Rise of Industrial IoT and Barriers of Adoption

Andy C. Chan
Aug 31, 2018 · 5 min read

Internet of Things (IoT) devices have finally made their way into our everyday lives. Whether it’s Google Homes or smart locks, people (especially millennials) are more becoming more likely to live IoT — enabled lives. According to a Tech Crunch article, since October 19th of 2017, Google has sold a Google Home every second. It’s safe to say consumers have adopted the notion of IoT platforms into their lives. However, what about the business sector?

The rise of Industrial IoT (IIoT) has helped enable businesses to connect machines, sensors, vehicles, and other devices to increase operational efficiency, safety and more.

The term IIoT refers to the Industrial Internet of Things. In a broad sense these platforms help enable businesses to connect machines, sensors, vehicles, and other devices to increase operational efficiency, augment the workforce, increase safety, etc.

In a recent survey, Amy Talbott of ZDnet mentions how a large portion of industrial companies are eager or have already deployed IoT technologies among their workplace. However, that does not come without its concerns such as security risks and the lack of understanding of these new systems and how to manage them.

For me, there are three main issues the industry still needs to overcome to experience mass adoption.

  1. Misinformation
  2. Technology Immaturity
  3. Implementation Challenges

Let’s dive in!

1. Misinformation

Most businesses are not familiar with these new technologies and so naturally there’s misinformation around what these platforms can and cannot do. Even when the FitBit came out, the branding around the company was to enable you to live a healthier life to which some people interpreted that as directly helping lose weight or monitoring their biomechanics where as some of these outcomes (like losing weight) are an indirect by-product of the service itself. Even with my own experience of selling our product VIT to companies, we have to be careful with the narrative to otherwise not mislead upper management of over inflated exceptions on the return on investment. For example, there are gas monitoring IoT services that help track gas usage in tanks. However, there can be confusion over what silo of gas monitoring the technology does, and because it can monitor a tank of gas does not mean it can be easily transferred to other adjacent problems, such as gas pipes. There needs to be more emphasis on the vendor side to help educate these clients to understand what they true needs are and whether the technology can actually help solve their issues.

2. Technology Immaturity

The truth of the matter is that all technology goes through a maturity curve where the first releases are always buggy. The difference between consumer and industrial IoT is that in consumer tech if your FitBit fails to notify you that you didn’t hit your step count for the day — no big deal. However, if a company implemented a man down system (where devices detect whether an employee is down either from injury or not responsive) and that system does NOT send out a notification at the proper time — pretty big deal. Typically IIoT applications are mission critical to companies where system failures create high-risk scenarios. For corporations to adopt IoT the technologies themselves have to be far along on the maturity curve and well-tested otherwise risk putting lives at stake. There’s also an issue with internal corporation maturity when it comes to adopting modern technology. Plenty of Fortune 500 companies still rely purely on Excel spreadsheets and local servers instead of cloud-based solutions to complete day-to-day operations. While there are arguments against cloud-based IT, we won’t get into them on this article. In addition, the security risks that IoT devices bring to the workplace are challenging since there could be hundreds of devices each with their own vulnerabilities. Not only can these devices act as points of failure for an IoT system, but also the method of which devices communicate is a large challenge especially if a company decides to implement different devices from different vendors.

3. Implementation Challenges

I think this is by far the trickiest part and largest barrier to true adoption of IoT devices in the workplace. Some companies think that technology can be an “end-all”, right-out-of-the-box solution where in reality the implementation is what will makes it or breaks it. One of the main issues with implementation is the culture of the company itself. Do they have the right leadership in place? Do they have the right training and competencies to roll out an IoT solution? Something that I’ve seen time in and time out are IoT businesses rolling out solutions with companies that are not internally ready to take on the deployment side and end up leaving a bad taste in both parties mouths. Companies will need to have the patience of trying new methods of deployment, training, and cost structures. While vendors need to have the wherewithal to know how to navigate the waters of the corporate culture and power structure to successfully implement a solution and is both cost-friendly and easy to deploy to the overall operations. Some major silo’s of companies that IoT vendors need to engage in to successfully roll out an IoT solution are:

  • Operations
  • IT
  • HR
  • R&D division
  • Potentially other vendors for integration

It’s a difficult and painstakingly long process since each of these silos may have conflicting interests but ultimately needs the other silos write off before a deployment can be successful.

As I had mentioned in the previous point, integration with other IoT vendors or pre-existing legacy software or machines maybe critical to the success of a rollout. However, many pre-existing solutions are not built to connect to modern IoT protocols like BLE, Wi-Fi, Zigbee, etc.

Companies also need to rethink what their key performance indicators (or KPI’s) are with regards to what success looks like. Most of the time, IoT platforms are giving businesses new data sets and information that they have not used before. And so, using previous KPI metrics may not make sense for the new system and often times this is a primarily reason why corporations need to assemble the right leadership team in place for new technologies to be successfully implemented.

Last but not least, implementation costs can present some challenges with IoT products. Typically, costs are structured around a SaaS (software as a service) model where a company is continually using an IoT service and paying a monthly fee for service maintenance and upgrades. The benefits of the SaaS model is it allows for lower upfront costs, flexible cost structure, and even if a vendor provides hardware they can “rent out” the hardware in a HaaS (hardware as a service) model which follows the same train of thought as the SaaS model.

So to sum it all up, the future of IIoT looks to be bright, especially with the self driving car revolution and automation of factories. However, businesses coming into the IoT space need to keep in mind some of the constraints of corporations to ensure a successful launch. What are your thoughts on the rise of IIoT and some of the challenges that still remain from taking it mainstream?

Andy C. Chan

Written by

Entrepreneur. Full-time muser of life. Musician. Film maker. CEO, Founder of VIT Initiative.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade