Study: IoT adoption still slow for government agencies

The federal government’s adoption rates for the Internet of Things (IoT) is still low, according to a study by the Center for Data Innovation.

This is likely to continue to be the case, with the federal government lagging behind the private sector, unless changes are made to encourage adoption across agencies, the study said.

The reasons adoption has been so low are plenty, including a lack of leadership, a lack of workers with the necessary technical abilities to use IoT-generated data, a lack of sufficient funding to modernize IT infrastructures (and, according to the survey, even when the funding is there, the process gets bogged down by policies) and finally, the potential security risks and uncertainty.

The survey listed a number of reforms that agencies should make to address these challenges, including:

• Having the federal chief information officer establish an IoT taskforce to provide cross-government leadership and coordination to support the deployment of IoT across the government
• Developing an IoT action plan to identify how agencies will use IoT solutions to cut costs and improve sefvices
• Employing a chief data officer to ensure the necessary technical infrastructure is established

Click here to view the entire survey results.