IIC launches maturity assessment tool for businesses adopting IIoT

June 24, 2019 – The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) has launched the IIoT Maturity Assessment, a web-based tool included in the IIC Resource Hub that enables users to better understand their enterprise IIoT maturity.

The IIC is a membership program with a mandate to transform business and society by accelerating the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).

The IIoT Maturity Assessment helps organizations become best-practice adopters of IIoT by guiding business managers through a range of questions about the adoption, usage and governance of IIoT within their organizations.

“The IIoT market has grown quickly and many businesses planned strategy while in the midst of execution and need to step back and assess their true IIoT maturity,” says Jim Morrish, co-chair of the IIC’s Business Strategy and Solution Lifecycle Working Group and co-author of the IIoT Maturity Assessment tool in a release. “The IIoT Maturity Assessment will help companies get a baseline for their maturity right now and assess it in regular intervals to track their progress.”

The IIoT Maturity Assessment is comprised of a framework of four main dimensions and their corresponding strands.

Business strategy
· Market context
· Strategic context
· Business model innovation and refinement
· IoT Foundations

Business solution Lifecycle
· Interface-to-business strategy
· Solution design
· Project team structuring
· Project management
· In-service monitoring and feedback

Technology
· Technology strategy
· Reference architecture and standards
· Platforms stack
· Data location transparency

Security
· Governance
· Enablement
· Hardening

The IIoT Maturity Assessment considers 63 individual capabilities, each with five levels of maturity within the above framework. For example, under strategic context, a maturity level can range from a limited number of key individuals having stepped up to IIoT ownership to full ownership of IIoT within an organization. The IIoT Maturity Assessment provides feedback about the level of maturity and highlights areas that may require development.

“There’s a real difference between using IIoT to streamline processes and using it to create new revenue streams or make better business decisions,” says Ian Hughes, senior analyst, Internet of Things at 451 Research. “A tool like this can be a real eye opener for an organization wanting to transform their business to remain competitive and increase profits.”

The final outputs provided to users also give links to the IIC Body of Knowledge for reference and to help improve their maturity. This includes collaborative resources developed by industry leaders from the IIC membership, including IIC foundational documents (Industrial Internet Reference Architecture, Industrial Internet Security Framework, Industrial Internet Connectivity Framework, Business Strategy and Innovation Framework, Industrial Internet of Things Analytics Framework, and Vocabulary Technical Report) and other IIC documents and tools.

The IIoT Maturity Assessment is available in three levels of analysis: Quick, Standard (both open to everyone) and Detailed (IIC members only).