here’s how. While a data analytics investment focuses on in-house, or easily purchasable data to augment already present data, an IoT investment opens up to a whole new set of questions. That’s what data science does, it helps answer questions, and also allows businesses to ask new questions. With an IoT investment those questions become much more flexible. You can begin to ask questions about an entirely new universe of value sources. By being able to place sensors and devices to collect data the actual physical world you can understand, automate, and improve your business in ways not possible before.

A Simple Example

An example will help make this more apparent. Suppose you are a hotel company investing in an IoT strategy. That strategy may include deployment of connected light sensors that report their status. That collected data aggregated across your entire enterprise now offers you an understanding of light usage patterns: where lights are typically left on unnecessarily, when they can be dimmed, what countries have different light usage patterns allowing you to better serve those customers, and more. Other investments could include fire extinguishers that automatically report their status to keep compliant with the law and door opening and closing tracking on key operational parts of the hotel to track usage of those facilities by employees. These are a few simple ways that sensors of the physical world could help improve a hotel chain’s profitability.

Download our white paper, Calculating the Return on an M2M Investment, to learn more.