According to the technology experts at Gartner, the world will be filled with more than 20.4 billion IoT devices connected to the Internet by 2020. Will one of those IoT products be yours? More importantly, will it be the right product for the market and your business goals? Will you have the right resources and tools to build and support it? What is your approach to IoT strategy and delivery?
Even if you’re not planning to develop a product that is specifically designed to serve as an IoT device, chances are you’ll still be affected by the technology. Companies are expected to invest more than $15 trillion in IoT between 2017 and 2025. Just look at the auto industry where 90 percent of all new cars are expected to be connected to the Internet by 2020.
If researching, selecting, building, and supporting the right product wasn’t hard enough already, now throw in a device that’s always connected and vulnerable to outside sources. To add an IoT device to your portfolio or to develop a product that interacts with IoT devices, you have to get smart about how you plan and support your product portfolio. While that’s not entirely easy, here are the first five of ten ways product portfolio management will make your digital product innovation easier.
The right product portfolio management tool will evaluate your company’s current capabilities via the list of questions and help you learn a smarter approach to launch the right IoT products that will move your business forward.
- Get started with the right IoT strategy – to address the complexity of IoT/smart projects, start by putting in place a foundational strategy that defines what success looks like. The strategy should cover what problems the product will solve and the value its smart technology will deliver. From there, formulate a top-down plan and determine what resources will be needed for development and support. Use technology to manage your new strategy to keep up with the dynamic and continuous evolution of corporate innovation. When necessary, pivot your strategy quickly as changes occur in market conditions, competitive landscapes, and technology platforms.
- Ideation, employee engagement, and voice of the customer –solicit ideas from customers and employees around IoT with the greatest potential by tapping into their wisdom and advancing the right ones through the front end of innovation. This means centralizing ideation and eliminating manual brainstorming efforts that are tracked and lost in spreadsheets. By enabling internal and external product and technology experts to collaborate early in the commercialization process, you can pinpoint the products with the greatest chances of success and eliminate unnecessary resource costs.
- Capability management –plan and ensure your organization has the right business capabilities to invent, launch, and support smart connected products that deliver against your IoT strategy. This includes building the organizational foundation needed to create and support digital products and initiatives and evaluate business capabilities in the context of business goals. With this information, you can define a capability roadmap that helps your business understand how to invest appropriately and bring the IoT roadmap to life.
- Establish your technology landscape – before innovating in the digital universe, you must first be digital within your organization. With the right tools, you can visualize your technology landscape to help optimize your technology decisions in the context of strategy, programs, products, applications services, and components for a unified visualization that identifies dependencies. Incorporate technology lifecycles in planning to take advantage of the right technology solution. Collaborate with technology leaders to understand the strategic intent of technology usage and stay ahead of industry trends.
- Prioritize your product portfolio and prepare for “what-if” scenarios –pick the right IoT initiatives and don’t be afraid to kill them. Using product portfolio what-if analysis, you can ensure the optimum portfolio mix to achieve your strategic goals by evaluating and comparing multiple scenarios that consider different market conditions. With the right information, you can eliminate lower value IoT initiatives faster and shift people and money to higher revenue-generating products and services. You can then reduce overall product portfolio risks by assessing resource capacity and technology familiarity in advance.
These are just five of 10 tools you can use to help pick and deliver the right IoT projects. For the next five tools, read part two of this blog – Digital Innovation: 10 Ways Product Portfolio Management Can Improve Delivery.
Also, if you’d like to see how your organization is doing against these first five considerations, download the full eBook, “10 Steps to ‘Get Smart’ About Launching the Right IoT Products.” .
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