The Internet of Things (IoT): A Research Agenda for Information Systems

The Internet of things (IoT) is emerging as an integrated set of digital innovations with the potential to unleash unprecedented opportunities and create significant challenges from both technological and societal perspectives. The IoT’s emergence signals many valuable opportunities (particularly for information systems (IS) scholars) to conduct scholarly inquiries. We posit that, since the IS discipline operates at the intersection of information technologies’ (IT) social, business, and technical aspects, IS scholars have a unique capacity to understand and contribute to advancing research on this new topic and associated phenomena. We outline the IoT’s distinctive attributes and their implications for existing IS research traditions. Furthermore, we highlight some illustrative research perspectives from which IS scholars can study the IoT. We highlight a research agenda for IS in two different ways. First, we discuss four IS characteristics that change based on IoT elements: 1) the physio-digital continuum, 2) multi-level exploration of IS, 3) composite affordance, and 4) heterogeneity. Second, we discuss the ways in which the IoT opens up research opportunities based on its impact on four major thematic domains: 1) organizations, 2), technology, 3) individuals, and 4) society.