What makes an IoT professional? Passion. Drive. Expertise. A sense of purpose. Creativity. The latter is in high demand that is driven by the need to explore the added value proposed by the contemporary technology. Expert knowledge shall span software, hardware, users and business acumen. A good sense of business purpose is a must to enable an Internet of Things initiative to drive corporate profitability. All in all, a multi-faceted person an IoT professional is expected to be, isn’t he?
The recent report by the Application Developers Alliance quoted J. Bond – not the famous MI6 agent, but relayr co-founder and chief product officer – Jackson Bond said: “We found the hardware guys are happy building devices and connecting into the cloud, but the software guys were having a harder time. They did not understand the hardware. Even though 30 to 40 percent had heard about IoT and 60-70 percent had already pushed for it in their projects, they were failing because it was difficult to get the programming connected to the bare metal.” So, does it mean that IoT professionals naturally come from the production floors, labs and industrial engineering? Well, the fact that the issue is being raised in software developer communities points to the shift of the original trend. There are good reasons for that. The interconnected world – be that a plant, a fleet of vehicles, a multitude of consumer things or the industrial internet on a wide scale – requires pervasive involvement of a variety of competencies.
Hence, national IoT projects, like the IoT Project of Finland, emerge. And the present count of the Internet of Things Meetups has reached 486 user groups with 141,160 members in 49 countries. This results in an enormous work of thought, both at academia and in business, and facilitates relevant research and creative approaches to solving existing business problems.
To drive the success rate of the IoT projects, what should be considered by the IoT professionals? As much as the possessed competency matters, cooperation across various interest groups is what might help an undertaking to result in a tangible result. The businesses desperately look for value and performance improvements. Creativity assumes fall of mind borders. And professionalism suggests a goal focus. Altogether, it ain’t rocket science and is a matter of intelligently applying the exiting skills to the evolving industrial contexts.
For instance, at Bilot we are the IoT professionals. We manage to complement our portfolio with experience of working with sensors and other ‘bare metal’, we partner with hardware vendors and expand on our core competency of business intelligence and analytics. As a sneak peek into our solutions, here is an example that might seem simple from the first sight, yet involves an amazingly large number of elements and implies the Internet of Things subject matter comprehension.
Interested? Stay tuned to Bilot events.
