The IoT Scotland event held in May 2018 was a vibrant, thoughtful and popular DIGIT event. It afforded an ideal opportunity to step back and reflect on what the Internet of Things actually could mean and where it is today. The conclusion is that – in spite of groundbreaking projects and good intentions – we are still some distance from realising the vision of a transformative internet of things. What’s needed is not more technology, but more imagination and public discourse.

In summary, there are some genuinely great projects out there, with UK firms in the vanguard (especially in the hardware and connectivity spaces) but there is a sense that, in 2018, we are witnessing a slightly underwhelming procession of incremental adoptions rather than genuine  breakthroughs in outcome. This may be in part ‘hype-fatigue’ and the fact that IoT is a vague, umbrella term covering a multitude of technologies and applications. But these are, to some extent, excuses.

Trials, Pilots and Stovepipes

In the main, the state of IoT remains locked in the language of trials, pilots and stovepipes of connected things and data published in private clouds for singular purposes. In spite of the explosive growth in deployed sensors, and developments in various network technologies, there is a stasis within the IoT space. It is a stasis caused by sub-scale development, siloed thinking and two particular and interconnected failures. One is a failure of imagination. The other is the lack of a mature debate about how a genuine IoT could be made to benefit humanity in an ethical, safe, secure and sustainable way.

That is not to say that the projects and implementations showcased are not worthwhile, transformative projects in their own right. Rather, it is that the deployment of a city-wide sensor network is not really news anymore; nor are sensors that indicate occupancy or vacancy in a shipping container or hotel room, and so on. To cities and businesses not effectively deploying such technologies and applications; and consequently not using this data to improve performance and understand their environment, there is one question. Why not?

Dominated by Technology

The semi-permanent state of trial and pilot, as well as the lack of widespread commercial adoption speaks to one of the challenges I highlighted above. Namely, that the IoT conversation is still dominated by technology and narrowly conceived applications and use cases. Nor are many of these deployments really using the internet, save for the cloud-based publication of data – often privately, for a specific user audience in mind. Again, this can be unquestionably valuable in its own right – particularly when that data is made open and available to a wider audience. The explosion of sensor data is, today, generating new insights, providing data where previously there was none. This is a good and useful development.

In effect, however, this current iteration of the IoT is actually poorly named. It may herald Industry 4.0, but it is using IoT v2* currently. Today’s IoT is better characterised as a patchwork of private sensor based networks – with emerging network standards, and common architectures (including the cloud). But it doesn’t sound very sexy, so i don’t think it will catch on.

Freely Discoverable and Interactive

The real internet of things is one where sensors and assets on the network are discoverable and interactive, like a page of HTML. That is how the internet became the phenomenon it is today – a common set of standards that enabled a world-wide-web of information and communication. Who could argue that our society and economy has not been transformed as a result?

In June 2015 the McKinsey Global Institute published a study forecasting the impact of the IoT (The Internet of Things: Mapping the Value beyond the Hype). It is substantial piece of work, full of well argued clustered analyses and economic modelling – arguing that IoT will contribute up to $11.1 trillion per annum to the global economy by 2025. It is of course a forecast, and so who can say by what order of magnitude it will be wide of the mark! But this would miss the point, and also miss one of the central tenets of their analysis. What was most revealing was that up to 60% of the benefits from IoT would emanate from cross-industry, interoperable applications. In other words the planned, and/or serendipitous, discovery of insight about the relationships between things, people and data. That is, through an open, discoverable and interoperable internet of things.

This imagined future version of IoT is hugely challenging and goes a long way to explain why IoT remains some way from being part of the public discourse and why the moniker and potential feel removed from the actual current impact. It is a challenge of mind-blowing complexity to even conceive, never mind build and then manage a world where a vast array of interconnected things could operate in this way. There are major security, ethical and political implications – which the traditional internet is already illuminating. What is the relationship between IoT and GDPR, for example? How are rights and liabilities shared amongst sensor providers, operators, consumers, governments, and commercial organisations?

The Life Journeys of Citizens

The challenges are many and varied, and it would be foolish to advocate that IoT should evolve in the same open, and sometimes volatile way, as our existing internet (although in the connected home, this is already happening to some extent). What is needed is a mature and urgent discourse on how IoT can develop to deliver the 2nd order benefits highlighted by McKinsey. This involves moving beyond trials and pilots, the much wider promotion and adoption of standards such as Hypercat and a much deeper involvement of citizens and ‘users’ in deciding what this all means. Crucially, it also involves breaking down silos and looking for relationships between data, assets and the life journeys of citizens. It is a theme I’ve explored elsewhere, but the internet age demands a re-think of our current Victorian-defined public and private realms, and the onset of IoT makes this all the more urgent if we are to manage and yield its benefits.

Citizen-Focused Customer-Centric IoT

In many ways the current focus on GDPR, and initiatives around the re-humanising of digital technology provide a good context to focus on the benefits and challenges of a genuine Internet of Things. Lora-WAN and NB-IoT (as just two examples) are important technological building blocks, but they are – alas – a technical footnote in the whole and future story of the IoT.  A world where only governments, businesses and techies know about these connected and sensing things sounds a distinctly dystopian place. It’s time to imagine a citizen and customer-centric IoT – ethical, safe and secure. Once imagined, it can then be delivered.

* SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) and other remote condition monitoring networks have been around for a very long time and could be argued as a quasi IoT v1 (although they pre-date the internet).