The Internet of Things

We often talk about how the internet is becoming more deeply incorporated into our world, but that story goes both ways. The things in our world are increasingly connected to the internet and to each other—everything from your kitchen appliances to each piece of inventory in a warehouse. The Internet of Things (IoT) shows some of the most tremendous promise for manufacturing and for our daily lives.

The IoT essentially means that the objects with which you interact with offline have a presence online. Consider your refrigerator. For some reason, people love the idea of a smart fridge, possibly because it’s where we keep all the stuff that keeps us going (or we’ve all too often forgotten to thaw something for the evening meal resulting in another tip for another delivery person). So your fridge will have a dual presence online and offline, and so will all of the items in your fridge. When you want to know if you need to pick up milk, you can ask the digital avatar of your fridge and it’ll let you know. You can ask it to start thawing some chicken so that you can cook when you get home.

Manufacturers will be able to reduce loss as each piece of inventory, each unit of raw material, will exist in a digital form that can be tracked and analyzed. Each piece tagged with some bit of technology that gives it a soul on the internet.

The Rise of IoT

We’ve just reached the coast of the IoT, and this coming year, 2014, we’ll be discovering a great deal of this new land. Now is the time for business leaders to prepare to take advantage of (and discover and invent) what the IoT has to offer. According to Business Insider, there are already 1.9 billion devices that lead a dual existence and we can look forward to that number swelling to 9 billion over the next five years.

So we’re going through a transition, and it’ll be a difficult transition for many. The IoT can be clumsy—are we going to monitor all of our objects all of the time? No. There will be a gangly adolescence in which we try to control everything and we obsess over data, but eventually, the success of the IoT will be defined by its increasing invisibility. Just like we’re prompted when we receive an email rather than checking it obsessively, we’ll be prompted when the fridge needs our attention or when inventory needs to be ordered.

The Trust Factor

For us to reach this point, we’ll need to learn to trust the IoT. We’ll need to believe that when it says you have enough headlights for the assembly line to keep moving for the next week, you won’t have an unexpected stop. When the IoT earns our trust, we’ll make progress toward reducing waste and increasing daily life efficiency. The details will be handled silently and when things require our attention we’ll be gently asked with a chirp or a buzz.

One thing that could violate that trust is the inherent security complexity that will arise when your possessions know things about you and broadcast them stupidly because you weren’t attentive to your privacy settings. Marketers will know that you have a guilty pleasure that includes eating from a jar of pickles and watching Lifetime, and they will market to you accordingly as you walk past a display case in the grocery store. Your thermostat might broadcast when you’re not home and your smartwatch will let the insurance company know that your blood pressure has been climbing.

Don’t panic. No one wants that. There will be stumbles, but the rewards are always enough to keep us pushing forward, and the rewards are enough for individual convenience and business profits that the IoT will continue to embrace our objects, so be ready for it.