IT leaders remain skeptical of digital transformation and IoT

Cisco's survey on digital readiness suggest that information technology (IT) leaders around the world are not yet convinced of the industry’s ability to drive digital transformation, which is bad news for the Internet of Things (IoT).

By Malek Murison May 29, 2016

Cisco’s international survey regarding digital readiness suggests that information technology (IT) leaders around the world are not yet convinced of the industry’s ability to drive digital transformation, which is bad news for the Internet of Things (IoT).

The premise of the survey is the "fourth era of industrial evolution," which will be characterized by increased digitization. This will in turn rely on a combination of the IoT, analytics, automation, and machine learning. The result will be secure industrial connectivity, autonomic infrastructure, and predictive ecosystems.

Cisco’s survey took into account the opinions of 2,040 enterprise IT leaders across eight countries and eight industries. The complete results are being released gradually, but Cisco revealed some interesting comparison points between the U.K. and Germany.

IT modernization is multi-year effort, so even the most advanced organizations are only a part of the way toward complete digital readiness. In the Cisco survey, the most advanced companies scored only 77 on a 100-point scale—results that suggest performance at the top is passable, but that there is significant room for improvement. The U.K. and Germany scored an average of 75 and 72 respectively.

Less advanced companies scored only 48 out of 100. Factors hindering digital readiness highlighted by the survey are familiar and include compliance to security policies, security itself, IT automation, and the time it takes to provision new infrastructure.

Daryl Miller, vice president of engineering at Lantronix, said: "Issues persist because integrating IoT connectivity into millions of existing enterprise and industrial devices is much more complex than it appears. The challenge is so difficult that many organizations attempt to build an IoT infrastructure from scratch, depleting a substantial amount of resources, only to fall short of their desired objectives. Companies need to keep the IoT simple by adapting their existing systems to become compatible with the IoT. This means that the functionality, design and continued use of critical systems won’t be impacted." 

Malek Murison is editor at Internet of Business, which is hosting the Internet of Manufacturing Conference November 1-2, 2016, in Chicago. This article originally appeared here. Internet of Business is a CFE Media content partner. Edited by Chris Vavra, CFE Media, cvavra@cfemedia.com.

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