HOW DATA WILL ENABLE “LIVING SERVICES” IN THE IoT: BI Intelligence recently spoke with Mark Curtis, co-founder of Accenture-owned digital design firm Fjord, about how the IoT will change digital experiences. In a recent report, Fjord argued that the true value of connected devices will be in delivering “living services” that learn and adapt to their users’ preferences and habits over time.

Curtis illustrated the concept with the example of a smart lock on a hotel door, which on its own doesn’t deliver a great deal of value. But when that hotel door is networked with other connected devices in its proximity it can tell who is entering or leaving the room based on the smartphone or device used to open the door. That recognition by the smart lock could then turn other devices in the room on or off and alert the thermostat to set the room temperature to the customer’s preferred setting. 

For that smart lock to deliver such an experience, data needs to be analyzed in the backend to understand the customer and personalize functions to his or her preferences. Curtis detailed three obstacles that enterprises need to tackle to deliver these personalized experiences:

• Organizations need a platform with the scalability to ingest huge volumes of data that will be created by new connected devices in their networks.
• To analyze relevant data, organizations will need to know what kind of insights they’re looking to get from their data. Today, a human often has to interpret data to find the most relevant information. That won’t be possible in the future – the exponential increase in the volume of data from more connected devices will require automating that selection process. Organizations will have to know before hand what data to segment out for analysis.
• Organizations will have to think through how they will change services in real-time based on data. For example, customers will increasingly want to see for themselves all of the data being collected so they too can understand their own behaviors. This is already becoming prevalent with fitness trackers that allow the users to see data regarding their activity levels. Over time consumers will get bored looking at the same data all the time though. So enterprises need to surprise customers by learning what information they’re interested in and then interpret the data to deliver new relevant insights. For example, a fitness tracker could learn when the user’s activity levels typically drop and provide suggestions through a mobile app or web portal on how to be more active during those sedentary periods.