25.10.15 5 Steps to Implement a Successful IoT Project with Tom Clement (50) - OpenText Summit
[00:00:00] In this episode of great practices. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What am I doing? This is a very different episode of great practices for two reasons.
First, it marks my 50th episode of talking with great PMO Leaders project and program managers and industry leaders. Who've shared their insights and great practices over the past four years. Second, this is the first episode where I've been asked to be the guest podcaster at an industry event.
The IOT Innovation Summit OpenText hosted this virtual conference that focused on predictive power and AI operations. I was asked to interview Tom Clement, who is OpenText's Vice President of IOT Solutions. The following episode is a recording of that conversation. You're gonna hear more about the problems companies experience when it comes to an IOT deployment.
Five great practices Tom has developed to ensure it's successful and [00:01:00] the biggest mistake people make that can be avoided. Plus, you'll learn the secret of how to become a Triple Crown guest on great practices.
I hope you enjoy the episode.
Hi everyone. We are back here with you all again discussing IOT, and we thought it would be interesting to invite someone who has a long history of documenting and discussing highly successful principles as it relates to a myriad of topics that require [00:02:00] project management expertise. Chris Kopp is the host of great practices, a very popular podcast.
That provides project managers, project management leaders, and business leaders of all levels with insights into running their operations effectively. I've had the privilege of being on the podcast not once, but twice, to discuss trends and the keys to successfully deploying enterprise technologies. And we have discussed best practices for IO OT deployments.
We thought it would be great for Chris. To be on this segment so he and I can have a brief conversation about iot. Chris, can you tell us a bit more about what great practices is all about? Absolutely. Thanks for having me, me on Tom. Appreciate it. And uh, this is a very creative way that you've come up with in being on great practices for the third time.
So well [00:03:00] done, well done then. Yeah, I'm triple crown. That was good, man. So, so lemme tell you, uh, the premise of great practices. Uh, it was some years ago, somebody asked my 7-year-old nephew and they said, Hey man, what's your favorite movie? And he thought for a minute he says, I don't know. I haven't seen 'em all yet.
And I, it took me a second to to think about that. I was like, that's actually a pretty profound statement coming from a 7-year-old, because that means that you would've seen every single movie and you would've been able to say, well, that's the best movie. That's my favorite movie. So I got to thinking about that a couple days later because I saw best practices.
You know, we got best practices around the office and around work, and everybody's got a best practice. And I got to thinking about that. I said, well, best implies that we've done them all. We've tried every single thing there is to try, and this one is the best. Nobody's done that. We don't know if it's going to be the best.
We haven't tried them all right. [00:04:00] But what we have tried is something great. It's something that's great that works for us. It's something that's great that works for our organization and that's what great practices is all about. So I partnered with the PMO leader, um, thank PMI for project managers to produce this podcast.
And we're 50 episodes in of which Tom, you're gonna be three of those. That's incredible. What a great story. Thanks so much for, uh, being a part of all of this, Chris. We really appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm looking forward to this conversation because when it comes to the internet of things, Tom.
Um, you are my go-to guy to understand what are the, the great practices that are working in that space. And I know, you know, we've had conversations before and you've developed a matrix that really can help companies scale with their deployment. But before we get into that matrix, what problems? It's that you've seen companies.
Experience when it comes to iot deployments? Sure. It's a, it's a really interesting [00:05:00] question. It there, it's a broad, there's a broad spectrum, um, of the challenges, but I'll give you my top three. So first and foremost, always no clear business objective. Yeah, so projects start as tech pilots without a clearly defined KPI.
Really, there may not be specific ROI, so success can't be measured and the funding dries up. The second component is what I would refer to as data chaos and integration gaps. I'll talk a little bit more about this in a minute, but the devices produce potentially inconsistent, maybe siloed or poor quality data that isn't mapped to enterprise systems.
Okay? You can collect data all day long, but you have to map it downstream to the systems. To really make it useful. So having an integrator that knows what they're doing is important. And then the last one is operational misalignment. We're talking about an enterprise deployment, so there's lots of different constituencies involved, [00:06:00] so it drives deployment, of course.
Um, but operations owns the outcome. So without shared ownership, uh, adoption stalls and the value really never scales. Yeah, so that's a lot of, you know, that's a lot of noise and like you're saying, just people would be reluctant to bring that into the organization, you know, because of not being able to realize the benefits of that.
So what, what are some of the, what are some of the impacts then you've seen to companies if they do flounder in this area? Uh, some of those impacts could be, uh, let's call 'em common pitfalls. Okay. So companies get excited about connecting devices, deploying sensors, or building dashboards, but they skip defining a measurable KPII mentioned that.
Yeah. And they really don't think about. The project becoming a, a science experiment, right? Because that's what can happen because if there's no agreed ROI or success metric, the, the stakeholders lose interest. And if it's harder to deploy [00:07:00] than they originally thought, and they have a lot of cost overruns, it just goes into that list of things that we tried that just didn't scale.
So it's like, it's kind of like that shiny new object that people are just gonna go chase after and then it just goes bad and then it's orphaned and then when it's brought up again, people probably don't wanna do it at that point. Absolutely. So you've kind of developed, I guess you would say, some great practices to.
To really show how we can deploy a successful iot project. Can you walk us through this matrix, what we talked about a little bit earlier? Can you walk us through this matrix, uh, that helps people really think through this journey that maybe they've just started to begin or that they're on their way?
Maybe they're in the middle of doing it right now. Okay, so let's, uh, let's segment this a bit. So, in, in my world, we're talking about an enterprise level project, okay? So we're talking about multinationals. Maybe, maybe you're [00:08:00] cross border. Maybe you're Europe, US apac, you've got multiple regions, maybe multiple subsidiaries.
You really wanna make a significant investment in improving the overall posture of your business, leveraging IOT. So we've developed a great practices set of building blocks, and it starts at the bottom, Chris. So if you work your way up, and I'll cover this relatively quickly, so turnkey ingestion. You have to have the ability to collect data.
At scale. And if you can, then you can support rapid expansion of iot networks. You're not getting stuck. You don't have to re-engineer data pipelines, and this is gonna be critical when you're talking about starting with thousands and potentially millions of connected devices. Second, something that's sort of lost.
In the continuum of success as a great practice. And that's your identity management posture. Yeah. So do you have a secure [00:09:00] role base way of allowing access not only to the dashboards that you're building, but to other applications in the business? Are you making sure that it's fault secure? So it has to have single sign on and multi-factor authentication.
And ideally you're doing this in a self-service posture. What I mean is if you have to add, subtract, and delete multiple users in multiple countries in multiple time zones, and each of them needs different privileges to access the data that they need to do their jobs, ideally, that would be a self-service prophecy.
You don't wanna have developers adding and deleting people at scale, that results in potential security issues. The next piece. Of the great practice building blocks is data and application integration, and I said I'd speak a little bit more about this. This is another cornerstone. You can collect all the data you want, but are you doing that with an integrator, A company [00:10:00] that has a history, a long legacy of integrating to multiple downstream systems and ERP systems?
If you don't have that. Out of the box, that's where your IOT deployment becomes quote unquote, the science project, right? You get stalled every time You need to integrate to a new downstream system. Yeah. Highly scalable data processing. So if you can scale with your data. It's highly scalable. Well then you can do things like adding predictive maintenance, uh, uptime guarantees, incorporating SLAs and, and compliance for your data around the world.
And last but certainly not least, is transaction and incident management. So if you're real-time process. It allows you to detect issues, anomalies, and trends instantly enabling things like shutting down a faulty machine, uh, rerouting a logistics route, [00:11:00] uh, alerting, maintenance teams. All of that is. Only possible if you have real time incident management.
So is there, out of, out of those five great practices, is there like one area, um, I guess that people spend, uh, the most time in, or that is just most important to get rights when you look at those five areas? Um, that's why it's the first building block. It's sort of the foundation of the mansion. Yeah. For lack of a better term, you really need to have a plan about how you're going to access, collect, organize, and.
Provide that data to the downstream systems that you have. So maybe, uh, a pre-configured system architecture. Think about the entire trip of your data elements and where you want them to end up. Who wants access, and what are the insights and the KPIs that you wanna achieve? And you need to have a comprehensive plan to do that.[00:12:00]
Yeah, that, that is a great point. I mean, that is the epitome of, of garbage in, garbage out, you know? I mean, if you've got, if you've just got bad data from bad sources, bad locations, everything like that, it's not gonna, it's not gonna serve your need at all. And how do you coalesce it? I, I, so how do you integrate it?
Right? You collect all the data, but you can't. Feed other downstream systems inside of a company, that's where projects start to stall. Yeah. So let me, let me net this out so that it's not a science project, right? So what I'm hearing you say is you start with good data. You then need to know who has access to this data, make sure that that's, uh, scalable as well.
Bounce this data up against real business needs. Make sure everything is staying connected and then actually do something with this data, right, in order to operationalize it, in order to, to tie it into somewhere in a profit, law, profit and loss, where it's gonna, you know, increase revenue, decrease cost, whatever that is, is ultimately what [00:13:00] these building blocks are showing us.
That's a hundred percent accurate. You couldn't have, uh, framed it out any better. That's why we brought you on, Chris, because you have a, you have a way to really explain things and make 'em simple. Well, it was this great presentation right here, Tom, that you put together. So that's, that's what did the trick, man.
So let me, let me ask you this though. When you're looking at these great practices, what, what is the biggest avoidable mistake that you've seen people make in this journey? Uh, I think the biggest avoidable mistake is, um, probably more, more than anything else. It's, uh, it's cross-functional stakeholder alignment.
Okay. You, you can't, IOT is like an ERP deployment. It can't, you can't deploy a solution like this in isolation. Yeah. Are your business stakeholders really bought in? Is, is it prepared to work with you? Um, [00:14:00] what about all your applications that you're gonna ultimately source data from and to? Yeah. Um, it's a comprehensive project.
You know, Chris, you know, one of the things that we highlight on your podcast is great practices. I mean, you're gonna have to have a really strong project management lead and a team, maybe even a PMO involved to make sure that this project succeeds and that team's gonna have to hold everybody accountable.
To the KPIs, the timelines, uh, and you're gonna have to be very careful as you move along so that it's secure along the way, and that at each milestone, your stakeholders are seeing tangible results. So it's interesting because just as, as it sounds like the, the, the good data is foundational to successful.
You know, uh, iot implementation, that alignment is foundational as well. Right? The data's there. Can you collect it? You, you, you've gotta get everybody on board [00:15:00] with this before you start on this journey. Yes. Well, we appreciate your insight into this, Tom, into how making, how to make an IO OT initiative scalable and successful.
How long have you been doing this again? So, um, I'm 25 years in B two P enterprise sales and delivery. Okay. And, uh, in my current role, uh, from an IO OT leadership standpoint, I've been in this nearly five years and I've been in other roles where IO OT was applicable, so call it 10 years in the IOT space and 25 years as a B2B, uh, sales executive, uh, VP of professional services and a number of other roles.
That's fantastic. Alright, so let's say somebody wants to get in touch with you, they wanna learn more about this, they wanna, uh, continue this conversation. What should they do next? I'm a power LinkedIn user and that's a always an easy way. Yep. Uh, Tom Clement out out on LinkedIn. It's always an easy way to get involved, uh, with me directly, but [00:16:00] you can also, um, go to our.
OpenText Aviator iot website, um, it that has everything that we've talked about in a lot more detail, all our use cases, all the examples of where we've been helping customers, and there's a way to contact us and we get back to people almost immediately. And that's www.opentext.com/aviator iot. Perfect.
All right. Well Tom, thanks again for being on today. Congratulations on being the third time guest on great practices and uh, we encourage everybody listening today to keep putting those great IO OT practices in the practice.
That was another great, albeit different episode of great practices and I'd like to thank Tom and OpenText for inviting me to be part of their iot Innovation Summit. Do you have a great practice you'd like to share? Go ahead and send an email to Chris dot [email protected] [00:17:00] and someone will get in touch with you shortly.
Also, be sure not to miss a single episode by subscribing to great practices on your favorite podcast platform. and if you like what you've heard, we've had some great guests on, we've got many more on the way. Be sure to share this with your manager, colleagues, and anybody else you think would benefit.
Thanks again for listening to this episode and keep putting great practices into practice.
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