My view on UK Government ‘Internet of things’ to get £45m funding boost

In the recent speech by David Cameron at the CeBIT technology trade fair in Germany, is this really enough to establish a real leadership role in the new frontier of digital business and society ? For example The German government last year committed 200 Million Euros to Industry 4.0.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-26504696

The “Internet of things” or IoT is rapidly growing to be the “next big thing” in IT as mobiles, tablets and now wearables are expanding the definition of IT into every aspect of objects, rooms, transport, health, education and daily lives. This has been called the “Digital Ecosystem” or the age of the “Industrial Internet” and “Quantified Life” and will have a very significant impact on how products, services and industries will work in the near future. This is why at CeBIT and many other tech conferences and Governments all over the world are rapidly investing in technologies that can integrate and automate many every days services that previously where manual or just on a web site.

While we are still early days into this, to put it into perspective Google,Amazon, Facebook and others have built the first wave of “cloud” platforms but the Internet of Things is the layer above this that connects everyday objects, people, buildings and activities into new cost efficient and better integrated services. This has the potential to create new value products and services in many industries from medical, to automotive, education , retail and others.

I see several challenges

• While £45 Million is just the first investment (tripled from last plan by UK Government) that is just enough to establish working pilots and feasible digital services. This is in danger of missing the next scale out stage that needs joint Private industry and Government spending. At present I don’t see any strong plans for this yet.

• We need 5G bandwidth networks to support the massive increase in data involved that will occur in these new hyperconected IoT networks. The use of multi internetworking such as wifi coverage to local ISP relay, frequency allocation issues, mobile traffic and network performance is currently too slow to work effectively in large scale Internet of things so it may be at least 5 years away. That said we must be investing and developing technologies now to be in a competitive position.

• It needs a blend of engineering and information Technology skills and innovation leadership. My concern is the UK may not have the right staff approach that may be focused on local “project” level driven priorities and an “engineering gadget mindset”. It really needs better product portfolio thinking and a bigger leadership role in establishing proper digital platforms for next generation workspaces. It needs more IT centric leaders in particular who can work and transform across disciplines and set this level of vision and ambition.

• There needs to be better incubator to industry organizations in the UK to get solutions out of research labs and into rapid scale up and scale out services. I believe we already have a minimum set of Open Standards but its still too fragmented to get wide adoption. Too often we create great ideas and a few successful world beating UK companies but don’t do enough to get more return on investment. The UK needs to quickly establish new platforms for industrial Internet of Things Integration with Government backing and protection to avoid loss of Intellectual property and buy out by proprietary vendors.

So its good news , the next frontier is beckoning but its already growing and we need to avoid catch-up again as Neelie Kroes, EU commissioner for Digital Agenda said about the EU and Broadband. We need to get stronger total program investment and avoid tactical projects which may be potentially insufficient. The good news is I think is the EU and the UK are aware of this challenge and must invest significantly.

#IoT #SmartCity #Government #DigitalEconomy #DigitalEcosystems #DigitalEnterprise