Buzzwords are a constant in IT, Cloud, HCI, Analytics, GDPR are all in common parlance in technology discussions across businesses of all type. However often these words are bandied about and serious discussions are had, however not everyone is sure what some of these buzzwords mean, what the technology consists of and importantly what positive impact does it have on an organisation? if any positive impact at all!

Let me present another contender to the buzzword Olympics, IoT or “The Internet of Things” what does that mean? What is a thing? And do I want things? let alone an Internet of them! The only thing I know about IoT was that I don’tt really know much about it!

When I heard that a friend of the podcast had taken on a new role as an IoT Solutions Architect and wrote a great introduction to IoT blog post (Demystifying IoT)

It seemed like a great opportunity to get some IoT education for not only me, but also the Tech Interviews audience.

So, on this week’s show I’m joined by Mark Carlton, who is now an IoT Solutions Architect at Arrow ECS and asked him to share what he’s discovered in his time in the role, how he sees IoT as a technology and how implementing it can deliver value to a business.

We start off by trying to define what we mean by IoT and Mark shares how, like many a new IT trend, it isn’t really that new.

We also explore why IoT is more than just sensors and how in reality IoT is a platform architected from sensors, gateways and importantly analytics tools that can help us to make sense of the data we collect and turn it into something valuable.

We discuss how often IoT projects are too quick to focus on putting sensors in lots of places rather than starting with a focus on business outcomes and asking the question “What do I want to achieve with this sensor?”.

Mark shares the importance of looking at IoT projects like any IT project, with a focus on business outcomes, the Why? How? And What? Of a project and not the technology.

We then explore use cases, how are people using sensor data to discover new things about their business. Mark also explains how it’s not only this additional data from increasing amounts of IoT that is useful but how access to large amounts of historic data is allowing us to find new trends and information which is creating brand new opportunities and ways of working.

We finish up by looking at security and compliance, both crucial elements of an IoT platform design and how it’s critical they are included right at the outset because adding security retrospectively to these platforms could be almost impossible.

Finally, Mark shares some advice on where to start and some sources of information to consider.

I hope this episode has helped you better understand this emerging technology platform and how it could serve your business, I know it certainly has helped me.

For more information you can follow Mark on Twitter @mcarlton1983

His blog at justswitchitonandoff.com

Until next time thanks for listening.