By: Bhargav Desai, Global Lead, Transformation Management Consulting Practice, LTIMindtree

Introduction

Our world is getting filled by connected devices. As per industry estimates, we will have estimated 25 billion connected devices by 2020, and this is a staggering number. What does this mean to various industries and the workforce engaged across those industries. How will they embrace this massive intrusion of connected devices in their work life and personal life? Whether this will turn into a battle of Human versus connected devices/ intelligent machines is a question that is to be answered. For most of the organizations, embracing IoT is not a choice but a compulsion. This has become an existential requirement. So how can organizations embrace the wave of IoT and ride it to their advantage.

Enablers of IoT journey

Being and integral part of this transformation journey for many of our clients, we believe that IoT is an opportunity for organizations to unleash their true potential. There are two major tenets that have to be managed to be successful in the IoT Journey.

• Transforming Leadership – e-Leader
• Digital / IoT enabled workforce

Let us dive deeper on our approach for managing three tenets:

Transforming Leadership to become “e-Leaders”

Transformation of the leadership team seems very logical and an easy task to accomplish. Based on the statistical data available with PROSCI for major transformation program, more than 80% participants believe that leadership infectiveness is a primary reason for program failure.

For a transformation journey like IoT, leadership has to embrace the data-intensive and faster decision making skillset. Leaders have to learn “Fail Fast” approach and propagate informed risk taking ability across the organization. The Innovation culture has to the appreciated and encouraged by the leadership. Agile mindset and agile business strategy have to be embraced by e-leaders. e-Leaders have to demonstrate the “Agile mindset and decision making, innovation orientation, and most importantly – empathy.”

How do we enable this transformation?

• e-Leaders Grid: Peer-coaching and supporting in adoption of “attributes of e-leaders”
• Fail fast is the new normal: Mandating “fail fast – agile thinking and execution approach” for majority of the strategic initiative
• Innovation Council: Creation of innovation council for propagating culture of Innovation
• Crucial conversation labs: Senior leadership to conduct crucial conversation labs – ensure leaders resisting the e-Leader transformation are aligned and on-boarded.

Digital / IoT-enabled workforce

Enabling existing workforce to embrace and adopt IoT-driven processes and systems will depend primarily on the acceptance of the idea of “co-existence”, and will depend on perception of the workforce around – work culture changes, loss of flexibility, loss of control, Job loss fear, and reskilling challenges. To manage these challenges, an organization would need to create a persona-driven approach with a focus on –

• Role Transformation: This aspect would cover development of IoT-aligned organization structure and role definition, IoT-aligned performance metrics, Competency assessment and enablement framework for IoT-ready workforce, digital yet customized workforce engagement mechanism.
• Future-state Definition: This aspect would cover identification and finalization of the end state metric of the IoT program, adoption metric for workforce.

Conclusion

Adaptation for the IoT Journey will not only involve adoption of new technology and processes; an imminent change in organizational thought process will be required. Managing such a massive change in organization mindset should be driven and managed by a dedicated team of Organizational Change Management professionals. These efforts will not give the outcome from start of the journey, but will ensure long lasting results for an orginization.