The Internet of Things could offer huge amounts of information about your IT components so that you can work more efficiently to optimize your operations. Learn how SAP LeanIX can leverage all your data to surface the insights you need.
The Internet of Things (IoT) has been around since the 1980s and, nowadays, almost every device you use is interconnected with every other device you have. That's a vast amount of information and it can be leveraged to optimize business operations across your organization.
This data is often used to manage inventory or monitor storage temperatures, but could it also be used to enable predictive maintenance? Just as your printer tells you when it is jammed, so could a server warn you that it's about to break down.
Yet, adding IoT connections to each of your devices is expensive and it might not be necessary. You already have a huge amount of data available about your devices without IoT, so perhaps you can leverage predictive maintenance without IoT by leveraging SAP LeanIX.
To learn more about how SAP LeanIX can help you find the five types of obsolete technology holding your organization back, download our white paper:
The Internet of Things (IoT) is the idea of adding computers and internet connections to devices that don't normally have them, so that they can be networked together to share information. For example, you might add technology that turns on the lights in your home when you unlock the front door.
This is easily confused with what we now call Smart Home technology, which is a kind of IoT, but IoT extends far beyond the home. You might, for example, set your office printer to order itself more ink when it starts to run out or a factory to start producing more cars when orders come in for them.
The first IoT device was created in 1982 when the Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science Department added sensors to a vending machine in the building to track temperature and inventory. This was inspired by a computer-controlled vending machine invented by the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1972.
The term "Internet of Things" itself, however, was coined by Peter T Lewis in 1985:
"The Internet of Things, or IoT, is the integration of people, processes and technology with connectable devices and sensors to enable remote monitoring, status, manipulation and evaluation of trends of such devices."
Peter T Lewis, President, Director, and co-founder, Cellular One
Since then, we've seen networking devices added to everything from refrigerators to door locks. Most often, IoT devices are used to automate operations and track inventory, but could it be put to better use?
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a powerful tool for inventory management and automation, but it's yet to be fully leveraged to manage technology obsolescence. IoT could be leveraged to identify obsolete IT components in real time.
Of course, organizations have been tracking the age of their technology for a long time. It's common to use amortization to prepare you to purchase replacement equipment once it's reached the end of its life.
However, this system can be imperfect. An over-used device can fail before its time, while an old machine can still operate well enough to make replacing it wasteful.
In manufacturing, predictive maintenance is used to manage the replacement of devices when they are actually wearing out, rather than just after a set period of time. IoT device connections can be used to gather information about device usage and wear and tear in order to facilitate remote predictive maintenance.
We already have this kind of functionality in place for some IT components. A printer will send you a notification when it is running out of ink or has a paper jam, but imagine if a server could send you a similar notification when it's reaching the end of its life.
Even better, imagine if you could have a dashboard of every single IT component your company owns with each having a countdown accurately predicting when it will need to be replaced based on the actual usage and wear-and-tear. Well, we may not have IoT capabilities built into all our devices as of yet, but perhaps we can offer the next-best thing.
The Internet of Things (IoT) could well be leveraged to perform predictive maintenance on your organization's IT components. However, that requires installing IoT within each component when there is a better way.
After all, each of your useful devices will be operated by a user every single day and who is better able to monitor your device than they are? Taking their feedback and putting it in the context of which of your devices is important for achieving your business goals will allow you to determine where best to invest your limited budget in order get the best return on investment in updating your technology.
To make this even more accurate, you can add user feedback and device context to performance metrics, cost data, vendor information, and every other metric you have available. All together, you can gain a complete picture of which parts of your IT landscape need replacing, whether you have IoT data or not.
This predictive maintenance allows you to put the minimum amount of resource into achieving the optimum productivity and efficiency from your IT toolset. This puts you in the best position to get the most from your employees and your operations.
All you need is a central repository that can pull in the information you already have about your IT landscape without even needing to connect them all up to the IoT. That central repository is the SAP LeanIX Technology Risk and Compliance solution.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is almost obsolete itself now, since we have so many connected devices already. Those devices that still aren't connected to the internet are still used by people and processes that are all very connected to the internet.
The data you need is there and the SAP LeanIX package of solutions can gather it all together to surface the insights you need regarding where you need to invest in replacement technology. It can do it all in one place with the support of automation.
Out of the box, the SAP LeanIX toolset will connect to your configuration management database (CMDB), such as ServiceNow. It will then track those IT components against the data it gathers from automated user surveys and the information you already have about your IT landscape from the SAP LeanIX Application Portfolio Management solution.
Should you ever get IoT data, you'll be able to add that to customizable IT component fact sheets without SAP LeanIX. Until then, there's plenty of other data that you can draw into the repository in order to monitor your IT components and conduct predictive maintenance.
To learn more about how SAP LeanIX can help you find the five types of obsolete technology holding your organization back, download our white paper: