Internet of Things Gone Wrong

While the Internet of Things (IoT) is—with weary resignation—most likely to bring images of colourful light bulbs to mind, its impact is most likely to be felt in the factories that produce those bulbs, the systems that assure their quality, the logistics fleets that transport them, and the retail environments you purchase them within for Dad’s Christmas gift because “Dad likes tech, doesn’t he.”

Shifting the bulb from “Christmas-gift red” to “eye-watering green”, McKinsey suggest that the economic impact of IoT to be $3.9-11.1 trillion a year by 2025, with the potential to drive new value in everything from smarter utility and city design, to more nimble and effective healthcare systems.

Yet while you’d struggle to find the CxO who wasn’t both convinced on the growth potential of the “Internet of Webpages” (e.g. the Internet), and able to formulate ways of leveraging it, the Internet of Things largely remains within the realm of CTOs and technologists. Its transformative potential—and more pertinently—what it can do for a business are inaccessible to the very leaders with the capacity to actually implement it.

Our experience with telcos, tech, IoT, and wider enterprise businesses suggests three possible reasons.

Things not talking the same language

A common issue in the consumer IoT world is different languages, protocols and specifications (e.g. my toaster doesn’t not talk to my lightbulb). The relatively bespoke nature of B2B IoT largely side-steps this issue, but as a side-effect pushes it higher up into enterprise away from technology and into people.

Understanding IoT requires a high-level of technical grounding. This places a barrier that drives many CEOs to relegate it to a “technology project” rather than a driver for growth. Compounding the issue, similar language gaps exist between CxO, technologists, and vendors, with the latter struggling to articulate and link IoT to business needs.

Internet of Vendors

While IoT has potential to spark transformations, it builds upon and combines myriad technologies that have previously made that claim. A simple IoT flow of connected devices producing big data to drive machine learning and artificial intelligence, and deliver actionable real-time analytics involves a lot of technologies. Very few players are credible in more than one of these stages, and yet many are trying to build deep moats rather than broad partnerships.

Sidestepping this complexity requires more than just partnership between ecosystem players. It requires them to not just simplify their offerings into familiar bundles around devices, connectivity, and analytics, but to also then orientate and connect these around enterprises and their needs.

Learn and grow

Where language and connection meet, conversations flourish. Conversations create moments of learning, and drive experimentation moving together. For a technology that both relies and unshackles conversations around data, IoT is a field overwhelmed by hyperbole and brands communicating one-way.

Were it to become bilingual—speaking both to technologists and business leaders, and a facilitator of conversation between those parties, it would begin to bring enterprises and vendors into genuine communities that will begin to align interests, build common knowledge, and deliver on the promise of a more connected world.

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To suggest a way forward for IoT, it is helpful to look back in time. If we were advising companies involved with the Internet of Webpages in its formative years—knowing what we know now, and with these three learnings in mind—we’d probably suggest they simplify and broaden their language away from TCP, HTTP, or WWW, that they position their brand to enable wide-ranging partnerships, and that they foster a culture of experimentation. More than anything, we’d suggest dialing down the hyperbole, and let value surface organically; the dot-com bubble remains in the minds of both leaders and investors.

These suggestions would seem obvious looking at the Internet now, with it’s perhaps delayed, but certainly transformative impact. For IoT however, they remain some way off, along with its true, transformative moment.