CONCEPT: Logistics

Logistics: This is the art and science of moving, transporting and/or delivering things (material, hardware, equipment or supplies), services or even people across geographical space. Crucial considerations here include: efficiency, coordination, timeliness, security and cost; or, in general, the appropriateness of the means in relation to the mission. Vehicular breakdown and safety of passage are, likewise, always a twin-concern requiring management's 'unblinking' attention and capacity for effective response and even 'networked' intervention.

To have good logistics, you must in the first place have clarity of purpose and a good strategy to realize it. Otherwise, whatever carriers and other transportation resources, routes, personnel or passion and related communication mechanisms that you may have will be of little avail. Thus, the adage that "if you don't know where you're going, you won't get there" tells us less than half the truth. You must have the means (of necessity dependable) to get there, as well. As a minimum, then, strategy should be based on a robust form of  SWOT analysis or its equivalent. In, a robust and pro-active 'supply chain management' system is a necessity for consistent success.

Partly driven by considerations of security (against international terrorism, in particular, as well as piracy) and of efficiency, logistics and IoT have increasingly become intertwined in 'heavy-duty' commercial shipping around the world. In hindsight, one can see that IoT was always implicit in both commercial (for example, in the worldwide cargo-delivery 'transactions' of FedEx and DHL) and humanitarian airfreight (for example in UNHCR and Red Cross operations). It was even there, in its 'infancy', in passenger air-travel -- and most pronounced in long-haul flight. 

But there has been, through it all, a periodically morphing sort of reverse 'cultural lag' (see, also, Godin) here -- between a 'driving' adaptive culture (that is, growing safety and security concerns and needs) and a 'responding' material culture (for example, as alluded to already, the technologies required to give assurance of passenger and shipping-line security). Quaintly, the intuitive tail was wagging the material dog here. With recent advances, however,  IoT's value-proposition has caught up with the need (the demand) for it. This proposition has indeed become more and more explicit and even routine in its effect.