Internet of Things in Your Business Environment
At this point in your life, how many objects do you own that are connected to the Internet? About five, six? Seven?
Ten years ago, the answer would have most likely been one or two. But these days, the average person has a smart phone, a personal computer, a work computer, a tablet, a smart TV, and some kind of online gaming system, like an Xbox or a Wii. Experts predict that by 2020, 50 billion objects will be connected to the Internet, and each and every individual will own 6.6 connected objects. Furthermore, it’s projected that the 3 million people interconnected through technology in 1990 will have grown to 1.5 trillion by 2020.
This is what the Internet of Things means.
But what does it mean for the business environment? Twenty years back, technology scholars encouraged small businesses to get online, or get out. Flash forward those twenty years, and it’s very true. It’s very rare these days (and unfortunate) to find a business that’s not online.
The new encouragement from technology scholars for business owners now is: Get Ready for the Internet of Things to transform your company—or prepare to fail.
While this warning may not apply to all fields, it does apply to a whole heck of a lot. The majority, in fact.
When it comes to companies, the concept of the Internet of Things (or “IoT”) can be utilized to create greater production efficiency and a better and more organized quality of business. It’s all about connectivity, networking, and analytics, which are very important keys to a company progressing. The Internet of Things is a natural evolution of smart technology, the Cloud, telecoms, communication—all the things that we were already using, just all rolled into one.
The future is exciting for businesses who embrace the fundamentals of IoT and utilize them, because they only gain. Valuable data of all kinds is already continuously stored in the Cloud, where it’s instantly analyzed and reviewed. This helps progress happen, as it’s much faster to see what’s working and what isn’t—thereby creating greater customer experiences and improved business processes. From Cloud to analytics to reports, the system should be seamless and easily sharable throughout the office.
“Cloud computing incited huge changes in IT markets and among traditional system vendors, but IoT promises even greater evolution and disruption,” says Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT. “If IoT market projections are anywhere near accurate, it will be a massive commercial opportunity that could transform the ways that businesses use and benefit from technology.”
By working together and connecting the right way through the right online and on-site management, employees can handle major data increases. The big winners from IoT will be anyone who acquires better document control, better tracking, better reporting, and better organization by taking advantage of it. The future of document management and enterprise content management solutions is the combination of online and on-site tools and practices, as well as the office always being on the same page with their information and devices.
Enterprise Content Management is a key area of business that drives extremely important organizational processes, and plays a vital part in business growth and development. With constantly-evolving technology and connectivity, there have been high-impact changes that have transformed business processes and made them richer, more powerful, and more versatile. IoT has the ability to bring in new opportunities that can transform scope, workflow, efficiency, and effectiveness within a business.
The Internet of Things is not just about gathering data; it’s also about the analysis and use of that data. So business owners will need the right reporting software, and the right software to share it. As consumers acquire more and more devices—and new ones are constantly launched and sold to us—the data of a business should be accessible through all of these devices. Employees should be able to pull the information they need from their smart phones, their tablets, web apps, their desktops, their laptops. Everything.
Many strong Enterprise Content Management solution companies will provide software that allows employees to easily access their data from anywhere. Data is everything to a company, and the way it’s shared is almost just as important. This is another critical area of a company’s success—the marriage of the Cloud and a business’s digital filing cabinet. As a business owner, having all of your data, both marketing data and company data, in one secure and easily-accessible place cannot be encouraged enough.
“One ECM system to rule them all” should be the slogan of businesses now and going forward. Having the marketing information that has been collected, researched, analyzed, and otherwise slaved over right alongside company data (reports, emails, invoices, general info) is like magic. It reduces so many mistakes, so much frustration, and really does put everyone on the same page and bring minds to one meeting space—even if those minds are spread across the country in different places. This is why having the right enterprise management system in place is one of the smartest things a business owner can do. It truly is taking the “Internet of Things” mindset and placing it within the workplace.
To many business owners, it may feel overwhelming to know where to begin with utilizing the world of connectivity to transform. However, it is crucial to start in order to stay competitive. Technology may be intimidating, but keeping up is survival.
The biggest mistake a business can make right now is not to do anything at all, and to not try. This can result in many lost opportunities to leverage enterprise-level content for growing a business. Enterprise Content Management technologies must evolve to keep up with the explosive growth of the Internet of Things—including providing highly-flexible, intelligent content repositories and building hybrid workflows around the unstructured content coming from IoT sources. and much more. The convergence demands the need for an advanced ECM platform.
At Contentverse, we are your experts when it comes to enterprise content management and document solutions. Businesses don’t need to be weighed down under unnecessary paperwork or confusing software systems. We can help organize all your company’s data, from digitizing everything to organizing it so that all your employees are on the same page and connected to your company’s information. Let us help answer your questions today!