The human side of Industry 4.0: Big Data

Amedeo Bellodi from H-FARM Consultancy

At school, they taught us that we had 3 industrial revolutions. The first one dates back to when Watt harnessed the power of steam for mechanical work. In the 19th century, when the impact of electricity and the assembly line laid the foundations for mass production, the second revolution happened. More recently,

the advent of computer science has shaken the world for the third time.

Don’t think that history is confined to books, history is already here.

The so-called Industry 4.0 is happening right under our eyes: born as the natural evolution of the tech expansion of the last decades, it aims to make industrial production interconnected and automated.

Is Industry 4.0 just a trending topic?

Digital transformation is affecting every industrial process, from the management of big data to its processing through analysis techniques such as machine learning and deep learning, to the development of methodologies to manage the interaction between men and machines.
If you think that Industry 4.0 is simply a trend, think again.
In 2016 the Italian Government issued a national plan to promote industrial innovation across all sectors, agriculture and manufacturing included.

Overcoming obstacles with a data-driven attitude

Users leave countless digital fingerprints whenever they are online. Today’s business problems can therefore be tackled based on data-driven logic, relying on real data to decide what to do.
We are doing a lot, but a lot is still to be done. A few months ago, the IBM Institute for Business Value in collaboration with Oxford Economics published the results of a study that found that 64% of over 900 CMOs consider their sectors to be mature enough to adopt state-of-the-art treatment technologies from now to 3 years. However, only a quarter of them is already planning to implement these solutions.

The digital revolution is more human than ever

The force of the digital revolution can scare even the most structured and mature companies, that fear it would take huge efforts to redesign their processes and their internal organization to make room for new professional roles. Actually, it’s enough to take one step at a time to avoid the lethal outcome of more flexible competitors (whether they are robots or not).

You can read the original post in Italian here.