Doing an IoT project? You need knowledge from across the enterprise, not a dedicated team, advises Konecranes' Alun Jones

The range of knowledge and skills required can't be embodied in a single, dedicated team, suggests Jones

Organisations embarking on Internet of Things (IoT) projects should resist the temptation to put together dedicated teams and should instead put together teams embodying knowledge and skills from across the enterprise, according to Alun Jones, data scientist at industrial equipment giant Konecranes, speaking at last week's Internet of Things Business Summit 2016, hosted by Computing.

Jones, who has been working on embedded IoT projects at the global industrial manufacturer for a number of years, said that in his experience at Konecranes it made sense to put together ad hoc teams because the knowledge and skills required to take a project from conception to completion were too vast for any one team to embody.

"I think it's best suited to having clusters of teams - people come together, do something and then either disband or carry on. Nobody can know everything. So we try and get experts from various different parts of the business together and sit them in a room to work out what we should doing, work out what we have got and see if it works," said Jones.

Konecranes has been embedding connected devices within its industrial products for more than a decade which are, for example, capable of telling the company when parts are wearing out before they break down. The company can arrange repairs to be made without the customer suffering from any downtime.

For Konecranes, therefore, Jones does not believe that legacy embedded devices - embedded, perhaps still transmitting data, but no longer needed or used - will be a problem.

"The crane has a lifecycle," said Jones. "Every 10 years, there will be a general overhaul. As part of that general overhaul, we'll replace certain components."

A far bigger problem, therefore, is not obsolete devices, but obsolete software, especially operating systems. "We have problems, such as Windows 2000 Server running on some cranes. Never mind the sensor, it's the software that's going to be the biggest problem," said Jones.