The Silent Intelligence - The Internet of Things by Kellmereit Daniel & Obodovski Daniel

Author:Kellmereit, Daniel & Obodovski, Daniel [Kellmereit, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: DND Ventures LLC
Published: 2013-09-19T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

USE CASES

The use cases capture the goals of the system. To understand a use case, we tell stories.

~ Ivar Jacobson

In his book The Innovator’s Dilemma,25 Clayton Christensen uses a fascinating Harvard Business School case called “Hewlett-Packard: The Flight of the Kittyhawk.” The Kittyhawk was the product name of a revolutionary hard disk drive developed by Hewlett-Packard (HP) in the early ’90s. The disk was tiny and had a capacity of 20MB to 40MB, which made the product unique at its time with potential to disrupt one or more industries. Yet the sales volume of the disk was disappointing. HP expected to sell seven hundred thousand units over two years, but instead sold only one hundred sixty thousand, which resulted in the product being cancelled in 1994. What was the problem? Why couldn’t such a groundbreaking technology win in the market?

The Kittyhawk team was targeting the emerging market of PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants, the ancestors of modern smartphones, only without Internet connections). To serve that market, the hard drive had to be more robust and withstand a one-meter fall test, which drove the cost up to about double what it could have been without the robustness. The Kittyhawk met these requirements and would have been excellent. However, the PDA market was not ready to take off: It took years to grow into a market large enough to benefit from innovations like the Kittyhawk disk.

In the meantime, Nintendo had its portable game consoles, and more and more games were being sold. The new games were stored on cartridges, which took up a lot of space — especially in a kid’s backpack. HP’s Kittyhawk would have been an ideal solution for Nintendo, and it did not even need to be super-robust for that (which would have made manufacturing the disk easier). The market for game consoles exploded in the early ’90s, but HP completely missed it because they were chasing the wrong target.

The story demonstrates how critical it is to pick the right market and, crucially, the right use case for the technology. Good understanding of use case drives market selection. As we discovered in chapters 1 and 2, many critical technologies are available for M2M. But the question is, what is the right use case that would bring value to customers and drive revenue?

Businesses, especially new businesses, live and die by use cases. A use case defines exactly what a user is going to do with the product or service and why he/she is going to do that. For example, if we describe a use case for tracking assets within a hospital, we would see the following: A nurse is looking for an IV pump, which is urgently needed in the operating room. She pulls out her smartphone, launches an app, types in IV pump, and within seconds the app shows her several available IV pumps in her immediate surroundings, ranked by distance. She walks to the nearest one and brings it to the OR.

In total, the solution saves her hours a week looking for IV pumps and other assets, such as portable EKG devices and defibrillators.

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