FINAL WORD
FINAL WORD
Close to three quarters
of IoT projects failing
and business decision-makers, some
interesting differences emerged:
• IT decision-makers place importance
on technologies, organisational
culture, expertise and vendors.
• Business decision-makers place
greatest emphasis on strategy, business
cases, processes and milestones.
• IT decision-makers are more likely to
think of IoT initiatives as successful.
While 35 per cent of IT decision-
makers called their IoT initiatives a
complete success, only 15 per cent of
business decision-makers did.
A
t this rate, with IDC predicting
that the worldwide installed
base of Internet of Things (IoT)
endpoints will grow from 14.9 billion at
the end of 2016 to more than 82 billion in
2025, IoT may soon be as indispensable as
the Internet itself.
Despite the forward momentum, a new
study conducted by Cisco shows that 60 per
cent of IoT initiatives stall at the Proof of
Concept (PoC) stage and only 26 per cent of
companies have had an IoT initiative that
they considered a complete success. Even
worse, a third of all completed projects
were considered unsuccessful.
“It’s not for lack of trying,” said Rowan
Trollope, Senior Vice President and
General Manager, IoT and Applications,
Cisco. “But there are plenty of things we
can do to get more projects out of pilot and
to complete success.”
Cisco released these findings at the
IoT World Forum (IoTWF), an event
where it convenes the industry’s best,
brightest and most passionate leaders with
the goal of accelerating IoT. It surveyed
1,845 IT and business decision-makers
in the US, UK and India across a range
of industries, including manufacturing,
local government, retail/hospitality/
sport, energy (utilities/oil & gas/mining),
transportation and healthcare. All
respondents worked for organisations that
are implementing and/or have completed
IoT initiatives. All were involved in the
overall strategy or direction of at least
one of their organisation’s IoT initiatives.
The goal was to gain insight into both
the successes as well as the challenges
impacting progress.
Key findings:
1. The ‘human factor’ matters.
IoT may sound like it is all about
technology, but human factors like
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Rowan Trollope, Senior Vice President and
General Manager, IoT and Applications, Cisco.
Inbar Lasser-Raab, VP of Cisco Enterprise
Solutions Marketing.
2. Don’t go it alone. A total of 60 per
cent of respondents stressed that IoT
initiatives often look good on paper
but prove much more difficult than
anyone expected. Top five challenges
across all stages of implementation:
time to completion, limited internal
expertise, quality of data, integration
across teams and budget overruns.
Cisco’s study found that the most
successful organisations engage the
IoT partner ecosystem at every stage,
implying that strong partnerships
throughout the process can smooth
out the learning curve.
“We are seeing new IoT innovations
almost every day,” said Inbar Lasser-
Raab, VP of Cisco Enterprise Solutions
culture, organisation and leadership
are critical. In fact, three of the four top
factors behind successful IoT projects
had to do with people and relationships.
Collaboration between IT and the
business side was the #1 factor, cited by
54 per cent. A technology-focused
culture, stemming from top–down
leadership and executive sponsorship,
was called key by 49 per cent. IoT
expertise, whether internal or through
external partnership, was selected by
48 per cent.
In addition, organisations with the
most successful IoT initiatives leveraged
ecosystem partnerships most widely.
They used partners at every phase of the
project, from strategic planning to data
analytics after rollout.
Despite the strong agreement on the
importance of collaboration among IT
ssue 07
NTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS
Marketing. “We are connecting things that
we never thought would be connected,
creating incredible new value to industries.
But where we see most of the opportunity
is where we partner with other vendors and
create solutions that are not only connected
but also share data. That shared data is the
basis of a network of industries and the
sharing of insights to make tremendous
gains for business and society, because no
one company can solve this alone.”
3. Reap the benefits. When critical
success factors come together,
organisations are in position to reap a
windfall in smart-data insights.
A total of 73 per cent of all participants
are using data from IoT completed projects
to improve their businesses. Globally, the
top three benefits of IoT include improved
customer satisfaction (70 per cent),
operational efficiencies (67 per cent) and
improved product/service quality (66 per
cent). In addition, improved profitability was
the top unexpected benefit (39 per cent).
4. Learn from the failures. Taking on
these IoT projects has led to another
unexpected benefit: 64 per cent agreed
that learning from stalled or failed IoT
initiatives has helped accelerate their
organisation’s investment in IoT.
Despite the challenges, many in
Cisco’s survey are optimistic for the
future of IoT, a trend that, for all its
forward momentum, is still in its nascent
stage of evolution. A total of 61 per cent
of respondents believe we have barely
begun to scratch the surface of what IoT
technologies can do for business.
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