Internet of Things could be a short-lived phrase. Soon the Internet Of Things Will Become The Internet Of Services.
In this article we will learn how Internet of Things is slowly moving towards Internet of Services
What is Internet of Service?
Let us take an example of Rolls Royce’s business model. Rolls Royce doesn’t sell engines to airlines these days; instead it sells airlines “hours flown”, and a service contract to maintain the leased engines. The airlines get a free engine when they sign up.
Take another example of home devices, for example smoke alarms. There could be a company which does not sell the smoke alarms directly. But instead it installs the smoke alarms in your home. The alarms would report their status back to your insurance company or boilers which report a fault and book in a service while you sleep.
These types of service subscriptions will pay for our hardware many times over, so the value is in the service you receive.
In this article we will learn how Internet of Things is slowly moving towards Internet of Services
What is Internet of Service?
Let us take an example of Rolls Royce’s business model. Rolls Royce doesn’t sell engines to airlines these days; instead it sells airlines “hours flown”, and a service contract to maintain the leased engines. The airlines get a free engine when they sign up.
Take another example of home devices, for example smoke alarms. There could be a company which does not sell the smoke alarms directly. But instead it installs the smoke alarms in your home. The alarms would report their status back to your insurance company or boilers which report a fault and book in a service while you sleep.
These types of service subscriptions will pay for our hardware many times over, so the value is in the service you receive.
Internet of Services — Definition:
A service is a commercial transaction where one party grants temporary access to the resources of another party in order to perform a prescribed function and a related benefit.
Resources may be human workforce and skills, technical systems, information, consumables, land and others.
The Digital Footprint of Services:
The service definition above covers a broad range of services. It is therefore useful to find criteria to differentiate the various kinds of services. One obvious criterion relates to the digital footprint of a service: how and to what degree are information technologies used to instantiate a service.
As an example, think about logistic services. The traditional service is about granting access to some socio-technical resources to ship something from one point to another. With digital media, the information flow associated to the material flow became more and more important. As an example, information about delays in just-in-time delivery is almost as important as the material flow itself. Even without introducing a strict metric, it is intuitive to say that the digital footprint of just-in-time logistics is higher than in traditional transportation.
Consider another example of a haircut. It is in itself a manual service. But the service may be enriched by digital media: the appointment may be done over the web, the hair cut may be chosen in advance at home out of a photo gallery or the hair colour may be presented as an overlay on the portrait photo of the customer.
Challenges of Internet of Services:
Service Descriptions:
One challenge is to find an appropriate understanding of the term “services”. The technical meaning refers to “web services”, “network services”, and so on. An additional business meaning refers to “professional services”, the “services industry”, etc.
In order to form the Internet of Services, services have to be described in a way that the business dimension and the technology dimension come together.
Enterprises have to describe the business aspect of a service while at the same time services have to be described in a way that computers can automatically understand and link services. This requires a language that can be processed automatically.
Standardization of Service:
What we must watch out for, and it’s true for the web as much as the Internet of Things, is getting tied into a system which claims to be open, but won’t work with a different provider, requires an iPhone-only app, or refuses to hand over years of your valuable data because you skimmed over the terms and conditions ages back when you gleefully unboxed the shiny thing.
To avoid building yet another M2M (Machine to Machine) siloed network, we will need standards.
Future of Internet of Services:
We only see a very first glimpse of how the future of the web-based service economy will look like, but evidence matures that an Internet of Services is emerging.
Enterprises will use the Internet to build and provide huge numbers of new kinds of services that go beyond booking flights or purchasing books. Services that are available on the Web separately will be combined and linked with one another resulting in aggregated value added services.
Using web technologies, services will become more widely and easily available. Enterprises will open their business processes to others to form value networks which will be, in the end, a necessity for success in most markets. The Internet of Services is expected to ensure profitability and further growth of the service sector.
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