Infrastructure and organisational disciplines will need to change if IoT is to become a part of future business operations, according to Gartner.
Research director Nick Heudecker told the recent Gartner Symposium that the Internet of Things will break down traditional data principles.
“The idea of a data monolith today is becoming rapidly outdated,” he said.
“You will need to analyse data where it is generated, and ensure quality when it is admitted and used.
“Processing will have to occur in real-time, interactively, iteratively, or in batch.”
For companies that retained information architects, they would need to get closer to the IoT devices and the source of data, Heudecker said.
However, he believed data processes would also increasinly occur “without human intervention”, and that decision management and decision automation will become increasingly prevalent.
He believed the IoT and business worlds could be bridged with robust master data management (MDM).
“MDM will become a key part in understanding and relating the ‘things’ in the world to what your business processes are actually expecting and are used to dealing with, in terms of data,” he said.
A conceptual framework
Heudecker outlined a conceptual framework for the infrastructure required to support an IoT ecosystem, centred around four principles:
- Describe – How are you going to adequately detail the information? How are you going to collect the metadata? How are you going to validate the metadata as useful and correct?
- Organise – How are you going to store the data? How are you going to optimise for that storage? How will you do that in a highly distributed environment?
- Integrate and share – How will you integrate and share data between different parties and capitalise on existing capability?
- Govern – How will you govern your traditional and IoT data sources? How will you ensure you’re not sharing things you shouldn’t? Are you using data that is the highest quality? Do you trust the data being collected in your IoT environment?
