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Internet of Events: What Businesses Should Know

When mathematician Clive Humby said, Data is the new oil back in 2006, he couldn’t be more right.

Today, data fuels almost everything in the world, from politics and business to science and healthcare.

And we are not talking about just any kind of data, but big data or massive data sets that continue to grow in volume over time.

The so-called “Internet of Events (IoE)” is one such kind of data.

This blog post takes a closer look at what exactly is the Internet of Events, explains the need to look into and process data, and discusses how the Internet of Events can change business organizations.

What is the Internet of Events?

IoE refers to all event data, be they machine events (executed by a machine) or life events (performed by a person).

IoE is one of the most important sources of information as events can practically take place anywhere, which include:

At an Airport or Train Station

Events occur when a person buys a ticket, checks in, and passes through security checks.

Inside a Medical Facility

The extraction of blood or urine samples and their analysis are considered events. Checking in a patient, either through a computer or the classic clipboard, is also an event.

On Social Media

Events also happen in social networking sites when people exchange personal messages, post tweets, and reply to comments.

In a Machine or System

Your luggage going through the x-ray machine at the airport is a type of event. An order placed through a self-service kiosk constitutes an event as well.

We can go on and on as there are a lot more instances or places where events happen, but mostly, the point is event data is present everywhere.

Businesses have to use them the right way.

Internet of Events Illustration

The Need to Process Event Data

It is important to emphasize that users cannot use event data from IoE as is.

Just as oil needs to be processed to become gasoline, event data needs to be analyzed to become useful to an organisation.

Otherwise, the data will only confuse people, leading to wrong and misinformed business decisions.

Consider an e-commerce store that uses event logs to see if its employees or systems follow the established process.

The ideal scenario would be:

  • If it’s a new customer, sign up is required.
  • If it’s a returning customer, log in is required.
  • Customer orders online.
  • Payment is processed.
  • The backend system receives the order and packages the merchandise.
  • The merchandise is shipped.

If the management receives event logs that show that more than 50% of transactions don’t follow this process, such as when shipping comes before the payment, this can lead to more questions and confusion.

Why isn’t the ideal process flow being followed? Who is at fault? Are we losing money because of this process disruption?

These are just some of the questions they may ask.

But if event data is analyzed correctly by data scientists using a combination of machine learning (ML) algorithms and statistical processes, confusion can be avoided.

The process model should indicate that when a customer selects cash on delivery (COD) as the preferred payment method, shipping would naturally occur before payment.

Data science allows businesses to make sense of the big data that comes from IoE.

Data scientists are experts in process mining, which involves process discovery, bottleneck detection and analysis, compliance checking, and time analysis.

In sum, they interpret data and present the overall process analysis in a meaningful way.

How IoE Can Change Business Organisations

There are a lot of ways that businesses can benefit from IoE.

Financial institutions, for one, can use event data to determine which tasks can be automated, and which require manual execution.

Even the healthcare sector has a lot to look forward to.

Event data can be logged into electronic health records (EHRs), enabling medical staff to monitor the health of patients even without hospital admission.

Conclusion

Data has become quite a commodity as more and more companies use big data and data science to make strategic business decisions.

Therefore, businesses that don’t utilize data can’t expect to stay competitive, regardless of the industry they are in.

IoE provides companies with the opportunity to take a look at event data from different perspectives.

They can then use data science to make sense of it all.

As a result, when used correctly and with the right systems, IoE can prove to be a major game changer for business organisations.