Cisco: Only a quarter of IoT projects considered a success

Most Internet of Things projects stall at the proof of concept stage, research from networking vendor claims

Internet of Things (IoT) projects are failing, while most stall at the proof of concept stage, research Cisco released at the IoT World Forum event it hosted in London this week finds.

According to the vendor's survey of 1,845 IT and business decision makers in the US, UK and India in energy, local government, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, hospitality and sports and transportation industries, just 26 per cent have launched IoT projects they consider a total success, and one-third of completed IoT projects "were not considered a success". Additionally, 60 per cent of projects stall during proof of concept, the survey found.

So what makes a successful IoT project? According to the report, the biggest factor was collaboration between IT and business (54 per cent), which can be challenging considering that data found disparities in the priorities of IT decision makers and business decision makers. The data finds IT decision markers place more value on expertise, organisational culture, technologies and vendors, while business decision makers prioritise business cases, milestones, processes and strategy.

In addition to collaboration, other top factors to IoT success were found to be having a technology-focused culture (49 per cent) and either internal or third-party IoT expertise (48 per cent).

Cisco also found the tapping of partner ecosystems from strategic planning to data analytics post-rollout as key to fruitful IoT projects. This could be due to the top five barriers facing IoT initiatives being time to completion, limited internal expertise, quality of data, integration across teams and budget overruns, according to the report.

"We are seeing new IoT innovations almost every day," Inbar Lasser-Raab, VP of Cisco enterprise solutions marketing, said in a statement. "But where we see most of the opportunity is where we partner with other vendors and create solutions that are not only connected but also share data. That shared data is the basis of a network of industries [and] sharing of insights to make tremendous gains for business and society, because no one company can solve this alone."

Indeed, a high ratio of less-than-successful projects does not seem to be putting an end to IoT initiatives. According to the survey, 64 percent of respondents said learning from stalled or failed IoT plans has assisted the acceleration of their company's investment in IoT.

These hopefuls are striving for the top benefits perceived by the emerging technology, improved customer satisfaction (70 per cent), operational efficiencies (67 per cent) and improved product and service quality (66 per cent).

Cisco's survey examined respondents in organisations deploying and/or having competed IoT initiatives and who were involved in at least one of the initiative's strategy or direction, the vendor said.