The business drivers of the Industrial IoT are clear, with survey respondents citing operational efficiency, productivity, and cost savings as catalysts. Sustainability targets like optimizing energy and resource usage were also highlighted as important priorities, however. Though Industrial IoT’s potential for value is clear, we discovered some respondents still found it a challenge to create a clear business case. Value realization increases with large and comprehensive implementations, but these also involve more complexity. To understand the true potential, a holistic approach is needed across infrastructure, platforms and solutions. Business model innovations are an important factor in value realization. Many companies are effectively de-risking Industrial IoT investments, shifting capital outlays to operating expenses using cloud technology and “as-a-service” consumption models, which are now finding their way into the OT realm. Subscription and service-based consumption models can simplify implementation, leverage existing infrastructure, increase agility and accelerate “time to value.” Use cases that deliver lower costs are critical to industry’s progress on sustainability. For example, the cost savings that come with optimizing maintenance spending or reducing electricity bills, are integral to the business case for sustainability.

— Key Insight Economic and environmental gains don't have to be a trade-off and can be true "win-win" scenarios.

With Industrial IoT, the first step is, as one expert put it, connecting “dark assets,” placing connected sensors on physical infrastructure, so it can provide data for decision-making (eg, motors, drives, buildings, vehicles, electrical equipment and systems). Once assets are connected, we can harness OT and IT data to feed enterprise systems (eg, ERP, MES, SCADA) and analytics dashboards. This allows consistently secured and contextualized data to help users avoid needless complexity and enable good decisions. Mitigating complexity is key here. Not everything that can be measured matters and not everything that can be counted should count. It’s why enabling better decisions at scale demands deep domain expertise. The benefits of capturing data vastly expand when the Industrial IoT is scaled. Expanding the scope of Industrial IoT enables richer insights across operations, moving from asset-level to system-level intelligence that encompasses entire value chains and ecosystems.

— Key Insight Connecting physical assets can unlock transformative insights, but ensuring data collected translates into better decisions at scale demands deep domain expertise.