Considerations

Move Beyond the POC Phase Before Recognizing IOT Use Cases

IoT Use Cases Are Still a Risky Business

Avoid these common IoT mistakes

Before organizations can realize the benefits of their own IoT use cases, they must move past the pilot or proof-of-concept (PoC) stage. By now, many enterprises have undertaken at least one or more new IoT use case PoCs. Unfortunately, a large proportion of such use cases never advance past the PoC stage. Many also never even come close to achieving the type of wisdom and insight espoused earlier by Barrett.

Here are a few reasons for IoT failure. These come from a variety of sources, including a 2020 Beecham Research report:

Weak business case for the IoT project (i.e., failure to demonstrate sufficient or timely ROI, TCO, and KPIs for the project).ⁱ
Project’s inability to scale from PoC to real-world production and unexpected deployment complexity.
Insufficient budget allocated to production-level requirements.
Insufficient focus on security/governance needed for production-level IoT devices and edge ecosystem.

The above list also mirrors many of the key reasons for Machine Learning project failures, as noted by UC Berkeley’s Spring 2021 Lecture 5 on ML Projects.

i. Many companies aren't as concerned about calculating a specific ROI or TCO up front. It's often faster for them to test an idea and prove what's possible than to spend months estimating future costs and writing a full business plan. In some cases, it can be worth the trial and error to learn what works, what doesn't, then quickly iterate towards success.