Vicious Circle into the Past

We are on the edge of an – as businessinsider.com recently called it – exploding era: The IoT Era. An interesting info graphic tells us stunning figures of a bright future (at least when it comes to investment and sales; see the full picture further below or in the article).

The info graphic in fact stresses the usual numbers (billions of devices, $ trillion of ROI) and draws the following simple explanation of the ecosystem:

Devices are receiving requests to send data, in return they do send data and data gets analyzed. Period.

Of course, this falls short of any system integration or business strategy aspect of the IoT evolution. But there’s more of a problem with this (and other similar) views onto IoT. In order to understand that, let us have a bullet point look at the mentioned domains and their relation with IoT (second part of the graph; I am intentionally omitting all numbers):

• Manufactoring: smart sensors use increases
• Transportation: connected cars on advance
• Defense: more drones used
• Agriculture: more soil sensors for measurements
• Infrastructure, City: spending on IoT systems increases
• Retail: more beacons used
• Logistics: tracking chips usage increases
• Banking: more teller-assist ATMs
• Mining: IoT systems increase on extraction sites
• Insurance (the worst assessment): IoT system will disrupt insurances (surprise me!)
• Home: more homes will be connected to the internet
• Food Services: majority of IoT systems will be digital signs
• Utilities: more smart meter installations
• Hospitality: room control, connected TVs, beacons
• Healthcare: this paragraph even contents itself with saying what devices can do (collect data, automate processes, be hacked ?)
• Smart Buildings: IoT devices will affect how buildings are run (no! really?)

All of these assessments fall short of any qualification of either which data is being produced, collected and processed and for which purpose.

And then – at the very beginning – the info graphic lists 4 barriers to IoT market adoption:

• Security concerns
• Privacy concerns
• Implementation problems
• Technological fragmentation

BusinessInsider, with this you have become part of the problem (as so many others already have): Just like in the old days of cloud commencement, the most discussed topics are security and privacy – because it is easy to grasp, yet difficult to explain, what the real threat would possibly be.

Let us do ourselves a favour and stop stressing the mere fact that devices will provide data for processing and analysis (as well as more sophisticated integration into backend ERP, by the way). That is a no-brainer.

Let us start talking about “which”, “what for” and “how to show”! Thereby security and privacy will become and advantage for IoT and the digital transformation. Transparency remains the only way of dealing with that challenge, because – just as with cloud – those concerns will ultimately not hinder adoption anyway!

{feature image from www.thedigitallife.com}