English | EN 
At the start of day two of the executive summit ‘Things’, the discussion focuses on how ‘Things’ will affect business, with some inspiring examples from Philips, TomTom and energy company Essent.
Jeroen Tas, the global CIO for Philips, first took the audience on a tour of connected things as offered by Philips and the changes they bring for the company. One of his key points was that in the world of ‘things’ it is about the device + the digital capacities of the device + the services. A connected toothbrush, connected light-bulbs, connected medical devices, automated pill dispensers all start to really make sense when you can weave them together into scenarios that have relevance in the eyes of the user.
Philips is going through a major transformation. They are building a real-time, connected enterprise where the business is focused on integration, working with the ecosystem and finding new business models. Instead of just selling boxed, their revenue will come from selling the data, access to the community, selling services, connectivity or data storage.
Simon Hania, from TomTom, addressed the issue of privacy as this is a very business-relevant theme for TomTom, and gave some concrete suggestions on how to create ‘privacy by design’:
- Incorporate data protection requirements from the start
- Take a multi-disciplinary approach: it is about your “license to operatein the information society”
- Embed “privacy by design” into development processes
- Document your data: “what, why, when, who, where”
- Consider law enforcement/e-discovery implications
- Appoint a “privacy czar” in your organization
