Industry 4.0 - My Point of View

There is a lot of enthusiasms out there, if people hear the words Industry 4.0. There are a lot of scientific articles and blog posts about it, but people still seem to under-estimate the meaning of it. From my point of view it’s one of the biggest chances to make business in the last couple of years and I as well struggled a bit at the beginning to get the big picture of what it is about. Anyway, I tried to write it down and to visualize it in some way and this is the result of my vision and how I see it: 

Let me try to explain my thoughts by starting from the Timeline and Vision section and continuing guiding you through the picture from the center to the outside:

• Timeline and Vision: We are currently on a journey towards an interconnected world, where computer aided systems and computing in general are everywhere around us or in other words ubiquitous. The pervasive applications we use at the moment will more and more reach a certain level within our everyday life so that pervasive computing will slowly shift the pure usage of computer systems into a background position. Don’t misunderstand me, the service you are using will still be there but it is as integrated into our life that you won’t notice the use of it until you need. The service will instantly be available. The final stage is going to be the already mentioned ubiquitous computing stage. At that time simply everything will be connected to each other and is able to communicate. Of course the scale of the arrow on the picture is not accurate. The arrow should end much further on the right hand side than on the picture.

• Business Drivers: The business drivers can be seen in the center of the picture. There are four markets, which -according to a lot of sources like Gartner for example- drive not only businesses but also whole industries forward very rapidly.
  • Everything-as-a-Service: As time goes by, we are still increasing the number of services we consume. This evolution is also going to change the IT. On some topics you can experience it already. Cloud services are booming right now, as well as Human-Resources-as-a-Service. People don’t want to invest money or struggle with high installation and configuration effort. They just want to sign up for a service and it has to be available in a very short timeframe, if not instantly.
  • Internet of Things: Internet of Things is a trend to connect traditional devices to the internet and make them smarter. This can not only be wearables like smart watches, glasses or fitness bands, but also fridges, coffee machines and other things. How cool would it be, if the coffee machine automatically puts as much caffeine as needed into your coffee based on the time you slept the night before. A lot of devices generate a lot of data, what is called Big Data. Out of Big Data you can gather a lot of useful information for new businesses with data analysis. An example needed? Police departments who use it for the prediction of the next crime area.
  • Everywhere Computing: As of today, the usage of smartphones and tables is still increasing whereas the use of regular computers is decreasing. But devices will still get more mobile, because this is what they did for the last 15 years!
  • Automation 2.0: You are right, I admit it. I created that word. But anyway, I find it very accurate to describe a new way of automation or orchestration, which is beyond the limits we face right now. Cognitive systems are going to understand questions like IBM’s Watson supercomputer did on the Jeopardy show. It will further improve until it is a real artificial intelligence, which can be transferred to robots, which build even more robots by simply printing them. Sounds scary, well it is, but we are talking about a future which is still a lot of years ahead.

• Supporting Factors: The supporting factors spread across the business drivers. They somehow enable, influence or ease them.
  • High-Speed Networks: This is an easy one. Since one day we are going to live in an interconnected world, the base of communication has to be improved, which is the networks. The bandwidth has to be incredibly high, they have to be ultra fast and super reliable.
  • Scalable Computing: Since the consummation of a service always reaches a peak level one day, the service provider has to make sure that it’s service is able to handle peak requests always in line with appropriate spendings.
  • Self-Service: You know it! You like services that are easy going and instantly available. Since providing employees, which care about customers and handle those service requests, companies have to shift to self-service portals for most of the services.
  • Green-IT: Very important point, since I don’t want to leave a garbage dump as a planet to my kids by exploiting it to a maximum. We all have to save resources trying to minimize our trash output.
  • Collaboration: Because technology is starting to become overwhelming for a single person, we need to collaborate more and create a value by working in a team. A lonesome fighter is not able to achieve anything big in the future.
  • Interfaces and APIs: How are the interconnected services and machines able to “talk” to each other. Answer is easy: By using open interfaces and APIs built for that reason. Otherwise services will be isolated from each other.
  • IT-Security: With all those scandals about IT-Security rushing to mainstream media, IT-Security gathered even more attention than it already had before, because of rapidly increasing cases of cybercrime. A focus will be to secure all those Industry 4.0 factors and safeguard them from criminals.
  • Social: Machines are going to communicate with each other invisible for the human eye. Life and especially time will tick faster. Humans still need to be socially active. This is why all of those interconnected services need to have a social component, too.

• Obtain market attention: With all those services, products and machines around us in the future it might become difficult to place the service in the market. But still, if you do so, you need to obtain market’s attention. I think there will be three very simple ways:
  • SEO: The most impersonal method will be to optimize your service for the search engines. As I said before, since users want to start using the service very uncomplicated by signing-up for it, be sure that if they find your service or product on the internet they are very likely to use it. I mean, the reason is easy: They searched for it.
  • Viral marketing: Of course, a very comfortable way of obtaining market’s attention is viral marketing, since it can be free and it works. If people like your offer they will share it. Pretty cool if you consider that a couple of years ago you had to fight hard to reach a big community like the one behind Facebook or LinkedIn.
  • Personal Recommendation: Maybe the most traditional way of free promotion. Personal recommendations: You know how it works. After watching an awesome movie at cinema, you recommend it to a friend who will very likely watch it more probably than without your recommendation. Especially if he or she has to take a decision about two even movies. All the same for services and products in the Industry 4.0!

If you read this lines down here, you have read my article. Well, thanks for that. As I wrote before: This is my vision of the Industry 4.0, but I am also interested in your opinion, hence I would be very happy to read it in the comments section.