Organizations are embracing IoT as part of their strategic initiatives, with over 70% of respondents indicating that IoT is “essential” or “important” to their organization’s business and technical strategies, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), titled The Rise of the Internet of Things: Connecting Our World One Device at a Time.

IoT is a growing concept in terms of exposure and implementation. There are new estimates for the number of linked devices almost every quarter. Some of these estimates go as far as to say that within five years, there will be nearly 40 billion connected devices around the globe. With this growth in the number of connected devices, there is a wave of adoption to take advantage of these devices.

“The 2016 EMA IoT study shows that organizations are embracing IoT as part of their strategic initiatives. The CxO suite is involved since IoT has the strong opportunity to bring down operational costs and provide opportunities for new business models,” said Lyndsay Wise, Research Director of Business Intelligence at EMA, and my co-author on the report. “COOs and CFOs look to these opportunities to improve processes and lower costs. CEOs look for disruptive opportunities to develop competitive advantage.”

IoT implementations are technically difficult and best practices are still developing. The implementation of IoT strategies will continue to be a complex process that requires a mix of internal and external resources and business and technology stakeholders to drive IoT initiatives.

Some key data points from this survey are:

■ Nearly 65% of respondents indicated that data-driven strategies were “vital” or “important” to their organizations.

■ Nearly 33% of respondents indicated that process efficiency in the form of increasing product or service quality and the increase of customer satisfaction were the driving business reasons for implementing an IoT ecosystem.

■ Nearly 30% of respondents indicated that increasing analytical capabilities in the form of facilitating discovery of new operation processes (14.4%) or enabling new analytical domains (14.0%) were the technical drivers associated with IoT strategies.

■ Privacy issues (20.5%) and device users uncomfortable with data collection (19.1%) were the top two obstacles associated with IoT implementations.

Methodology: The EMA global end-user study examined different aspects of IoT, including strategies, implementations, and projects. Based on a panel of 250 IT and business professionals, the research extracted knowledge from decision makers with visibility into strategy, budget, and implementation associated with their organization’s IoT initiatives. Overall, the panelists provided information on over 700 different projects that implemented the strategies from IoT initiatives. Moreover, the research also explored key industry segments like healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and transportation. Each of these segments provides a unique opportunity to utilize IoT architectures and IoT devices to add value into its respective organization.

John L Myers is Managing Research Director for Business Intelligence at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA).