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.

Agile at Scale

In a recent report The State Of Agile 2017: Agile At Scale Forrester stated that DevOps adoption is beginning to drive Agile adoption and that many organisations are adopting both simuultaneously in large scale transformations, i.e. they are going Lean as suggested in the 3rd layer of the DAF Framework (see: The Way of DAU (including the DAF) ).

Additionally, Forrester identifies major impediments:

• Culture & Behaviour,
• Availability and Commitment of skilled product owners,
• Effective Executive Leadership,
• Lack of project / programme frameworks

As key blockers to successful adoption which further re-inforces the Digital Adoption Framework principles and recommended activities for iteratively adopting a digital business model.

Anyone who wants to discuss can find the discussion group here on LinkedIn.

All constructive thoughts and suggestions are welcome.

The Way of the Digital Leader

What Makes a Digital Leader Great? For many years now it has been clear that other C Suite and senior managers have been increasingly impatient with the efforts of the Information Function to deliver innovation. At the same time it is vitally important to deliver existing services robustly and drive down costs as globalisation and digital delivery increase competition and customer expectations.

In parallel there has been long been a strong movement to "Manage IT as a Business-within-a-Business" or what I call "The Business of IT" (TBIT). Recently this has morphed into a trend for describing the CIO's role as being the CEO of IT. This is important as one of the key roles of a CEO is to think and act in the 3 functional dimensions of his organisation: Control the Business, Do the Business and Support the Business. This is key to building an integrated senior management team which acts coherently with the same unity of purpose. Failure to achieve cohesion will undermine the success of any investment in IT systems, as the business will fail to exploit the potential value.

At the same time there are initiatives such the TBM Council's work on developing "Technology Business Management". This focuses on the conversations that the Information Function must have with other parts of its Business. Key to this is agreeing upon and demonstrating value and cost with transparency.

However for TBIT to be successful, the "Right Value" needs to be identified. Whilst the CIO cannot do this on his/her own, the CIO needs to be stongly plugged into the Business and its Market. Understanding of how the Business Operates, its strengths and weaknesses and the issues that it faces is a start. Understanding the trends within the market place and positioning of key competitors is another milestone. But overall, there needs to be understanding of the customer's needs, desires, frustrations and experience, as well as anticipation of how they may change. Lastly, there needs to be empathy which identifies who else deals with your customers, in a non competitive but complementary manner, and how they could collaborate with you to deliver more.

One more plank is widening the sources of innovation to exploit capability and knowledge that existing partners can bring to the Business and networking with other sources of ideas, e.g. former colleagues from the Business, analysts and academic thinkers.

If I put this together, the answer to the question may include a leader who:

- has good social skills (or at least works on them) and networks with key internal and external stakeholders,

- looks outward and understands the "big rules of the market place",

- builds an effective team which can deliver and gets on well with each other,

- works well with the rest of the C Suite and their teams,

- is lucky enough to work in a business with a healthy collaborative culture.

So just as digital enterprises are moving to understand each customer's individual needs better and make customer interaction more human, the digital leader needs to focus on empathy for success.