Many IoT vendors will downplay costs or subsidize pilots to get you to buy, which can make it hard to determine the true costs of implementation and ownership. Plus, costs aren’t just about the technology, there are also costs associated with installation, training, integration, and broader business roll-out. Pilots fail to move to scale due to the high cost of scaling (32% of projects) and due to unclear business value/ROI (28%). So how can you find out what the costs would really be to scale? How do you calculate the value to your business, to determine a clear ROI?

IoT pilots aren’t just fun science projects, pilots help you understand how the IoT application will work in practice at a larger scale. You don’t want to run a pilot, only to find that you’ll have to rebuild everything from the ground up because the pilot wasn’t architected for scale. In fact, 18% of IoT projects fail because of lack of trust in the scalability of IoT platforms. So how can you verify that the system that you’re piloting is built for scale? How do you avoid rework, and ensure that you can quickly move from pilot to business-wide roll-out if the pilot is successful?

The true value of IoT is unlocked when your IoT application is integrated with existing business systems, not siloed. Integration means that you can enrich the IoT application with data from existing business systems like ERPs and CRMs. Integration means that you can use your identify provider for single sign-on and to manage permissions within the IoT application for enhanced security and lower management overhead. Integration means that can feed your new IoT data into other parts of your business to increase efficiency, reduce costs, generate insights, and enhance customer experience. So how do you create these integrations while minimizing development efforts?

Every business is different, even within the same industry. Different business models, processes, personnel, internal systems, and more. Whenever you’re implementing a new tool (IoT or not), some degree of adaptation will be necessary. However, it’s easier to adapt a tool to your business than it is to adapt your business to a tool. So how configurable is the IoT application? Can you add custom extensions and features? If so, can these customizations be performed with no-code, with low-code, or do you need experienced developers?