Five Unexpected Implications Arising From the Internet of Things

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More than half of major new business processes and systems will incorporate some element of the Internet of Things (IoT) by 2020, according to Gartner, Inc. The impact of the IoT on consumers' lives and corporate business models is rapidly increasing as the cost of "instrumenting" physical things with sensors and connecting them to other things — devices, systems and people — continues to drop.

"Uses of the IoT that were previously impractical will increasingly become practical," said W. Roy Schulte, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "The IoT is relevant in virtually every industry, although not in every application. There will be no purely 'IoT applications.' Rather, there will be many applications that leverage the IoT in some small or large aspect of their work. As a result, business analysts and developers of information-centric processes need to have the expertise and the tools to implement IoT aspects that play a role in their systems."

Gartner has made four more predictions for the IoT:

Through 2018, 75 percent of IoT projects will take up to twice as long as planned.

Gartner expects three out of four IoT projects to face schedule extensions of up to 100 percent with the consequent cost overruns. The more ambitious and complicated the project, the greater the schedule overruns. For some projects, compromises will be made to keep them on-schedule, leading to significant weaknesses in performance, security or integration into existing processes. In the mid-to-long term, these compromises will require that the IoT project be refactored and perhaps even recalled and redeployed.

"Product-centered enterprises will be the worst affected," said Alfonso Velosa, research vice president at Gartner. "They will seek to launch smarter, connected products, although this will often be a reactive, tactical approach that seeks to address their competition's IoT product. However, even for enterprises conducting internally centered projects that may focus on cost reductions, there will be people issues. Most of these issues will center on the normal introduction of a new technology model. It will be complicated by emerging business models that will require process and cultural change. Addressing both of these will lead to projects going over schedule."

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