How Wearable Technology can help Servitization

Don’t switch off your Google Glass headset yet, says Professor Andy Neely, Director of the Cambridge Service Alliance. Whether it is the latest headset or even a new Smartwatch the information being gathered by the wearables is offering some really interesting opportunities for innovation in products and services. He says the information gathered by Wearable’s will have positive outcomes for firms and society more generally.

If patients can monitor their own blood pressure automatically or heart rates automatically potentially then they could feed that data back to the hospital or the doctor and they could then be smarter at how they allocate their limited resources. The doctor could be sent the data the patients were getting from monitoring their own blood pressures, and this would allow them to call in the patients with problems for further investigation.  The technology allows organisations to allocate their resource more efficiently which in the long run is going to be better for the tax payer and Society generally.

Andy uses the example of a technician, who may go out to repair something and they may look at the appliance and not know how to repair it. But if they had Google Glass they could potentially stream a video back to their base and ask other experts around the World for their suggestions too.  Support teams won’t need to travel to the site, they could offer suggestions to your technician about how to repair it and they could then carry out their suggestions. The technician could then upload their video to the internal intranet and others could then access it too if they came across the same problem sometime. 

Wearable technology can improve the quality and efficiency of the way in which services are delivered. The value is in the data, not the metal, that’s for sure. Making that shift to services requires a significant organisational change, but the key to making this change is understanding your customer and your customer’s customer, says Andy. The wearables will enable you to start that journey. 

Listen to a PODCAST by Andy Neely on this topic. In this Podcast Interview Professor Andy Neely, Director of the Cambridge Service Alliance, examines how the new Wearable technologies can help firms make the shift to services