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You are here: Home / Human Capital & Industrial IoT Workforce / IoT Culture Strategy as Digital Transformation Lynchpin

IoT Culture Strategy as Digital Transformation Lynchpin

November 7, 2016 by Babette Ten Haken Leave a Comment

IoT culture strategyDevelop an IoT culture strategy. That step is a mission-critical response to the data tsunami characterizing the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) ecosystem.

At IoT Emerge, speakers presented digital transformation strategy business cases. In each case, IoT culture strategy concurrently evolved.

We witness the beginning of IoT Phase 2, as I like to call it. Business and human capital strategy models pivot from assembly-line mindset where workers are told what to do.

Task complexity catalyzes IoT culture strategy and business model pivots.

Digital transformation deconstructs yesterday’s business models and human capital strategy. How prepared is your organization to evolve from “what got you to where you are today” mindset?

The IoT paradigm shift involves more than restructuring people and functions. What is involved in executing IoT culture strategy is best captured by MIT’s Edgar H. Schein in Humble Inquiry.

The U.S culture is strongly built on the tacit assumptions of pragmatism, individualism, and status through achievement. These assumptions introduce a strong bias for getting the job done, which, combined with individualism, leads to a devaluing of relationship building, teamwork, and collaboration except as a means to the end of task accomplishment… However, as tasks become more complex and interdependent, collaboration, teamwork, and relationship building will become more necessary.

Clearly, IoT outcomes are not best executed via corporate silos, individual competition and Us versus Them mindset. IoT connectivity not only connects machines: it connects people as well.

IoT Culture Strategy eats execution of digital transformation strategy for breakfast.

You have heard the phrase “culture eats strategy for breakfast,” attributed to Peter Drucker. Consider how your organization’s business, operations, IT and people processes changed since 2011, the formal recognition of IoT as the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Executing digital transformational strategy is the ultimate test of converging people-processes-software-equipment within your organization. Your business lynchpin is IoT culture strategy. A lynchpin stabilizes execution of business, IT and operational strategy.

  • The IoT Buyers Journey is not about conversations with machines, although buying decisions are more data-driven today than they were yesterday.
  • Machines do not sell to each other. Why leave the sales process up to marketing automation?
  • Extraordinary customer experience is not created by leaving new customers to the mercy of automated customer service platforms. Why does the sales team continue to abandon newly won customers, post-sale?

Operations and Information Technology convergence catalyze IoT culture strategy.

Deploying a digital transformation strategy, such as moving from paper-based business and operations processes to Cloud based data-capture platforms, involves more than flipping a switch. At the conference, Robert Bierwagen, VP and CIO at MPI Corporation, shared the nitty gritty of their business case.

Digital transformation is not a matter of telling employees “Make It So.” It is not a matter of consolidating everyone onto one CRM platform and then expecting everything – and everyone – to automatically sort itself out and fall into place.

To execute IoT digital transformation, employees must collaborate and work in cross-functional teams. That scenario is both messy and rewarding.

  1. First of all, current employees, especially those on the plant floor, may be neither comfortable nor conversant working with machine-software interfaces.
  2. Furthermore, the majority of the current workforce was hired to work within a task- and function-oriented environment.
  3. Finally, these staffers were not hired for cross functional mindset or ability to work in an IoT team setting.  (Like when you ask the theoretical braniac IT guys to work with the “tell me and I’ll do it” OT guys on the plant floor.)

That first or second or third meeting is not going to be magic. Got the picture?

Seeking stability in a state of flux: the industrial IoT ecosystem.

IoT decision-making is continuous and multi-factorial, involving the intersection of people, processes, software and machines. Folks with winning IoT culture strategies “get” this. Those who resist or dig in and defend yesterday’s legacy processes lag behind.

The Caterpillar and MPI Corporation business cases focus on the realization that an IoT culture strategy is the lynchpin of a never-ending digital and organizational transformation.

The irony of digital transformation is that human to human relationships are firmly re-inserted into mission-critical decision making. The IoT culture lynchpin requires people to work with other people to make and execute solid decisions.

Terri Lewis, Digital and Technology Director, Energy & Transportation, described Caterpillar’s journey into the IoT as a growing realization that “collaboration across the value stream is the killer app.”

The Big Data IoT tsunami inserts greater complexity into how we make decisions. Computational power is a tool. It allows us to seek – and gain – greater clarity from big data. However, insights are achieved by people collaborating with people within a solid IoT culture strategy.

Is organizational culture the first or last item on your digital transformation “To-Do” list? Think about it.

Babette Ten Haken is a management consultant, strategist, speaker and coach focused on customer success for customer retention in the industrial Internet of Things ecosystem. She traverses the interface between human capital strategy for hiring, developing and implementing teams of collaborative technical, engineering, sales and business professionals. She serves manufacturing- and engineering- intensive companies, catalyzing teams to create enduring business outcomes.

Babette’s playbook of technical / non-technical collaboration hacks, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon. Visit the Free Resources section of her website for more tools.

Image source: Getty images

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Filed Under: Collaboration And Convergence, Customer Experience, Success, Loyalty, Retention, Human Capital & Industrial IoT Workforce, Professional Development Tagged With: culture strategy, digital transformation, IoT, IoT Culture, IoT Culture Strategy, IoT Emerge

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