There’s not a week goes by that I’m not offered a miracle IoT (Internet of Things) solution.
Often the promise is to make customers' lives a lot easier or save the business hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Cynically a lot of them purport to offer insights that you could just as easily get by doing something really old school - like actually talking to customers.
I’m a huge technology fan but many of them remind me of the tale of the russian pencil.
Legend runs that during the height of the space race in the 1960s NASA scientists realised that pens could not function in space. NASA needed to figure out another way for the astronauts to write things down. So they spent millions of taxpayer dollars to develop a pen that could put ink to paper without gravity.
Their crafty Soviet counterparts on the other hand - simply handed their cosmonauts a pencil.
Job done.
Like the best anecdotes, the story isn’t entirely true, but does illustrate a point.
Sometimes the rush to technology can blind you to a simpler solution.
Many of us who have flirted with smart home tech have had our fingers burned with what can be a fragmented minefield of complication and frustration.
There are clever products on the market. Companies like Amazon and Google are creating incredibly complex virtual assistants and normalising the voice user interface. But in reality, we all have experience of products which have little interaction and offer nothing but a gimmick to make our lives feel a little bit simpler. Meanwhile the real problems go unsolved.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the most talked-about topics in the tech industry, and yet the provider landscape is still relatively immature. Numerous 'solutions' are on the market but there's a lot of over inflated promises.
It’s not just the fault of providers. At present, most data generated by IoT is not processed, meaning that it doesn’t improve efficiency or provide a good ROI. New thinking and technology is needed, both to process and analyse the huge amounts of data it produces. It’s one thing to be told a property is at risk of damp and mould - it’s quite another to do something useful as a result.
Image of a hype cycle for the internet of things
The real opportunity for IoT is to move the conversation away from gadgets and towards a more strategic footing.
What is the organisational case for the Internet of Things and how does your infrastructure support it?
This is going to require more joined up thinking across organisations and the creation of a common platform capable of utilising data across the whole enterprise. Indeed , common platforms and collaboration across the industry is needed to create more insight and accelerate the development of the smart home.
Otherwise you’ll be left like many of the tests we have done - potentially interesting but failing to demonstrate real world outcomes.
IoT could still change everything. But our organisations need to think of it in strategic terms rather than cool sounding ideas.
Photo by Dan LeFebvre on Unsplash