How to connect people to your digital transformation-Stacey on IoT

When I talk to people about the Internet of Things, there is usually a spiritual separation between technology, business processes, and related personnel. Companies are getting better and better at linking technology to their business processes, but communicating the results of any automated alerts or notifications to people remains a real challenge.

ServiceNow, a software company dedicated to helping companies implement and track human-centered business processes, is trying to solve this challenge with a new platform designed to capture machine and business data and transform it into so-called digital workflows. You or I may think of it as a notification sent to service personnel, or even an alert sent to the CRM system to update the customer through the application.

ServiceNow’s new platform is called Connected Operations and consists of four parts. The first part is bridging, which introduces data from connected devices and processes. The second is the rule engine, where companies will try to explain to the software what happens when certain data parameters are met. To give a simple example, if the sensor A on the printer detects Y, it indicates that the printer is out of paper.

The third part is an operational event, which adopts rules and generates responses for human handling. So, in the example above, realizing that the printer is out of paper will generate a message to the specific person telling them to add more paper.

The last element is a series of interrelated workflows that are responsible for introducing other data about employee processes to ensure that those responsible for solving problems or implementing notifications have the tools they need. In our printer example, this might include links to paper lists and reordering systems, or even links to location data for the affected printer.

However, although all these feelings are indeed logical, with the expansion of business scale and the increasing popularity of IoT implementation, implementing and tracking business processes has become more challenging. Therefore, if your organization has 100,000 printers in 40 offices around the world, calculating paper inventory and maintaining printer inventory will become more complicated.

When monitoring equipment on site, some companies may wish to prioritize the dispatch of maintenance personnel so that unnecessary equipment can be fixed during normal working hours to avoid overtime. Predictive maintenance programs may not have this context, but ServiceNow does.

It’s worth noting that ServiceNow doesn’t want to get insights from the company’s connected sensors and machines; it needs raw data. Jonathan Sparks, vice president of the company’s Internet of Things and Operations Products, said that this is because as time goes by, ServiceNow will be able to gain richer insights from the above data, so that it can detect certain problems It is recommended to follow a different process, or just provide to help customers find problems earlier than now.

I want to be cynical and think this is just another effort to get more data, because data is the new motivation. However, there are many examples of companies that have obtained data from different customers and analyzed them to find new best practices, warn about new trends in the entire industry, and even point out problems with specific equipment brands. The real question is whether customers want to push all their raw data to the ServiceNow platform.

In any case, I am encouraged by ServiceNow’s focus on digital transformation. Unable to turn insights into actions, the Internet of Things is just an expensive and complex alert system. Although some tasks will be fully automated, there are still many places where human participation is needed to solve problems. Organizing this participation and ensuring scale expansion is as important as connecting machines to the network.

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