Организационные способности компаний, требуемые для внедрения IoT проектов

The 21st century has brought many changes to the human lives. Although it doesn’t feel that 2000 was that long ago, during the last 20 years the world has seen the rise of Apple, the global financial crisis, which was the worst since the Great Depression, electric car in the space and many more events that already became iconic for this century. However, one of the most iconic events that reshaped our world was the advance of the Internet.
At the time when the Dot-Com bubble burst, the number of internet users was about 304 millions. In June 2019 it exceeded 4,5 billion. Being one of the most transformative and fast-growing technologies, Internet has led not only to the major changes in how people communicate but also to the way how business operates. It stimulated the appearance and promotion of new concepts such as e-business and e-commerce, re-engineered business processes and profounded structural changes in the production of goods and services (Apăvăloaie, 2014). The Internet has matured and was adopted by the vast majority, however, it is reshaping our world again, connecting not only people but also things.
The term Internet of Things (IoT) was first mentioned by Kevin Ashton in 1999 and the concept still seems odd. Unlike the Internet, IoT is currently in the Early Adopters stage of the Technology Adoption Life Cycle model (Cyzerg, 2018). At the same time, the interest in the technology from enterprises is tremendous since it promises tantalizing opportunities for product innovation and creates attractive business opportunities in a wide range of industries. According to DBS bank, the installed base of IoT-connected devices will soar from about 11 billion today to 125 billion in 2030 (DBS Group, 2018). Moreover, it is expected that IoT will be the key element in stimulating other technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), which enables machines to simulate intelligent behavior and make well-informed decisions with little or no human intervention. Nevertheless, most of IoT projects are unsuccessful. According to a survey, conducted by Cisco, the failure rate of IoT projects is 75% (Cisco, 2017). The companies who want to utilize IoT mentioned that the biggest challenges are complexity and technical challenges (38%), lack of knowledge (29%) and difficulty finding the right solution (28%) (Microsoft, 2019). Besides, Microsoft’s research shows that around one-third of IoT projects fail in proof of concept stage due to the numerous reasons which include absence of clear strategy, lack of resources/knowledge to scale and unclear business value that pilots demonstrate. Despite the aforementioned challenges, companies continue their attempts in identifying the IoT services and solutions that can be monetized, making particular attention to IoT platforms which will capture significant growth in the IoT market that is expected to be worth more
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than $14 trillion by 2022 (Accenture, 2016). However, Accenture’s researchers concluded that these attempts might not reach the desired results – companies simply don’t have capabilities to succeed in time of IoT revolution.
Nevertheless, the current IoT research is mostly written on the applied scale of technology in using IoT (Dachyar et al., 2019). It overlooks the importance of understanding the IoT from the managerial perspective, mainly focusing on developing technical parts of IoT (Dunaway Virginia et al., 2019). With the evolving understanding of IoT potential, more and more articles are focusing on the benefits and value that technology can provide and its role in industries development. In such a way, Dachyar et al. (2019) discovered the most influential topic for researchers so far, which is the emergence of 4th industrial revolution where IoT is one of the key elements. However, the findings of consultancy companies such as Accenture shows that many of them are still not ready to go through it.
At the same time, the academic articles that could support companies in overcoming challenges and provide valuable information about the necessary firm’s resources and ways how to orchestrate them in order to successfully apply IoT are simply missing that information. Even if the company does not suffer from the lack of resources, without an extensive knowledge of how these resources should be utilized, it is less likely that it successfully deploys the prominent technology. That brings firms to developing capabilities since new capabilities make new solutions possible, and needed solutions stimulate demand for new capabilities (Kane et al., 2015). Meantime, Sinha and Park (2017) point out that skills and capabilities required to win in this new world order are vastly different to what companies have cultivated over past several decades. Thus, the aim of this paper is to explore the organizational capabilities that firms need to have to realize IoT projects. In order to achieve this aim, the following tasks should be accomplished:
• Analysis of organizational capabilities of companies that implemented IoT
• Discovery of resources for organizational capabilities creation and development that are
necessary for realization of IoT projects
• Discovery of routines supporting creation of organizational capabilities that are crucial for
realization of IoT projects
As a result, the model consisting of organizational capabilities, resources and routines that support their development for successful IoT adoption will be developed.