#2 – Every connected point will be business-critical

Sensor-equipped hard hats, RFID-tagged materials, autonomous machinery and self-replenishing spare part procurement. For tomorrow’s remotely located construction site manager, digitalization and hyper automation will bring far greater project efficiency, at the cost of far greater dependency on the availability of real-time data and the 5G or 6G connectivity that enables it.

The fictive construction site manager of tomorrow will not be alone in navigating this shift. As by 2025, an estimated 50 billion devices will be connected to the industrial internet of things. As industries from finance and retail to healthcare, construction and transportation put data-driven predictive abilities at the core of day-to-day operations, business leaders will increasingly grow accustomed to viewing connectivity as fundamental risk exposure. Because in a world where enterprise-wide orchestration takes place in clouds and edges - whether autonomous vehicle fleets or tele-medicine equipment - those clouds and edges can’t be allowed to go down.

For tomorrow’s connected enterprises, this will bring about a shift in connectivity priorities. Whereas speed and bandwidth might have formerly been key focal points, in a world of interconnectedness
and hyper-automation, robustness, reliability and data integrity will inevitably move up in the list of priorities. Possibly to the point where risk-sharing agreements between connectivity providers and connectivity users become commonplace as a means of mitigating the extensive financial damages associated with even the slightest downtime of critical connectivity.

3 Tips for future-proofing

1. Prepare for a world of live-data fueled decision machines

Whether referred to as intelligent automation, hyper-automation, robotic process automation, Industry 4.0 or Industrial internet of things; the core message is the same: in order to stay competitive in the future, enterprises regardless of industry will need to learn to successively delegate more and more daily operating decisions to ”machines fueled by live data”. In the same way that no enterprise can function without electricity, none of tomorrow’s successful connected enterprises will be able to do without automation and AI.

2. Demand robust and reliable infrastructures

In parallel with delegating more and more of operational decisions to intelligent automation, tomorrow’s successful enterprises should become comfortable in outlining service-level agreements with connectivity providers that put robustness and reliability of the digital infrastructure front and centre in the list of demands. Because in a future  where all connectivity will be business-critical connectivity, even minor downtimes or glitches will end up having far-reaching negative consequences for operations, finance and reputation.

3. Dare to think big

Ultimately, truly game-changing leaps in efficiency happen when companies realize that beyond improving existing processes, technology can be used to reimagine processes altogether. Similar to how visionaries 70 years ago saw that the car was not merely a means of getting from A to B faster, but also a way of getting to C (suburbs, malls) and thus skipping B altogether, tomorrow’s successful connected enterprises will be the ones that dare to embrace the full disruptive potential of a hyper-automated world.

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This article is part of our report: 12 predictions for Tomorrow's Connected Enterprise read the rest of the predictions here:

Tomorrow's Connected Enterprise