Why do IoT Projects Fail?

The IoT provides companies with the opportunity to gather data from a wide variety of assets and then transmit it, via the Internet, to cloud-based or other IT systems. Companies can then use this data to reduce the assets’ downtime, streamline their business processes, offer new services that increase their revenues, and otherwise transform their businesses. 

However, despite the promise of the IoT, and the success of many IoT projects, there have also been a large number of IoT project failures. These failures have led many companies to ask themselves what they got wrong with their IoT projects, and what they can do differently in the future to ensure their IoT projects are successful.

o help address these questions my firm, Beecham Research, recently published a new report titled “Why IoT Projects Fail.”

As one of the results from the online survey we conducted for this report demonstrates -- 58% of the respondents to the survey stated that their IoT project was either mostly unsuccessful, or wholly unsuccessful, with a further 30% stating their projects were ‘mostly’ successful but not entirely so -- the question of why IoT projects fail is of great importance to the large and growing number of companies who want to adopt IoT. It is also very relevant to the IoT companies who are providing these IoT adopters with the embedded modules, IoT gateways, smart connectivity services, edge-to-cloud solutions and the other solutions they need to bring these projects to fruition.

In the report we reviewed a wide variety of IoT industry sources and surveys to see what they had discovered regarding the reasons for IoT project failures. We also interviewed and surveyed IoT adopters, IoT solution providers and other IoT experts to understand their perspective on why many IoT projects do not live up to expectations, and why those projects that do succeed, do so.

What we found is that there are four high level reasons why IoT projects fail, with a series of lower level reasons:

• Business aims for the project are not thought out 
• Company organizational issues arise 
• Unforeseen technological problems emerge 
• Customer and vendor problems come up

IoT Project Business Aims Not Thought Out

Unclear business objectives were a major reason for IoT project failure. This confusion resulted in IoT adopters not understanding what the project needed to accomplish from a technical perspective, in order to meet the company’s business objectives. In addition, our research found that many IoT adopters wanted to be seen as embracing IoT technological developments for the sake of keeping up with market trends, and failed to understand all the complexities involved in actually building and commercializing an IoT application. 

Read More