In demand data scientists could soon be a thing of the past, as the emergence of a new role in corporate IT circles looks set to take precedent as the new must-have addition to any executive team.

Say hello to the “Internet of Things Architect”, or just IoT Architect if we’re going to be brief, which has just been brought to our attention as the next ‘go-to’ job description by Gartner Inc.

In a post called “The Dawn of the IoT Architect”, Gartner’s Drue Reeves defines the role of the IoT Architect as thus:

“An IoT architect’s job is to do whatever it takes to build end-to-end IoT solutions that solve real business problems”.

That’s a pretty wide scope of possibilities right there, but Reeves goes on to narrow it down a bit, explaining how the average IoT Architect has two modes of operation. The first involves helping organizations to solve business problems by building “discrete IoT solutions, Reeves says.

The second mode is much broader, with IoT Architects being tasked with setting up and communicating the organization’s overall IoT vision, message and architecture. That’s because modern organizations are already likely to have multiple IoT projects going on, Reeves says. The problem is that if organizations don’t have an IoT Architect in place, who’s able to build and drive a cohesive, centralized IoT architecture, they’ll end up with a scattered mess of devices, platforms and architectures which leads to a waste of resources, time and money.

In other words then, the IoT Architect will fulfill the role of overseeing and orchestrating a company’s IoT efforts to make sure they’re getting the best possible value out of them.

Whoever lands this kind of role will be well remunerated, with Gartner suggesting salaries in the range of $160,000 a year.

Prospective IoT Architects will need to display a range of skills to fulfill this role, including “collaborating with business leaders to determine their top business problems, architecting an IoT solution that will solve the problem, building a business case to justify the ROI, building an IoT solution prototype and selecting vendors, and finally, deploying the solution — at scale — across the enterprise.”

Interestingly though, Reeves notes that “many of these [skills] are easily transferable to other jobs in IT”. As such, if you happen to be a generic IT executive in need of quick pay rise, you could do a whole lot worse than adding a new “skill” to your LinkedIn profile and waiting to see who comes knocking on the door.

Image credit: GDJ via pixabay