Procurement for Digital Transformation and IIoT

With digital transformation comes risk

Digital transformation (DX) is a type of disruption. It will unlock new possibilities in business models, value propositions and operational efficiency. Competitive dynamics will ensure that entire industries must transform to become a market leader or keep pace with market leaders, or face loss of market share. As ever, this kind of disruption is not risk-free.

In a recent blog post we outlined the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC’s) approach to DX, the key technologies underpinning DX, and the first steps for adoption (as illustrated below).

At the end of this sequence is a need to ‘Plan for deployment’. Planning for deployment with Internet of Things (IoT), and wider DX, is significantly different to more traditional software and solution development environments. In general, with any IoT project, there are more constraints (both technical and operational), more dependencies (between technologies and vendors), and more opportunities to under-deliver. There are, of course, often significant opportunities to over-deliver in terms of impact to a business, and the setting of a strategic IoT vision at a technical and operational level during the deployment of any specific project.

Avoiding the pitfalls, and positioning for the upsides

The key first step to avoid the pitfalls, and position for upside benefits, is to undertake a rigorous procurement exercise. This is exactly the area that the IIC’s RFP Toolkit, co-authored by Transforma Insights, focuses on. The toolkit includes six key modules:

1. Challenges, risks and mitigation, identifying and discussing some of the key areas that can potentially compromise the success of a project, and how to combat these.
2. Project planning, including discussion of scope setting, and the overall RFP process.
3. RFP creation, including discussion of requirements management for IoT RFPs, and how to translate them to an effective RFP document.
4. IIC RFP Wizard, an interactive tool that allows technology adopters to profile the complexities of a specific project and ensures that the information that a technology vendor needs is included in an RFP.
5. RFP distribution & vendor selection, including guidance for adding functional requirements and supporting a vendor Q&A process.
6. Expert advice & discussion, including identification of pitfalls and best practices. Ongoing discussion on the RFP topic can be found at the IIC’s Community Forum.

The IIIC's Resource Hub

The RFP Toolkit is part of a wider Resource Hub proposition from the IIC, including assets that help end-users to develop technology concepts, and to adopt new emergent technologies in the most effective and impactful way. Also to be found in the Resource Hub, and co-authored by Transforma Insights analysts, are the IoT Maturity Model (intended to help end-users to understand how their adoption of IoT concepts compares to market leaders) and the Project Explorer (intended to help end-users to better understand the complexities of any specific IoT project).