IoT Adoption Drag

IoT Makes Slow Progress

Despite all the hype and general acceptance of its possibilities, IoT is making slow inroads into enterprises and can still be regarded as being in the early period of adoption in many businesses.

I have talked about CxO behaviour and culture in previous blogs as well as security and other issues, so what is holding IoT back?

Business Leader Perspective on IoT Adoption

A recent survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit (sponsored by IBM and ARM) involving over 800 executives around the world looked into the issue. This suggested that fewer than 10% had extensive IoT implementations, although many had dipped their toes in the water.

More positively, around 25% stated that IoT adoption was sparking innovation within their organisations with 22% indicating that IoT offered new opportunities, 20% saying it was changing business models and 16% believing that it was enabling entry into new markets and initiatives. So the overall picture is quite positive about its transformational potential.

Only 15% believed that IoT would significantly reduce costs, suggesting that IoT adoption is more about re-imagining their businesses than old fashioned cost cutting.

Interestingly enough, few executives saw technical issues as blockers to adoption. The key constraints cited were the Size of Investment needed (29%), Security and Privacy concerns  (26%) and lack of CxO Knowledge and Commitment (23%). 

This points to a smoking gun around Cost and Executive Behaviour / Team Buy In.

IT Leader Perspectives

Interestingly enough the British Computer Society's (BCS's) survey on Digital Leadership shows some mismatches.

Over the last 4 years the principle concern of IT Leaders in the Digital Space has been Security (averaging 60% of responses, plus or minus 2% over this period). The second most important concern has been Cloud (at 50%). In the last 2 years, Governance has moved into third place at 35% followed by Agile and Big Data at around 25-30% each. IoT was only cited by respondents as a major interest by 18%. Although Cloud, Agile and to some extent Big Data are involved in IoT adoption.

This suggests 2 things. Business Executives are over confident about implementation issues and that IT Leaders have a mismatch in alignment and understanding with business aspirations.

IoT Success Factors

So it appears that CxOs need to get together and agree a common vision and set of priorities. IT Leaders need to build IoT into their plans and there is a need for education and collaboration to get a coherent approach in place.

Modern Artistry - This Week's Digital Themes

Last night I went to a BCS (British Computer Society) event on DevOps with the title "Fast Forward - Catch the Buzz!". The speakers were mainly from a company called Infinityworks. As was to be expected with anything to do with DevOps, this was a popular event with a good turn out and a diverse audience.

They presented 2 case studies on assignments they are working on for clients. In the first, they had taken over the management of a legacy website and its associated app to support engagement with a sports betting site. This they moved from dedicated hardware to a cloud platform, upgraded and then modified to produce different versions for new european markets, all in a matter of months. It was a great exposition on how modern tooling and automation, combined with agile and DevOps approaches can be used to do things quickly, safely and at scale. They also had interesting things to say about how elastic a cloud platform really is, if your loading is massively peaky on, say, 1 day per week. A key message which came across is how the culture of modern professional service providers is aligned to working intimately in genuine partnership with their customers.

The other example, discussed an unloved legacy application within the NHS, which had been delivered under a controversial national programme, had been taken in house, re-platformed and co-developed with them to make it more economical, performent and fitter for purpose using DevOps style techniques and some automation. The interesting thing being that the application did not need to be moved to a cloud platform to get these benefits and that suitable investment in tooling could achieve identical cloning and continuous integration. One of the salient lessons coming out of  the exercise was that design decisions should favour the optimisation of operability over ease of development as applications spend more time in operation than they spend in development and this is where the value is delivered.

It was also good to hear afterwards, in discussion with some of the presenters that the NHS is genuinely engaging via patient workshops in understanding the "customer journey" and using insights to feed into product management of its key applications. This is huge sea change from the previous central government driven approach which mandated things for politically dogmatic reasons.

Anyway, today as I was still reflecting on last night, I opened my email Inbox to discover an invite from the iconoclastic people at "The Register" to a lecture enticingly called "Sex, AI, Robots and You". Tbe format being a talk, Q&A and networking event. As this obviously has some overlap with digital topics, wearable technology and (wo)man machine interfaces, I just had to investigate a little further. When I followed up on the speaker, it turns out that she is a lecturer at Goldsmiths College and this is one of her research areas. Interestingly, she has started to hold hackathons called the SexTechHack. There were links from a review ( see: https://www.girlonthenet.com/2016/12/21/amazing-inventions-from-the-goldsmiths-sex-tech-hack/ ) to Youtube posted videos on presentations from the various groups at the hackathon. Overall they were surprisingly innovative and wide ranging. The content, however, only served to reinforce my thoughts discussed in my last posting on Post Digitalism. The key issues to address in the next generation of post digital technology are cultural, psychological and legal.