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deployment and operation. Meets requirements for worldwide spent $1.25 trillion on digital transformation and
reliability and availability. IDC projects that number to exceed $2 trillion by 2023 [8].
In industrial settings that investment was dominated and
3. INDUSTRIAL TRANSFORMATION justified by spend on:

Many recent books, white papers, and articles talk about • Improving customer experience
what digital transformation means and how it can be • Better customer engagement, outcomes, and value
accomplished. I have included a number of references that • Transitioning to new business models
address different aspects – why it is an imperative [5], why • Improving operational efficiency
it is not just about technology but about people [6], and why • Agility and flexibility, effectiveness, asset uptime,
many attempts at transformation fail [7]. From one point of supply chain optimization, recovery from disruptions,
view digital transformation is about how organizations stay and asset yield.
competitive, outsmart their peers by making better decisions, • Differentiating product and service offerings
attract loyal customers, and have satisfied employees and • Unique products and services with new highly
shareholders. This is an edge that allows them to stay in desirable features
business and be profitable, achieving tangible outcome- • Reducing risk across the enterprise
based results. For public entities the incentive is almost the • Safety, regulatory compliance, quality, avoiding
same, where without the profit motive, they deliver services
that the citizens appreciate, workers show pride in the results, product malfunction
and both show their support at the ballot box. Enterprises in
almost all sectors are deep in the throes of figuring out how A more granular examination of what digital transformation
to get ahead of the disruptions they face and how to achieve is about, is to look at the progression of value that it may
that edge; the same is true in national, regional, and local provide. Do the myriads of decisions that are made in an
government organizations. Perhaps the single most visible enterprise work effectively and pull in the same direction?
adoption trend in the public sector is “Smart Cities”, where On a daily basis, and in the long term, do the decisions result
the dependencies and tensions between technology and in actions, for both routine and exceptional situations, that
human-centric considerations are clearly visible. are highly productive? What is the yield from the investment
in going digital? How high is the risk of using promising but
From another viewpoint, one can consider digital not fully vetted technologies and processes that are very
transformation as an opportunity to better align enterprises much in flux? While one should in some measure ask these
questions of individual decisions, the intent here is to deal
and public organizations with societal needs, changing the
way they do business in fundamental ways. Examples would with the tangle of how they may interact with each other and
affect outcomes. In answering these questions in the positive,
be switching out carbon-based energy sources for
renewables, recycling materials to avoid the high cost and we hope that powerful new tools will allow us to conquer the
inherent complexity they represent. In an industrial setting a
deleterious effects of waste dumps, promotion of electric
vehicles to lower both pollution and carbon emissions, good reference to look at is the book by Langer [9] that
illustrates what the new technologies and tools can do in
changing production processes to eliminate dangerous
chemicals, provide protection against natural disaster, and so product design and manufacturing. The scale below is one
way we can imagine the progression of capability and value
on.
delivered but appreciate that the path is likely to be a lengthy
journey and that most industrial enterprises are still at the
There are four main changes that digital transformation lower levels, hence the previous statement that the roll out
addresses: business processes, business models, for digitization will last at least a two decades or more.
organizational culture and behavior, and lastly, domain- Success is unpredictable and requires that we make
specific implementations. The last of these are paced by the significant progress in technology, business models,
emergence of new technologies and the creation of new satisfying roles for industrial workers, and positive and
products or services. The heart of any of these changes is desirable outcomes for consumers.
institutionalizing fact-based data-driven decision making at
every level of the organizations. That requires trust,
cooperation, and engagement across business or Level 1: Providing awareness and pointing to important
aspects of situational status, supporting actual analysis and
organizational units and is hard to accomplish without
dealing with all four aspects simultaneously; it is inherently decisions to be made by people. (Situational)
complex. A point to make is that none of this is possible
without data. It is not any data, it has to be the right data, and Level 2: Identifying the cause of the situation or issue
it has to cover the issues at hand as comprehensively as reliably, reducing the time to resolution, but leaving the
possible. That data should also provide insight, over long nature of the response to people. (Diagnostic)
stretches of time, about performance and the feedback from
customers and end users.
Another factor that is essential is the return on business cases
that attract capital. It is estimated that in 2019 enterprises

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