Companies Deploy IoT Solutions but Are Confused about Achieving Goals

Organizations are ever more enthusiastic about IoT opportunities and what they could achieve through automation. But this exuberance is tempered by concerns such as how to reach company goals and which solutions would take them there, according to research by Informa Engage for Longview IoT, a Carnegie Technologies company.

“The IoT remains complex for enterprise organizations,” said Brad Bush, managing director of Longview IoT. “Companies want to move quickly to deploy IoT solutions and see real business benefit but are stymied by the lack of solutions that can help them quickly accomplish these goals. The survey results indicate that market needs the right partners with comprehensive solutions that take away much of the guessing, and just work, right out of the box, for the specific application they have in mind.”

Ambiguity lingers around IoT and its benefits, even though 84% of respondents have deployed the technology, and most have an internal team focused on IoT tasks. Unlike in the past, when most were skeptical about IoT, only 3 percent in the latest survey “dismissed IoT as hype, a sign that organizations are taking IoT’s potential seriously to deliver meaningful business outcomes,” the survey says.

The main four roadblocks companies encounter are cost, cited by 37% of respondents, security (37%), lack of expertise (36%) and poor understanding of benefits (35%), but issues such as infrastructure and operability and undefined standards are more prevalent once the technology is deployed.

IT companies are ahead of the game, leading deployment with 31 percent having already deployed IoT, followed by manufacturing (11%), healthcare (7%), consulting (6%) and finance/banking (6).

Enterprises apparently prefer to focus the use of the technology on scheduling and staff productivity (73%) or increasing competitiveness in the company, when it has so much more to offer. So far, IoT implementers hope for significant improvements in overall operational improvements (59%), cost savings (48%), better productivity (43%), reduced downtime (41%), improved worker and equipment tracking (37%) or predictive maintenance (30%).

61 percent of executives interviewed believe they still have a lot to learn about implementation prospects for their organizations, backing the study’s conclusion that IoT benefits have not been fully understood. IoT could help companies with remote monitoring to make smarter decisions for enhanced productivity and cost reduction, “but when asked to list implementation goals, respondents prioritize the more generic answers, citing objectives such as cost savings, productivity and operational efficiency,” the survey found.