Today, it is virtually impossible for fully operational IoT solutions to be provided by a single firm. Even Dell EMC, GE Digital and others team with large integrators such as IBM Global Services, or Deloitte to integrate IoT solutions in large customers. Cisco and Intel are leading the industry in this type of OT and IT matching today, however, it is a completely manual process.

As a result, The Channel Company has identified a need to offer an automated matching service to technology vendors and their resellers/integrators/solution providers. This system is meant to match technology vendors, IT partners, and OT partners according to specific skill sets needed to develop and deliver IoT solutions. More specifically, users will be asked to identify a Bill of Materials for their intended IoT project and the system will generate matches based off of complementary and critical skills.

Due to the structure of the timeline of the project, my team had a good amount of time to elicit, refine our understanding, and provide documentaton for our project, prior to implementation. We were able to deliver the following items:

• Business Case
• Project Plan
• Risk Analysis
• Requirements Documentation
• UI Documentation
• Software Design Documentation

Elicitation

The most crucial, and perhaps most challenging part of our documentation portion of the project timeline was eliciting requirements for the system. Our team worked remotely from Southern California to communicate with our client (The Channel Company) who is stationed in Boston, MA and our end users including Senior Executives and representatives from Wachter, KMC Controls, OSTusa, and Cisco. Our interviews with our stakeholders brought forth many conflicting ideas about the system's functionality. With all their input in mind, our team did our best to identify features that would maximize each users' experience as we made trade offs that were practical, given the scope of our project.

Use Cases

After identifying and consolidating the system requirements, we moved on to outlining the system use cases, as well as the basic and alternate flows that users can take to accomplish each use case through the system.

To view the requirements document and the outline of use cases, please click HERE.

Personas

The above personas were created based off of stakeholder interviews. They cover users from both the IT and OT sides of the technology industry and reflect their respective companies' IoT capabilities/skill sets and needs.

Storyboard

Wireframes

Dashboard

All users will be greeted with the system's dashboard upon login. From the dashboard they will have easy access to the main features of the system such as starting a new match, viewing matches in progress, and viewing matches the user has reached out to in the past. Each feature will have a brief description to help users easily understand which feature they want to use. Clicking anywhere on one of the sections will redirect the user to a different page. Users will also have the ability to edit their settings or sign out if they are finished.

Matching Criteria Input

If the user navigates to the “Start A New Match” feature from their dashboard they will be redirected to this page to input their matching criteria. The user will be prompted to identify a Bill of Matierals by selecting all the IT/OT related capabilities/skills required for an IoT solution from a picklist. Users will also be prompted to provide their starting location and declare a search radius. A map will be provided to illustrate the search radius. After inputting the matching criteria, the user will be able to click “Find Match” and will be redirected to a page with potential matches. In order to satisfy visibility of system status, a loading icon will appear until they are redirected to their matches.

Match Results

The match results page appears when the user clicks “Find Match” after inputting the required matching criteria. Three matches that best satisfy and monopolize the skills needed by the searching user will be shown at a time. If the user chooses not to partner with any of the three matches shown they will be able view the next best matches by using the downward icon shown in the wireframe above. The name, distance, and location of the potential partners will be visible and accessible on each match entry. Each match entry will also identify vendor nominations with notable icons to help the searching user identify distiniguished and trustworthy partners. If the user hovers over these vendor nomination icons, a tooltip pop up will provide an explaination of the nomination. The “View More Information” button reveals a company profile that provides more information about the company and their specializations and certifications. The “Contact” button moves the user forward in accepting the match and initiationg communication by providing the searching user with the contact information of the accepted match.

Mockups

Home Page

Registration Page

Find a Partner: Capabilities Selection

Prototype

Private at this time.
Created using with React and MySQL on the Amazon Web Services platform.