Digital Transformation in Practice: Learning from IIC Deployments

Achieving success with digital transformation is a challenge to businesses. Many factors come into play from business objectives to technology readiness, organizational goals and alignment. How can an organization begin to understand the issues and aspects associated with achieving positive outcomes? One way is to take learnings from practice to provide meaningful guidance. Industry IoT Consortium (IIC) members partner to put theory to practice. They experiment, assess, and pilot new technology, solutions and business models in testbeds and test drives. Results from testbeds and test drives inform members' go-to-market strategies and offer guidance to industry about how to solve real-world problems. Learnings can be shared with industry to help businesses form and fulfil their transformational goals. Industry guidance is extracted and applied leading to less risk and more rapid deployments. Testbeds are platforms for experimentation and innovation. They explore the technology and business models that enable a trustworthy industrial IoT. Each testbed is deployed outside the lab, in a real-world environment where the testbed faces a different set of challenges. Facing these real-world challenges builds insight and knowledge about how the testbed technology and business model perform. This leads to meaningful guidance and an impact in the marketplace. Testbeds produce technology and new learnings, but they are not solutions to be deployed as operable solutions. Test drives do that. Test drives are solutions created for deployment as pilots. Test drives leverage technology from testbeds and industry to the benefit of technology users and their businesses. Test drives enable technology users to take technology for a test drive, similar to how a prospective automobile purchaser may do the same. Test drives that achieve digital transformation outcomes result in learnings that inform industry about what works. Learnings that affect success factors for IIoT projects were documented in the IIC white paper, ""A Compilation of Testbed Results: Toward Best Practices for Developing and Deploying IIoTSolutions""1. This current report describes a set of IIC testbed and test drive deployments and extracts learnings from them pertaining to digital transformation. It makes observations to inform and guide digital transformation initiatives generally. Learnings from practice create meaningful guidance for businesses and teams engaged in or considering digital transformation initiatives. While testbed and test drive deployments may be constrained in their size and scope, each is deployed into a real-world environment and faces real-world challenges. As a result, learnings from the deployments are credible and extensible, with caution, to full scale projects.