IoT: The Foundation For Service Lifecycle Management

By Bill Pollock, president and principal, consulting analyst, Strategies For Growth, www.s4growth.com

The rapid growth of IoT technologies will transform how service-based companies operate and dramatically raise expectations of clients.

Hydrogen and oxygen are each critical components of life, the air we all breathe, and the basic building blocks of water (H2O), when combined together in just the right way. Well, that’s very similar to the way we see service lifecycle management (SLM) and the Internet of Things (IoT) — each critical components of business, the way we all communicate, and the basic building blocks of field services management — again, when combined in just the right way.

But why is this intersection so important? And why now? The reasons are many, pervasive, and growing exponentially. A 2013 McKinsey Global Institute report estimated that the number of “things” connected to the Internet “presently exceeds the total number of humans on the planet” and is “accelerating to as many as 50 billion connected devices by the end of the decade.” That’s billions.