Very often I start my Digital Innovation presentation with a slide mentioning "There are more people owning a mobile device than a toothbrush". Believe it or not but Jamie Turner, Internationally recognized author, speaker and Adjunct professor, investigated this. Philips is making some of these toothbrushes, IoT devices! The Philips Sonicare Diamond Clean Smart is a perfect example.

Talking about the Internet Of Things... did you know that this year the number of IoT Connected devices will surpass mobile devices? Actually there were already more IoT devices than there were people on Earth as early as 2008. According to various predictions among others of BI there will be more than 24 billion things connected to the internet by 2020.

Some more projections. By 2020, 40% of IoT technology will be health related, more than any other category. Globally, 60% of healthcare organisations have already introduced the IoT into their facilities.It has been predicted that the IoT has a potential cost cutdown of 25% from clinical and operational inefficiencies which stands for $100 Billion per year. Nearly 75% of IoT business projects are failing. A negative note about all the positive news and development IoT can bring, it also is a fact that nearly 75% of all the IoT business projects are failing.

The main reasons for IoT project failing are:
Time to completion (takes too long) Tightly coupled to the above mentioned, it results in budget overruns (project team needs to be assigned longer to the project hence more cost) Too less expertise of IoT / Digital Innovation in general (decisions are made on DI / IoT level without having the holistically and/or by management not hampered by technical knowledge. Integration across the various teams (think about the app development team, IT team, Marketing team etc).

Roughly 80% of companies fear they lack the skills to make sense of all the data the IoT provides
...and frankly speaking i can understand this. In another, to be written article i will dive deeper into this subject.


So the one million dollar question is, knowing that if 75% of the IoT projects are failing, how to prevent this? The solution for this is unfortunately not that easy as understanding Ohms law. To give you some insights in this, according to my own knowledge and experience, the collaboration between IT and the business side is one of the reasons why i IoT project can be successfully finalised. If the project team has sufficient IoT knowledge available and a technology focussed culture, this will also contribute to increase the change of a successful project.

With a IoT project, no matter what you are creating / developing, integration will be needed. Integration of your app with the cloud. Integration with your app and the appliance. On all these interfaces you will find integration challenges. A good example are for example push notifications: these are triggered by the appliance and needs to be send over wifi to the cloud. Eventually they need to be delivered at your iOS or Android phone. T

his example shows you already a pretty long chain of activities and in a classical project set-up, all these teams (appliance firmware / IoT module firmware), Cloud solution backend software and App development team) are working separately and not necessary on one location. In so-called 'one roofs' as in everybody for one week available in 'one-room', the teams really can focus on the integration issues.

My experience is that if you plan and anticipate on one-roofs in your project, the integration phase will be much smoother. Actually i need to rephrase this to: one-roofs are essential. Please let me know your thoughts about this article and if you are interested in a specific subject or you want me to dive deeper in some of the aspects i touched upon above, ping me and i will work on that!

Have a great evening,

Frank