Deploying The Internet Of Things: Don't Make The Same Mistakes

By Jim West, Vice President of Facilities Technology for Velociti

For anyone who’s survived a messy network deployment, the ambition and complexity of Internet of Things deployments should raise flags. From the very start, you need to plan for successful staging, installation, visibility, and ongoing monitoring.

Tiny sensors, swarm intelligence, Big Data. Lots of glamour, lots of anticipation. We’re well on our way to a sensor-enabled planet, with a trillion objects eventually reporting activity, temperature, motion, radiation, and whatever else developers and their clients can dream up. While most of the popular press is given over to consumer applications like connected homes, cars, and clothing, the high-economic-value opportunity is likely to be industrial and commercial IoT applications in factories, hospitals, hotels, farms, municipalities, logistics chains, jet engines, drilling rigs, wind farms, and elsewhere.

But what about deploying these many smart devices? Why worry about that? Isn’t that something you can just plug in or cable together at the end of our project timeline? Unfortunately, no.

Compared with the coming IoT networks, wireless and computer networks are relatively straightforward, and yet their performance is routinely hobbled by haphazard deployment. Access points are poorly located. Devices and connections fail prematurely. Deadlines come and go. Change orders devastate budgets.

With all the smart people involved, why do deployments so often stumble? Virtually all the corporate planning effort goes into choosing the right hardware, evaluating bids, negotiating price, and configuring software and middleware. Then, almost as an afterthought, the company’s reseller or system integrator partner passes the torch from IT to facilities, which dispatches a low-bid crew of installers. Things begin to unravel.

Sound familiar? Now multiply that tenfold or a hundredfold.

Deployment is not, and will never be, a glamorous topic. But it’s a critical planning factor that’s all too often taken for granted or treated as a fungible commodity service rather than the technology specialty it deserves to be. In the IoT, business-as-usual deployment services will be in over their heads, causing delays, cost overruns, and sub-optimal operation.                      

In addition to gargantuan scale and always-on status, IoT networks are more complex, heterogeneous, and intraoperative than their predecessors. Deployment experts, whether in-house or on contract, need to be involved early in the planning process to help optimize device testing, physical placement, data security, power consumption, and efficient bandwidth usage. The later in the process they’re engaged, the less helpful they can be.

A deployment expert, not tied to a particular vendor or technology, can offer crucial recommendations for staging, testing, installing, and enabling project transparency. Executed well, this project-management approach to scheduling, staffing, and status can live on past the actual rollout to continue monitoring IoT device health and assist with subsequent software and firmware updates.

Given most companies’ sorry experience with fumbled rollouts, it’s puzzling that so many continue to treat deployment as a last-stage installation function rather than as an integral contributor. With the Internet of Things, that attitude will lead to massive frustration. Spend more time up-front to ensure that deployment goes according to plan.