Remote Monitoring and Control Trends: Technology is becoming more integrated . . . now what?

By Larry Tucker

It’s all around us… We are a connected world. From our refrigerators to our cars, more and more devices are becoming connection-enabled every day. Projections estimate there will be more than 50 BILLION connected devices by 2020. With everything being connected, we as customers want to feel empowered, without being overwhelmed, but that doesn’t seem to be how it’s working out.

Connectivity should make life easier, not harder! Right? This should be easy with all the gadgets that we have here and there. Even when all is connected, you come to find out it’s still very disjointed. Shouldn’t it all just ‘talk’ to each other and make beautiful music? Manufacturers focus on what they know – their equipment, creating silos of technology and uses for it. Once this happened with TV remotes, and then came the Universal remote. Now every TV comes with one.  Commercial equipment and the latest got-to-have item will get there too! Some are ready out-of-the-box, while others will have to be pushed a bit to go in that direction.  

As connections continue to become more seamless and simple, businesses are finding that just having information creates more confusion. As product offerings expand, the need for a cohesive point of connectivity becomes the must have. No one solution, even a universal remote, is without its setup requirements to make it useful. Information and technology in and of themselves do not create competitive advantage. It’s what you do with them. Companies struggle to determine how to make all of this new information functional. There are a lot of directions you can go, but ultimately it’s what makes sense for the company’s business model and philosophy. 

So what is the priority? Is it customer service and loyalty -- using data to better know your customer and ensure your offers keep them coming back? Or, is it the experience of each and every customer and ensuring they get in and out as quickly as possible? Or, is it using a world class service organization to lower overhead and increase margins?

Whatever the motivation, it needs to stay at the forefront of the decision making process to ensure success can be realized when implementing a Remote Monitoring solution. This may mean added resources or underutilizing the capabilities of a really powerful technology. In the end it’s admitting that no matter how simple technology gets, it’s still never possible to find the ‘Easy’ button.