Whitepaper - IoT adoption in digital transformation journeys (v2.0)

Internet of Things Adoption in
Digital Transformation Journeys
Lessons learned from helping organizations getting started, delivering significant business
benefits and accelerating business transformation using IoT.
Published: February 2018
For the latest information, please see www.InternetofYourThings.com

IoT Adoption in Digital Transformation journeys | Page 1
The Internet of Things or IoT is disrupting organizations across industries such as Manufacturing,
Transportation, and Retail. Microsoft is undertaking Digital Transformation projects with over 1,000
customers, and with many of them, we had observed that IoT is the enabler of the business change.
However, Digital transformation isn’t necessarily about solving new business problems. It’s about how
to solve existing problems more quickly, economically, efficiently, securely and with an extensible design
that allows customers to iterate and evolve more rapidly.
The trends driving Digital Transformation include business, people, technology, and generational
factors. Organizations are quickly experimenting with new technologies as the time between hype and
adoption has shortened. The maturity of technologies such as IoT plus the acceptability of consumers
is helping organizations to unlock the value of connecting things. In response, organizations are digitally
transforming their business models to shift how they deliver value and drive efficiency. Also,
organizations are looking to enhance customer experiences as a key strategic differentiator and driving
this outcome by:
▪ Prioritizing customer obsession - putting the customer at the center of all their activities.
▪ Improving operational efficiency - integrating supply chain and using connected things to
empower improved operations and decision making.
▪ Experimenting with the digital economy - transforming business models to include partners
outside their circle of trust.
This paper introduces a new engagement model based on Microsoft’ experience helping organizations
succeed while adopting IoT as part of their Digital Transformation Journey.
Executive Summary

Figure 1: Recommended roadmap for IoT
This paper begins summarizing frequent organizations challenges, and the recommended IoT end-to-
end roadmap to support the journey based on previous engagements delivered by Microsoft Services
and feedback from Microsoft’s trusted partners.

Contents
Introduction........................................................................................................................................................................4
Top Challenges to IoT Adoption ..................................................................................................................................5
Challenge #1 - Misunderstanding the ROI and immediate profit outcome................................................6
Challenge #2 - Product-centric focus ....................................................................................................................8
Challenge #3 – Misaligned priorities between OT and IT ................................................................................8
Challenge #4 – Lack of standardization in industry standards, protocols and policies ...........................9
Challenge #5 - Security and data strategy is an afterthought ........................................................................9
Challenge #6 – Scaling to the rest of the organization and transition to operations ............................ 10
An End-to-End IoT Program to support the journey ............................................................................................11
1. Business Scenario Ideation ............................................................................................................................. 12
2. Prioritize Business Scenarios .......................................................................................................................... 12
3. Make the Business Case .................................................................................................................................. 13
4. IoT Maturity Assessment for the Business Unit......................................................................................... 13
5. Connect Your Things........................................................................................................................................ 14
6. Turn Data into Insight ...................................................................................................................................... 15
7. Integration with Business Processes and LOB Systems .......................................................................... 15
8. IoT Competence Center.................................................................................................................................. 16
9. IoT Maturity Assessment at Organizational Level.................................................................................... 17
10. Build Your Enterprise-Ready IoT Platform............................................................................................. 17
11. Connected Customer Experience and Transform Your Business ........................................................ 17
12. Scale and Reinforcement............................................................................................................................ 18
Call to Action.................................................................................................................................................................... 18
Credits................................................................................................................................................................................20

Introduction
According to a research conducted by Keystone Strategy1
, leaders in Digital Transformation generate
an average $100M more in operating income each year — eight percentage points higher than other
enterprises. Moreover today, one of the major drivers of Digital Transformation is the Internet of Things
(IoT). McKinsey2
estimates that this transformation could generate $11 trillion a year in economic value
by 2025.
Technology has been transforming business in the last years, and facts are demonstrating that IoT isn’t
an exception:
1. The rapid increase of the available data, especially from the digitization of things (i.e., Sensors,
Smart Devices, Gateways, etc.)
2. The rise of cloud computing providing limitless computing and storage power, increasing
organizational capacity to innovate.
3. The explosion and ubiquity of mobile computing from smart devices and sensors.
4. The cost and footprint reduction driving compute at the edge that was not possible in the past
IoT offers a tremendous opportunity to help businesses to transform their operations, dramatically
improve their operational efficiency, and to enhance customer experience with new business models.
“Internet of Things is a business revolution masquerading as a technology one. It’s a new set of
technologies that are enabling business revolution. Companies don’t wake up and decide to
connect things for fun; they do it because there’s value in it.”
— Sam George, Director of Microsoft Azure IoT
Based on the vision of business transformation using IoT and the increased accessibility of smart-
connected technology, underlying technologies of IoT such as Advanced Analytics, Artificial Intelligence
(AI), Machine Learning, and Edge Apps will be an inevitability part in many solutions across industries
(manufacturing, retail, utilities, etc.).
Many researchers are reporting that IoT has crossed the chasm3
and early adopters are reaping a
significant competitive advantage. With the Microsoft Azure platform, Microsoft can meet organizations
where their business is today and help them to get started or to scale their IoT scenarios quickly.
ThyssenKrupp Elevators and Finning are two splendid examples:
▪ ThyssenKrupp Elevators4
started their journey using the predictive maintenance capabilities of
Azure IoT Suite to reduce their downtime and costs, and now they are taking their IoT solution
1
Source: https://info.microsoft.com/Keystone-Data-and-Analytics-Whitepaper.html
2
McKinsey, June 2015. Source: Unlocking the potential of the Internet of Things
3
Crossing the chasm for the Internet of Things (November 2017) https://www.support.com/blog/crossing-chasm-internet-things/
4
Microsoft Azure IoT Customer Story: Quicker fixes, hands-free, when thyssenkrupp Elevator’s service technicians use Microsoft HoloLens

even further by enhancing their connected field service with Microsoft HoloLens. With the use
of HoloLens, ThyssenKrupp Elevators technicians can make remote calls to more experienced
technicians who can walk them through solutions.
▪ Finning5
, a Caterpillar equipment provider, is helping mining organizations to manage changing
market conditions offering more than just machines. Its innovative business intelligence (BI)
solution incorporates IoT to give customers the insight they need to solve business problems
such as reducing fuel consumption and unplanned equipment maintenance.
We have observed that organizations go through three stages in their efforts. However, there are many
challenges (see below the top challenges list), and then say we have developed the journey map to
address.
Top Challenges to IoT Adoption
Internet of Things (IoT) offers businesses opportunities for incredible savings and growth. We have
observed that the IoT customer journey is mainly composed of three stages. Each stage with clear
business outcomes and tangible return-of-investments from cost saving to an enhanced customer
experience monetizing existing investments.
Figure 2: Three main stages of a customer journey with IoT
As you are above to discover, when an organization connects their business with IoT, the opportunities
are endless including new business processes, revenue-generating capabilities and potential qualitative
benefits. Here are three customer stories:
5
Finning helps clients increase efficiency and revenue in tough market conditions with IoT, BI, and Azure https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/finning-
helps-clients-increase-efficiency-and-revenue-in-tough-market-conditions-with-iot-bi-azure

▪ Emirates Air Line Cable Car6
, a company of Transport for London, took a similar approach to
monetizing IoT by offering free Wi-Fi to customers. While they provided Wi-Fi to customers for
free, it enabled new revenue opportunities for them and allowed them to obtain accurate and
timely insights on the operations of the cable car.
▪ Tetra Pak7
, headquartered in Switzerland, offers to add value services that impact the bigger
picture when it comes to cost and the environment. Sensors on more than 5,000 Tetra Pak
filling machines at customers’ sites, all connected to Microsoft Azure, feed real-time
performance data to the company for monitoring and analysis—nearly 700 million data points
each year. Tetra Pak is using this data to support their vision of providing food safe an available
everywhere. Digital is important because it allows them to develop completely new values to
customers and deliver existing values in a much more efficient way, as well.
“We can now proactively support our customers (by) predicting and preventing failures, actually
before they happen at our customer sites”
— Ilkka Dunder, Director Digitalization of Services at Tetra Pak Services
▪ Jabil8
, one of the leading design and manufacturing solution providers in the world, uses
Microsoft IoT to create a digital, intelligent, and predictive factory. Jabil is accelerating the
product creation through ideation, to design to production using IoT-enabled service
management. By connecting the factory floor to the cloud, they are now able to reduce
unplanned maintenance costs and downtime and gain better agility to meet its customers’
demands.
However, the journey is full of challenges that requires attention during the journey making a significant
up-front investment in IoT implementations.
Different type of enterprises (medium, large, or global) and industries might have different priorities,
but in almost all cases, our customers typically experience the following six challenges or roadblocks:
Challenge #1 - Misunderstanding the ROI and immediate profit outcome
Even though organizations are discovering the potential of IoT; usually they are not certain how to
account for the IoT value in their return on investment (ROI) calculations. Also, an all-or-nothing
6
Transport of London uses Azure IoT Hub to provide free Wi-Fi to customers and create new revenue opportunitieshttps://customers.microsoft.com/en-
us/story/uktbsemirates
7
Tetra Pak keeps food and drink safe (Video) https://blogs.microsoft.com/transform/video/like-clockwork-tetra-pak-keeps-food-and-drink-safe/
8
How manufacturers are creating the digital, intelligent and predictive factory https://blogs.microsoft.com/transform/2016/04/24/how-manufacturers-are-
creating-the-digital-intelligent-and-predictive-factory/#sm.0001lpruijiktdlbxep1jt773o31g

approach can be prohibitive to small-scale experimentation, and business cases need to look at a long-
term planning rather than simply cost savings and short-term profits.
▪ Lack of compelling business cases and misunderstanding the ROI – The perceived high cost of IoT
in conjunction with the challenge of identifying the value creation at the organization level, is one
of the top IoT barriers.
▪ Solving many business issues at once– Organizations discover unexpected insights once they start
deploying and gathering data from the IoT solution.
▪ Time-consuming setup – Environments for the proof of concepts or MVP pilots are complex to set
up, take too long, require a new set of skills and usually can’t scale into production.
Addressing the challenge: Once a pilot or proof of concept (PoC) is identified, the preliminary activities
include defining the purpose, goals, scope, and metrics for measuring the outcomes. Our
recommendation is an agile implementation, planning next iterations and investments based on
learnings. A “Think big, but start small” approach will help to deliver the solution on-time and on budget.
A PoC is also helpful to begin calculating the basic costs associated with that area of the business or
department. General costs need to be considered but, also the other costs such as implementation
downtime, consulting, platform, change management (including to support the people side of change)
and security. It’s important to keep in mind that the solution itself comes with new costs.
By determining the actual cost of an IoT solution, an organization usually is less confident that an IoT
solution is the right investment. However, to evaluate the assessment fairly, the organization also needs
to look at some potential benefits it could gain from implementing an IoT solution.
Many enterprises look to IoT to reduce costs and expenses. Once one solution is in place, however, it
may generate new potential benefits beyond its initial intended use. That is why organizations should
examine the new possibilities of a connected solution at the start of the journey. Examples of new
possibilities include:
▪ New business processes and scenarios extensibility. Once the underlying infrastructure is in place,
it can be a lot simpler to add new capabilities and extend functionality to other processes and
scenarios. Initial investment costs might increase, but with proper planning, you can reduce the
costs of other implementations down the road.
▪ Revenue-generating capabilities. While reducing operational costs is a major focus of IoT
solutions, that same cost-reduction solution may also be able to generate increased revenue.
Only when we collect the data, and it’s analyzed, we can find trends reveal new revenue
opportunities:
o Improving customer experience by providing personalized offers to customers
o Scaling based on the solution utilization demand

o Providing new services (i.e., predictive maintenance) and new revenue streams from the
data generated (i.e., a connected car being able to sell the weather data)
o Changing business financial models from OPEX to CAPEX
▪ Potential qualitative benefits. An IoT solution can provide a soft return on investment and
potential benefits such as improved customer satisfaction, increased safety (including worker
safety), and increased business flexibility. Adding value to the customer through reduced prices,
increased security, or fast delivery to improve customer loyalty and ROI
Challenge #2 - Product-centric focus
Products and services drive the majority of organizations today; many of them are very successful and
satisfy their customer needs. Based on our experience, the use of a product-centric focus (from the idea
generation, concept development, solution implementation, and commercialization) is one of the key
blockers for their digital transformation.
Enterprises with a product-centric approach are siloed organizationally, tend to communicate the brand
promise in a unidirectional manner and usually don’t fully resolve customer’s issues.
Addressing the challenge: The journey from a product-focus to service focus requires a transformation
of the entire business with maintaining the focus on the customer. Accounting, sales, support and
almost all other aspects of the business must adapt to operating service delivery rather than product
delivery. Retraining is key, and the transformation requires an orchestration in conjunction with the
rollout of the IoT solution.
Challenge #3 – Misaligned priorities between OT and IT
Even though, Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) shared objectives,
traditionally they are misaligned in their direction and focused on different things because they don’t
share priorities.
▪ IT main focus is on the computing and cyberinfrastructure and the goal of keeping systems of
record running with optimum performance.
▪ OT is concerned with the operational aspects such as oil rigs or factories and its goals including
maintaining safety, privacy, resilience, and reliability.
IoT brings both OT and IT together, which is good for the organization. Even though they may have
different goals; it’s important to have right sponsorship from the start. For that reason, executives should
be informed about the vision details, the required resourcing, and the cross-organization delivery plan.

In some environments, OT will not allow an IoT solution to connect and impact certain systems or
machines directly. A realistic assessment of the organization maturity for IoT and a better
understanding the current state of their people, business, and technology, will help you to deliver
consistent value.
Addressing the challenge: The real challenge of IoT adoption isn’t technical; it is more about finding the
significant business benefits and addressing fear-of-failure. IT and OT must work together to address
any concerns and overcome technical and regulatory challenges. IoT overall strategy requires
agreements and collaboration between business, OT, and IT to succeed. The organization should define
vision and strategy for IoT and count with the right executive sponsor. Lack of a strong senior sponsor
is a good indicator of failure; an effective sponsorship will create credibility and shows the organization’s
commitment to the change.
Challenge #4 – Lack of standardization in industry standards, protocols and policies
The number of standards that exist today in each part of the IoT value chain and the lack of
interoperability is a major problem and one of the greatest barriers that keep businesses from adopting
IoT. Also, IoT devices manufacturers often use proprietary technology, and even some organizations
develop their standards.
Addressing the challenge: Companies like Microsoft are working within standards organizations and
consortia to ensure that the appropriate standards for interoperability and security are established.
Companies are also working with the government to ensure the appropriate regulations and policies
are established. IoT systems require the incorporation of existing legacy protocols and standards,
identification of gaps, and addressing the gaps when necessary. Organizations don’t need to start from
scratch and can work together with their technology partners to combine their industry domain
expertise and partner technology expertise to address the need.
Azure IoT Hub natively supports communication over the MQTT, AMQP, and HTTPS protocols. In some
cases, devices or field gateways might not be able to use one of these standard protocols and require
protocol adaptation. Organizations can use the Azure IoT protocol gateway as a custom gateway to
enable protocol adaptation for IoT Hub. For more information, please read this Overview of the Azure
IoT Hub Service.
Challenge #5 - Security and data strategy is an afterthought
To realize the full potential of an enterprises’ major IoT implementations (for example smart building or
connected vehicles), the solutions might need to take actions based on data from many sources. To
succeed, enterprises are dependent on the resolution of issues such as data discovery, data formats,

monetization models for data, and privacy/security implications. These issues can limit the impact of
IoT.
With IoT, organizations can capture massive amounts of data. An issue occurs when trying to manage
the data pools, establish who owns the data and, to help make sure the security isn’t compromised. It
is recommended that organizations have an agreed data strategy companywide which defines current
and future data governance
As the threat landscape is always changing, security isn’t so much a destination to be reached as it is a
continuous journey. Addressing the wide-reaching challenges of security in the age of IoT requires
participation from the entire technology ecosystem — from cloud providers to hardware manufacturers
and solution developers to the companies that ultimately operate the system.
Addressing the challenge: Security must be addressed from an end-to-end perspective; from securing
the sensors all the way to the cloud. For more information about how to assess IoT security from end
to end, please download our whitepaper Evaluating Your IoT Security showing how a comprehensive
IoT security framework can help grow, scale, and transform your business.
On the other hand, achieving the full potential of IoT is also about integrating the data from IoT
solutions into an organization big data strategy. As part of an IoT Strategy, organizations should put in
place the platform required to ingest, store, and analyze the ingested data. Moving from analyzing
historical data to predicting future behaviors will help organizations to realize value quickly and to scale.
With technologies such as IoT and advanced analytics, organizations can get new insights, find new
efficiencies, identify new ways to leave the competition behind.
Challenge #6 – Scaling to the rest of the organization and transition to operations
Most organizations begin with a pilot or proof of concept but are not sure how to scale the solution if
not carefully planned, or how to transition the solution to operations and the skills required to maintain
an IoT solution over time.
▪ Underestimating the funding required to achieve scale – Benefits are tied to the adoption, and
investments are at risk of being cut before having a chance of gaining traction. Clear milestones
should be defined to track IoT success.
▪ Monetization of the IoT investments – Cost savings and operational improvements are just the tip-
of-the-iceberg. Customers who just focus on those drivers will never realize the full potential of IoT.
Instead, the IoT program goals should be increasing margin via efficiencies gain, generating
revenue and creating new digital services with the help of their connected things and related data.

Addressing the challenge: Organizations need a complete roadmap for their digital transformation and
IoT implementation. It should take into consideration for proper planning using an iterative approach.
Each iteration should have clear outcomes and success metrics. Also, organizations need to bring the
right skills together and leveraging existing (or upcoming) Center of Competence focused on IoT. The
end goal is to transform the organization including sales, accounting, and support to a new way of
operating.
An End-to-End IoT Program to support the journey
We live in the age of the continuous digital feedback loop, wherever your things (i.e., assets) are located,
the field service that goes with them, and more importantly, how your employees work to improve the
organization’s customer experience. By connecting people, things, and line-of-business (LoB) systems,
IoT has the potential to positively transform the entire value chain and deliver true innovation on
customer experience between the physical and digital world.
During the last few years, Microsoft Services has been working closely with customers in all types of IoT
projects – from proof of concepts to complex business solutions. This unique position has given us a clear
understanding of the common patterns that seem to be found in almost all customer’s Digital
Transformation (DT) journeys while adopting IoT and what is required to be successful.
Enterprises need a plan to efficiently and effectively aggregate, store, and analyze all their data to get
the maximum value from the information collected. An IoT program can help them to accelerate the
delivery of their IoT implementations and increase their return on investment (ROI).
A successful end-to-end IoT enterprise program, based on our experience must include the following
milestones in the journey to success.

Figure 3 Milestones per each stage of the customer journey with IoT
1. Business Scenario Ideation
Begin with a business scenario ideation workshop with both business decision makers [i.e., Line of
Business (LoBDM) sponsors, Product Managers, Head of the Production Line, etc.]and technical
decision makers (i.e., CIO, Industry 4.0 Lead, etc.) using existing business patterns and delivered
solutions.
The purpose of the workshop is to explore the opportunities and identify the various scenarios and
possible starting points.
2. Prioritize Business Scenarios
Prioritize scenarios taking into consideration the future state of the customer experience vision and
identification of use cases for clear end-to-end prototyping for connected services/products (i.e.,
Connected Factory, Assets Remote Monitoring, etc.) The purpose of this step is to reach consensus
on the best place to start the journey.
During the evaluation, the organization should consider factors such as market growth vs. market
share and, their ability to execute (implementation complexity, change degree, people resistance,
etc.) vs. scenario’s potential benefits (business value).

3. Make the Business Case
Create a Business Case aligning the IoT initiatives with the business objectives and considering key
factors such as customer priority, inherent risks, complexity, total associated costs, short-term
benefits, long-term value, and potential data monetization. In other words, make sure the business
case covers all the financial analysis of value relative to implementing an IoT solution — including,
costs, economic rewards, and risks.
The Business Case provides a summary of the projected benefits, costs and risks for the initiative.
The goal is to show and demonstrate the expected ROI and rewards at each iteration so that
approval can be gained for the next phase.
Figure 4: Recommended business outcomes to consider in an IoT related Business Case
Organizations delivering truly successful projects build the business case and create a program with
a roadmap to build on the proof of concept and go on the transformation journey.
4. IoT Maturity Assessment for the Business Unit
Before moving forward, organizations should understand their current maturity level around IoT
Organizations with successful IoT implementations, usually asses themselves in three dimensions:
People, Technology, and Business.

Microsoft Services has developed a model to understand the IoT maturity level across organizations.
The IoT Maturity Model (IoTMM) provides a framework that encompasses four levels and three
capabilities that can be used to understand, manage and maximize the impact of IoT investments.
The overall goal is to help our customers to use digital technologies to enable innovation and to
improve business processes, providing value to their businesses and customers.
Figure 5: Microsoft Services IoT Maturity Model (IoTMM)
The assessment will help the business unit or department to understand their strengths and
weaknesses, identify skills required to be successful and to move forward on the appropriate
roadmap.
5. Connect Your Things
Implement the selected scenario by collecting insights from physical things by connecting them to
a cloud gateway to improve operational efficiency.
Choose a scalable platform such as Microsoft Azure IoT, capable of connecting many IoT devices,
supporting several IoT solutions, and allowing solutions to scale quickly.
At this stage, organizations don’t have a formal IoT program in place on an enterprise-wide basis;
the project team is isolated and, the scope is a proof of concept – usually to connect and monitor
their things. Reports usually use the data owned by the BU and the data ingested by their things
[i.e., Sensors, SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition), or Field Gateways].

The proof-of-concepts aren’t a science experiment; they are the first and critical step in any
successful IoT implementation. It allows enterprises to validate the effectiveness of their design and
selected platform providers before rolling out a solution across their entire business.
A well-planned proof of concept will strengthen the confidence of executive sponsors and uncover
design issues without large-scale consequences. Also, will allow organizations to adapt, learn,
change and iterate as required quickly.
6. Turn Data into Insight
Analyze and visualize data from physical things using predictive analytics and machine learning to
discover patterns based on historical and near real-time data. Define the design principles for the
enterprise data strategy. The objectives are to increase informed decision making based on
available information.
From a return on investment (ROI) perspective, at this stage organizations have enhanced the
visibility of the business impact related to their IoT solutions, including:
▪ Maximization and reuse of existing IoT investments.
▪ An increased understanding of current behaviors based on their connected things.
▪ Ability to anticipate what will happen moving forward across the organization and, being able
to turn data into insights.
▪ More efficient processes by using near real-time operational insights to make smart decisions
and reduce operating costs.
The Azure IoT enable organizations to analyze and mine disparate data to create new insights and
even predict future outcomes. Using Azure IoT, the organizations can analyze data that has been
acquired over a prolonged period to find patterns and correlations to uncover trends that offer new
insights about how their products are used or how they behave under certain conditions.
7. Integration with Business Processes and LOB Systems
Focus on integration into existing business workflows and the establishment of a sustainable long-
term infrastructure for utilizing IoT across the organization.
Once the value has been demonstrated, organization’s next steps usually are to develop a minimum
viable product (MVP). The MVP focuses on delivering a subset of business capabilities, which help
the enterprise to quickly establish and understand several processes such as their asset utilization
and behaviors.

It is important to remark that, a frequent practice in large enterprises is to have several business
units experimenting with different use cases and IoT implementations. If not coordinated this can
cause divergence and interoperability/integrations issues.
Due to the fact organizations don’t know where to start and what will deliver value – hence the need
for an upfront business strategy to identify the best place to start. Microsoft Services can help you
to build a program that has clear steps to demonstrate the value that, in turn, helps them sell and
build the program internally.
8. IoT Competence Center
Create the IoT Competence Center (IoTCC) with dedicated IoT experts with a deep focus on
empowering their Business Unit and divisions to lead the enterprise’s digital transformation.
▪ Driving a lower total cost of ownership of the organization IoT solutions with reduced
implementation costs or deployment risk through:
• The consolidation of best practice functions and services, allowing rapid, repeatable
successes from other deployments.
• The centralization of competency and operational efficiency which maximizes the use of
technology resources and assets.
• The ability to provide strategic IoT deployment planning—accelerating rollout success.
▪ Establishing working groups for data governance and Business-OT-IT alignment and
integration.
▪ Defining IoT Service Levels (SLAs), key metrics, and the overall process of meeting them.
▪ Higher and faster adoption of the complete IoT lifecycle across the entire organization which
improves user satisfaction and accelerate ROI. Pay attention to change management, especially
workforce and development, to incorporate IoT capabilities into job junctions and
organizational processes.
The IoTCC also serves to educate key stakeholders about the advantages of employing IoT. It further
helps to build the lines of communication business units and locations to prevent a silo-driven
approach to implementation.
The IT division usually leads this stage, and their main objective is to support each business unit and
IoT related use cases. The new model must include OT business integration, or it will fail.
Usually, an enterprise architect is assigned to provide IoT solutions patterns, recommend practices,
and architecture guidelines that make delivery of IoT projects more repeatable to maximize existing
investments. Also, core process changes and adoption change management (ACM) initiatives are
put in place to accelerate potential business benefits and minimize risks.

9. IoT Maturity Assessment at Organizational Level
Understand the Organization’s maturity level regarding their people, business, and technologies. A
change management plan is strongly recommended.
10. Build Your Enterprise-Ready IoT Platform
Based on your chosen scalable platform such as Microsoft Azure IoT, build an enterprise-ready IoT
platform capable of connecting many IoT devices, supporting several IoT solutions, and allowing
solutions to scale quickly.
▪ Create an enterprise-ready IoT Platform to allow the organization to build rapidly, test, and
deploy smart, connected business solutions.
▪ Prepare the IT division to support each Business Unit and IoT-related use cases.
▪ Assign a Chief Architect to guide the program, improvement investments, and increase
potential IoT benefits by focusing on value modeling, business capability modeling, and
innovation management.
11. Connected Customer Experience and Transform Your Business
Create new lines of business and new business models enhancing customer experience. The top
drivers of Digital Transformation are defined below:
▪ Understanding of your end-customers demands, concerns and usage patterns will help the
organization to have a better customer engagement as effectively as possible.
▪ Using data to facilitate virtually seamless interactions and decision making within Business Units
and address regulatory, risk, and cost pressures.
▪ Transforming business models to integrate components across the value chain.
At this point, Business Units work together as a whole. The organization has the right skills to
develop new and differentiated offerings, and the relationship between IoT, enterprise economics,
and the operational models are well-defined and can be managed to drive efficiencies,
effectiveness, and business growth.
As they transform from product to service, they need to transform their sales, accounting, support,
field operations, etc. We haven’t discussed this as part of the transformation challenges, and we
should tell them we can help. Also, the organization working as one unit begins to realize the full
benefits of IoT and be in a better positioned to:
▪ Find additional opportunities for new revenue streams
▪ Create innovated business models.

12. Scale and Reinforcement
Develop new and differentiated digital services to include and reuse a combination of the
enterprise’s connected things, their customer’s things, the Cloud and their Line of Business (LOB)
Systems. The end goal is to connect the organization with other business initiatives to develop a
digital ecosystem that activates the envisioned customer experience to meet the needs of digital
customers and employees.
Enterprises must understand their customer’s (and employee’s) reality through the end-to-end
journey and, continuously improve the digital feedback loop with the data at the center. By
harnessing things and product utilization data together with customer interactions, enterprises will
be able to drive continuous product improvement and create deep customer relationships:
The potential business impact delivered at this stage includes:
▪ Product transformation by gaining near real-time insights about how customers (and
employees) are using products and being able to make improved decisions.
▪ Revenue increased from new business models and innovative ways to provide customer value;
especially when the enterprise’s monetization strategy aligns with the IoT implementations.
Call to Action
Get started today. We have a team of experts to help drive a vision around your business objectives,
help define meaningful scenarios where technology can help improve efficiency, enable innovation, and
transform your business. Use our knowledge and expertise to envision and develop your end-to-end
program to accelerate the value imagined from the Internet of Things (IoT).
As part of Microsoft Services’ portfolio, we have a 16-week Internet of Things Advanced offering to
support your end-to-end IoT Program and to help you create an enterprise-ready IoT Platform that
will allow you to build rapidly, test, and deploy smart, connected business solutions. It makes use of the
full potential of Microsoft Azure IoT-related services to activate delivery of current needs as well as
continued growth and innovation. Also, it provides the foundations for the creation of an IoT
Competency Center (IoTCC) to facilitate value realization discussions, implementation models and
services related to IoT. An IoTCC will help the organization to maximize the use of technology resources
and assets, allowing rapid, repeatable successes from future deployments.

Figure 6: Microsoft Services’ IoT Advanced Offer Engagement Model for MVP pilots
We know there is not a “one-size-fits-all” approach to build an IoT solution, with the IoT Advanced
Offering Microsoft will partner with you to:
▪ Define your overall IoT Program to increase visibility and interest in how IoT can be leveraged
for various business units to help maximize their investments
▪ Define patterns and best practices to build your IoT platform supporting several IoT solutions
▪ Develop, as a reference application, a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) pilot for your business
scenario to meet key organization needs, gather insights to avoid a highly expensive upfront
and to get feedback for future product development
For more information about Consulting and Support solutions from Microsoft, contact your Microsoft
Services representative or visit www.microsoft.com/services.

Credits
Many subject-matter experts contributed to the conceptualization and articulation of the story
contained in this document.
Pablo Junco
Sr. Business Program Manager, Apps & Infra
Microsoft Corporation
Grant Peters
World Wide IoT Lead Architect
Microsoft Services
Nayana Singh
Principal PM Manager, R&D Azure IoT
Ron Zahavi
Principal Program Manager, R&D Azure IoT
Copyright Notice
© 2018 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This document is provided “as-is.” Information and
views expressed in this document, including URL and other Internet Web site references, may change
without notice. You bear the risk of using it. Some examples may be for illustration purposes only and
are fictitious. No real association is intended or inferred. This document does not provide you with any
legal rights to any intellectual property in any Microsoft Product. You may copy and use this document
for your internal, reference purposes.

Whitepaper - IoT adoption in digital transformation journeys (v2.0)

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