Think about it: consumers aren’t really interested in the temperature of one room in their house or the video feed from a single camera. They’re looking for the complete picture: ensuring the security system detects movement throughout the whole house or confirming the air conditioning maintains a comfortable temperature.
IoT is about the context of the product and its use cases. Your device or application is part of a broader service. A more comprehensive perspective broadens the context of an individual device and its scope of operation, affecting the approach of overall system design as we move from device-centric thinking to service-centric thinking. Consider the following:
- Conglomeration
The IoT consists of too many “things” for each to be valuable on their own. Devices must be organized together to provide useful information at a higher level. For example, an HVAC system doesn’t need to report the temperature in every room. Individual sensors report to a supervisory control system that makes local decisions, which in turn are reported to higher-level systems that may be offsite.
- Self-monitoring
Higher-level business decision-making processes would be overwhelmed if every individual sensor reported everything all the time. In our HVAC example, a localized supervisory control system can maintain building temperature based on an amount set by a centralized process. The enterprise-level systems would, therefore, rely on a service provided by the HVAC system on a building-by-building basis that reports critical information such as energy usage.
- Interchangeability
The services provided by this conglomeration of devices become more valuable than the devices themselves. If the quality of service remains the same, or better, the hardware is interchangeable. This might seem like a disadvantage for device manufactures, but smart companies who understand the importance of services and compete on the quality become the market leaders.
