Gartner’s Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2021 lists “people centricity,” “location independence” and “resilient delivery” as essential ingredients for creating the high degree of plasticity organizations will need to pull through the rest of the pandemic and the following few years. “People centricity” is of particular importance in the aftermath of Covid-19; while the pandemic has mandated more digitized processes, new technologies must revolve around enhancing the human experience.
Gartner projects that a key facet of this trend toward people centricity is the emerging Internet of Behaviors (IoB) – a natural extension and evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT adoption has exploded over the past few years, with 2020’s worldwide lockdowns and social restrictions driving exponentially more use cases. According to research from Transforma Insights, the world’s active IoT device count is expected to grow from 7.6 billion at the end of 2019 to 24.1 billion by 2030.
With the consumer sector projected to account for 65% of connected devices, corporations have the opportunity to capture an endless stream of consumer data or “digital dust” generated by a range of sources including smart wearables and social media. Corporations could then synthesize this data to predict and influence individual consumer behavior. Enter: the IoB.
How Software Will Drive The IoB
The IoT revolution was driven by hardware – connected devices that exchange data over the internet – but software that integrates this data will give rise to the IoB. One associated challenge is that the IoB’s best use cases will rely on synthesizing information from a wide variety of sources that have historically been siloed with little reason to collaborate.
For example, wearable smart devices are some of the most prolific and visible components of the IoT. Your smartwatch knows the weather, your calendar and how many steps you take on a given day. With software that enables the IoB, your smartwatch could integrate all three of these datasets in real time to help maximize your schedule; if rain is forecasted for 1 p.m. when you usually take your daily walk but your schedule is clear at noon, your watch could prompt you to exercise earlier.
Why Agile Is The Answer
Cross-functional teams – in which experts from different domains collaborate to define what technology must be built and frequently reassess its effectiveness – are positioned to deliver the best results in an IoB-driven world with multiple data sources being introduced from across the enterprise. Agile organizations intentionally use cross-functional teams to maximize business value. Teams that are accustomed to this approach will naturally synthesize disparate data sources more swiftly than those accustomed to working in silos.
A Mutually Beneficial Ecosystem
The IoB will only be as good as the data that feeds it, and with so much data, it’s reasonable to consider how users’ personal information will be protected in this new landscape. Axios recently outlined a few of these potential privacy concerns in real-word scenarios – including how drivers may want to share speed, braking and location data with insurers to negotiate lower premiums but might object to law enforcement accessing the same information – concluding that the “IoB must offer a mutual benefit to both parties or risk being rejected by consumers.”
The IoB will inevitably open “Pandora’s box regarding the policing and sharing of personal information.” The bigger the IoB becomes, the more susceptible users may be to phishing attempts and data hacks. However, as the world becomes increasingly connected to the IoT, the IoB itself is an inevitability. Fortunately, the agile approach is ideally suited to build not only a better but also a more secure IoB.
Traditional software development considers information security at the beginning of a product development cycle and then again at the end, when the product goes through integration testing. Alternatively, the most forward thinking organizations have found ways to integrate security into each step of the agile process.
Just like necessary product features, security requirements can and should be considered when developing user stories. As agile practitioners know, only stories that move from the product backlog into sprint end up in the product. If security matters (and it should), it must have a place within the user story.
The more security concerns a product has, the more domain expertise is required by your cross-functional team. Furthermore, in addition to the relative time required to write a specific piece of code, story points must consider the relative risk associated with a given task. The more sensitive data a product relies on, the greater the relative risk incurred if the task isn’t completed correctly.
Appropriately recognizing risk during story pointing helps agile teams consistently reassess what’s at stake. True to its name, an agile framework such as Scrum is an effective guide for delivering software faster. It’s also a map for nimbly navigating new security and privacy concerns as they arise. In this vein, the emerging IoB depends on agile technology leaders to understand the relative risk user data brings to every project and assemble the appropriate team to both satisfy and protect users.
Sourced from Forbes - contributed by Dave Todaro