Internet of Things

I have written recently about Business Analytics (BA). What is BA? How does it affect your IT strategy and your business in general? I have also observed that there is a relationship between BA and Big Data (BD) – they are related concepts.

To clear up any confusion, I would say that BA is related to taking a set of data, performing a modelling operation, and using the model to predict some kind of future state – what-if calculations. BD is more of a continuous analysis of very large-scale business information.

But the business concept that is driving forward the importance of both Business Analytics and Big Data is really The Internet of Things (IoT).

Even for a fairly short blog post, this is already starting to fill up with three-letter-acronyms so let’s define what the IoT really is. More and more devices are capable of communication using the existing Internet infrastructure. It used to be computers that we would connect to the Internet, then laptops, then smart phones. Now it is tablets, ebooks, televisions, and every corporate electronic system you can think of – from security systems to electricity meters to photocopiers.

This revolution in making almost every device connect to the Internet is the starting point for the IoT. The classic consumer example is usually the connected fridge that can recommend a dinner based on what is inside, though a more useful example might be your car diagnosing a problem and communicating with the service centre without your own interaction.

In 1999, about 250mb of data per person was created each year. By 2012 ten times this amount of data per person was being generated. Data creation is increasing and the speed of increase is accelerating. Every day people are generating data with their smart phones without doing anything – just by switching it on, connecting to the Internet and allowing applications to work in the background.

This change in both the consumer and corporate environment is driving both the need for continuous Big Data analysis and also the ability to predict what may happen next based on Business Analytic tools.