Developing high value IoT solutions using AI enhanced ISO 16355 for QFD integrating market drivers into the design of IoT offerings

The Internet of Things (IoT) provides huge opportunities for organisations developing new business models supported by interconnected product, service and software systems. Due to the complexity of IoT systems, the understanding and development of attractive new system functions is a great challenge compared with traditional, stand-alone product systems. Methods that focus on the integration of market and business analysis with product design and development emerged from Japan in the late 1960s under the title of Quality Function Deployment (QFD). These have undergone considerable development over the last 30 years to ensure they are appropriate for the development of both complex hardware, software and service systems and the current best practices are described in the recently published ISO 16355 for QFD. Recent significant progress in development of cognitive artificial intelligence (AI) systems such as IBM's Watson system, provides opportunities to gather and analyse significant volumes of market and technological information to support the core objectives of QFD i.e. aligning new product system design to customer and stakeholder priorities. This involves targeting information sources, refining analysis algorithms to ensure market priorities with associated underlying trends are identified reliably. In this paper, background concepts related to QFD are discussed and the areas where cognitive AI can have most significant impact on the QFD approach towards design and development of IoT systems will be covered.