Is Internet of Things the newest trend?

Internet of Things (IoT) will transform business operations, lead to significant revenue increase and enable businesses to cut down their costs. At least, this is what 40% of the 463 IT and business leaders that participated in Gartner’s survey believe. Nevertheless, the vast majority of the participants also stated that their organizations haven’t established a clear strategy and/or policy regarding IoT. It is evident that IoT is still at a very early stage and the business world is just starting to experiment with this new technology, although the reduced networking and processing cost is making it more and more popular. The real challenge is not so much the development of smart products, but the identification of business opportunities that will be created by these new smart products and ecosystems.

A practical way to understand if an organization is actually prepared for IoT is to determine whether it has the necessary human resources to support its efforts. Leadership and vision are always crucial factors to success and for that it is imperative to have executives that actually understand the potential of IoT, even if it means creating a team of executives from different departments. Based on the above survey, only a small percentage of the participants have developed a clear approach on IoT. Most of them replied that their senior executives have not yet fully understood the potential impact of IoT, although there are great differences depending on the industry. For example, senior executives in government, education, banking and insurance seem to be less aware of what IoT has to offer than their peers in communications and services.

It must also be noted that IoT, as all new technologies, presents certain risks and challenges and that is why all participants appeared to be very cautious of the factors that could prevent, or restrict, further development of this technology. It wasn’t surprising that safety and privacy were at the top of this list. Intangible industries are extremely sensitive about such things, since most of them operate in sectors directly related to safety and privacy, such as banking.

According to Gartner, in the next three years, most organizations will have a distinct team of IoT executives and almost all will have recognized the value of IoT.