Research: The Internet of Things - hope, hype or hazard?

Everyone's talking about the IoT, but how many are actually doing it?

How old is the Internet of Things (IoT)? Technological change being evolutionary it's impossible to pinpoint an exact start date. The phrase was coined at the turn of the century, but for the sake of argument let's just say that for practical purposes the IoT began 10 years ago when the ZigBee protocol for connecting smart-home devices came into being. Rather conveniently that would make it about the same age as big data, which began (again for the sake of argument) with the arrival of Hadoop in 2005, and cloud computing (Amazon Elastic Compute cloud was released in 2006).

The IoT is a superset of both cloud and big data analytics. While encompassing both, it also adds sensors, wireless communications and artificial intelligence, and as such has taken a little longer to enter the public imagination.

Four or five years ago when Computing consulted IT professionals about cloud and big data we would hear that neither was anything new and that a number of issues, most commonly about security, needed to be sorted out first before either would really gain any traction. Five years on and both are now integral parts of the landscape for any organisation that processes large amounts of information, even as some of the same concerns remain.

The IoT is in the same position today. Amid huge amounts of noise and hype many IT professionals believe that much of the technology constituing the IoT is too immature for them to dive in just yet or they cannot see any compelling case for it, although few doubt that the time will come.

However, some sectors are already engaged. Computing research among IT professionals earlier this year found that 15 per cent are actively involved in IoT, with another 23 per cent preparing for it - leaving 62 per cent somewhere on the spectrum of not caring. [download the full report]

Telecoms and technology, business and professional services, and manufacturing and engineering were more inclined to be preparing than their counterparts in banking, finance and insurance, which is an interesting finding because previous research undertaken by Computing has shown these businesses to be at the forefront of technology initiatives - particularly big data - and motor insurance companies are already making heavy use of geo-sensors in telemetry.

Also missing from the leading sectors were agriculture and utilities, simply because there were too few respondents from these industries in the survey sample. Many of the live use cases are actually in these sectors.

The companies preparing for IoT were large, with 1,000 employees or more. Organisations with fewer than 200 staff were much more likely to be playing wait and see.

Good things

So what are the benefits that the frontrunners are seeing - or hoping to see? Most involve extending their understanding of what's going on in their organisation and improving their intelligence about the outside world.

"Transparency from my sales guys to the marketing guys, to the vendors to the purchasing guys, everybody knows what's happening in the business. Who are the vendors I'm dealing with, what are the products on the shelf, what are the products in the warehouse?" offered a director of IT in retail.

"To inform strategy options and ensure they are plausible… either by predicting what will happen in the future or reporting what happened in the past and extrapolating," said a head architect in construction.

More generally, the majority saw the benefits of IoT as being able to respond immediately to events as they happen, although a sizable proportion also favoured the ability to look backwards and analyse past events too (figure 1). In fact both of these capabilities are important for machine learning, one of the cornerstones of IoT.

Respondents were also fairly evenly split as to where their initial efforts would be directed (figure 2). Internally focused interventions, such as optimising business processes and driving efficiencies, were favoured ever so slightly over creating a platform for new products and services.

Research: The Internet of Things - hope, hype or hazard?

Everyone's talking about the IoT, but how many are actually doing it?

An IT manager was hoping for seamless IT with everything connected to improve reliability, whereas for an IT director in retail the emphasis was firmly on the customer.

"For us things that get priority are always customer facing," that person said.

The emphasis on internal processes is understandable. The more prosaic matter of increasing efficiency will be easier to explain to the board when it comes to asking for funding than the blue sky visionary stuff.

It will be interesting to see whether this balance shifts as IoT matures, as appears to be the case with big data where organisations begin with putting their house in order then, once that is done, turn to consider information coming in from the outside world.

The initial focus might be operational, but looking at the main perceived benefits of IoT an emphasis on new services was evident (figure 3). However, the very even spread of the responses in the chart reflects not only the wide range of potential benefits on offer but also the lack of any clearly perceived "killer app" to drive IoT adoption.

Bad things

The shortage of real-world case studies and high-profile examples of IoT in action is likely to be holding back adoption at the moment. In their absence, caution is understandable. One organisation we spoke to had dived headfirst into the sea of sensors and quickly scrambled out again after finding the waters too choppy for their liking.

"Our chairman is an extremely high risk-taker and his view of things is to be two steps ahead of where technology is going to be," said an IT director in retail.

"We implemented a project and we called it the ‘Internet of Things' and it was not great. We were the early starters and that's where we got it wrong. We thought we were doing something for the warehouse and then we are touching the vendors and then we are touching consumers…"

This organisation had installed sensors to monitor stock levels but found that the system was incompatible with existing enterprise and customer service systems in use at the firm.

Indeed interoperability was mentioned as a common problem (figure 4). It can be difficult to get everything working together in the way it should. Others could see no clear benefit for them at the current time - which again is understandable given the lack of examples to follow. But top of the list came concerns over security.

"What would be a problem is securing the thing - cyber security can't be bolted on after the fact," said the head architect in construction, and yet it so often is. It is characteristic of a technology market in its infancy that businesses rush to get something out there and that security tends to be an afterthought rather than an intrinsic part of the development process - mobile applications being a prime example. With something as all-encompassing as the IoT this would be a very serious mistake.

Privacy is another issue of concern. The IoT is all about making technology invisible. Rather than having to type instructions on a keyboard, the idea is that technology will respond to our needs naturally, without us really noticing. This sounds fantastic, but essentially it makes us all passive rather than active participants in the generation and dissemination of data. Concern about internet privacy is rising, but at least we know when we're on the internet; we will not necessarily know when we're on the IoT. We will not know what the information will ultimately be used for - and should bear in mind that smart does not necessarily mean benevolent.

"I am really worried about the Big Brother surveillance aspects," said a technology lawyer.

"Everybody's going to know pretty much everything about everybody - or at least there is the possibility to get access to all of that information. There's potentially a much broader cultural issue in the disruption to communities..."

This person was not alone. Neither existing privacy and data protection technologies nor the legal frameworks that drive them were thought to be up to snuff, as figure 5 shows. The incompatibility of connectivity protocols came third on the list. These results show that the industry as a whole needs to come together to address some fairly fundamental issues if an IoT that is beneficial to us all rather than just the writers of the algorithms and providers of the platforms is to come into being.

@_JohnLeonard