by Angela Guess
Nick Heath recently wrote in TechRepublic, “Hyperbole is the norm when talking about how businesses can transform themselves using Internet of Things and big data. What you hear less often is just how difficult it can be to get these projects right. After more than 10 years of working on big data and Internet of Things (IoT) programs, analytics firm Teradata has seen how much effort is required to mine useful insights from webs of interconnected sensors. Sprinkling IoT sensors throughout your firm won’t necessarily give you a snapshot of what you need to know, at least not without a lot of work, said Martin Wilcox, who leads Teradata’s centre of excellence… Here are the five hard truths about IoT that Wilcox said businesses need to take on board.”
Heath goes on, “(1) Sensors sometimes lie. ‘This often comes as a big surprise to business and IoT people, who tend to assume that because smart devices never come to work hungover or distracted after a row with a partner, that everything they record can be assumed to be complete, consistent and accurate,’ he said. ‘But if you talk to the hardware engineers that maintain sensor networks, you’ll discover that nothing could be further from the truth.’ Given a large enough deployment of sensors, the accuracy of the data they collect will drift over time, as the hardware degrades, he said.”
The list continues, “(2) Sensors can obscure the bigger picture. Sensors often sit behind machines that filter and aggregate the data they collect. There are good reasons to ditch irrelevant data, but sometimes the data you thought was chaff later turns out to be valuable, particularly in regards to the information that can be gleaned when combining it with other data. ‘It’s precisely because what is noise for one application may be vitally important signals for another that at the very minimum we need to understand where and how sensor data has been summarised and filtered,’ he said.”
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