Creating Functional Teams for the IoT

Chapter 1. Building Functional Teams for the IoT Economy

You don’t have to be a hardcore dystopian to imagine the problems that can unfold when worlds of software collide with worlds of hardware.

When you consider the emerging economics of the Internet of Things (IoT), the challenges grow exponentially, and the complexities are daunting.

For many people, the IoT suggests a marriage of software and hardware. But the economics of the IoT involves more than a simple binary coupling. In addition to software development and hardware design, a viable end-to-end IoT process would include prototyping, sourcing raw materials, manufacturing, operations, marketing, sales, distribution, customer support, finance, legal, and HR.

It’s reasonable to assume that an IoT process would be part of a larger commercial business strategy that also involves multiple sales and distribution channels (e.g., wholesale, retail, value-added reseller, direct), warehousing, operations, and interactions with a host of regulatory agencies at various levels of government, depending on the city, state, region, and country.

A diagram of a truly functional IoT would look less like a traditional linear supply chain and more like an ecosystem or a network. The most basic supply chain looks something like this:

Supplier → Producer → Consumer

If we took a similarly linear approach and mapped it to a hypothetical IoT scenario, it might look something like this:

Entrepreneurs → Capital Markets and Investors → Sales → ...