It’s that time of year when everyone reflects on the past while looking to the future, and enterprises are no different. Executives at companies worldwide are reviewing changes in their industries including disruptive competitors and the technologies driving them. At the same time, they are reviewing their own technology implementations, assessing their effectiveness and looking to 2017 for further innovations.
In 2017, there will be growing “chatter” in the enterprise, thanks to smart devices that are now able to “speak” to the cloud and to one another. Some enterprises are already able to pinpoint the location and health of their critical assets, and are looking to expand the data available from these devices. Apart from operational data, these devices can provide real-time workflow visibility ensuring that the next best action is taken to achieve their business objectives.
Additionally, enterprises will take data to the next level in 2017 and begin to truly decode the information already being collected from IoT-enabled and wearable devices. Decoding this data will help inform and accelerate the decision-making process. However, this opportunity is not without its challenges. As computing power has skyrocketed and the amount of energy needed for each computation has plummeted, the ability to track and analyze data is reaching a point where enterprises have to jump in.
Data is, in fact, “perishable.” This means if you leave it sitting for too long, data loses its value and the ability to provide time sensitive insight your enterprise needs. Data has a shelf life, and enterprises are losing valuable insights because of the disjointed sources generating and collecting data independently, contributing only to a small piece of the big picture. One of the greatest challenges in the next year will be for businesses to translate captured data - across all devices and business functions - into actionable insights as fast as they can.
The “Intelligent Enterprise” is an operational framework that helps to define how information passes from the physical world into the digital world and how the resultant data is analyzed along the way providing real-time actionable insights and visibility. In partnership with the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard (TECH), Zebra assembled 40 industry experts for the 2016 Innovation Symposium: The Intelligent Enterprise. Click here to discover how these thought leaders defined an “Intelligent Enterprise” and how you may apply these best practices and opportunities to your organization.
Ultimately, the “Intelligent Enterprise” provides a new level of visibility that will enable businesses to grow faster by helping to make better decisions more quickly and efficiently. In 2017, we will begin to see enterprises functioning intelligently on a larger scale, across industries, to remain agile and save both time and money.
Enterprises should be excited for the coming year and the real-time opportunities it will bring. Businesses will be better positioned to react to how products and inventory are moving and where they are needed, manufacturers will understand what parts are needed and how to produce them immediately, and enterprises will be situationally aware of what’s happening across all their business processes and can act on that information immediately.
