By all accounts, and if all the hype is true, the most encompassing TLA we’ve ever known will be the IoT, also known as The Internet of Things.

This concept of almost everything you can imagine being part of a connected world to the extent that it essentially becomes the world is a pretty hard one to get your head around, even if you’re surrounded by technology and pretty comfortable with it.

The thing – not one of the Things in the Internet of Things thank goodness – that I struggle with, however, is the thing that we struggle with right now, namely how on earth do we make sense of all this flipping data? It’s a constant battle to see through the fog and benefit from a constantly expanding body of information about everything.

The key thing for us both as individual people and in our organisations is this: there might well be 30 billion devices connected in 5 years from now, but how will this make our lives easier or enable us to make money from it? Maybe the money will come from the manufacture and sale of the devices themselves. I don’t know about you, however, but I still have 2 remotes for one television and these devices don’t talk to each other. With the millions of different standards in all our different global walks of life, getting the things that make up the Internet of Things to talk to each other and make the sum of the parts greater than the whole is not something I think I’ll be solving by this time next week…