| |October 20179CIOReviewOnly when business and technology leaders are aligned on the meaning of Digital, will they be able to derive a meaningful Digital strategy of the machine, we have just injected machine intelligence, or AI, into our technology. Think driverless cars or service-oriented robots.If you want to consider the big-gest `big picture' of Digital, look no further than the Industrial Inter-net of Things, or IIoT. This term refers to the combination of as-set performance management, op-erations optimization, and business process optimization.Here's the pictorial representation of how the IIOT looks like, reprinted with permission from GE. (PLCs refer to programmable logic control-lers, which are hardware components which interface with machines and control them. SCADA refers to su-pervisory control and data acquisition systems, which help automate manu-facturing assembly lines.)Digital is a combination of hard-ware layers at the bottom, and soft-ware on top. You need both compo-nents in your Digital strategy, just one won't do it. The software layers collect, process and analyze data, and use algorithms to figure out what to do with the data. The hardware layers generate data based on sensor read-ings (e.g. temperature, engine thrust, etc.) and pass the data to the software layer using interfaces. In summary, technology leaders and business leaders need to develop common understanding of terminol-ogy such as Digital, IT, automation, AI and IIoT. They need to speak each other's `lingo' ­ for technology lead-ers to clearly outline the benefits to business, and for business leaders to explain clearly to the technology folks what the business really needs. Only when business and technology leaders are aligned on the meaning of Digi-tal, will they be able to derive a mean-ingful Digital strategy. tween IT, Digital and the IoT (or even the Industrial IoT). Here is the difference. IT pri-marily drives automation, as in, the automation of information sharing and forwarding during shop floor execution in a manufacturing or ser-vice shop, for example. What used to be written on a piece of paper and passed on to the next machine op-erator for processing, now gets en-tered into a software system, which reduces manual errors and provides uniform visibility to the data.The next phase in IT's evolution would appear to be integration be-tween the systems of information shared between finance, engineer-ing, manufacturing, service, supply chain and other functions within a corporation.Isn't all this digital? Well, it is, to the extent that almost all of the elec-tronic systems that form the back-bone of today's information systems are digital. There are hardly any `analog' electronic devices in use in the information technology sector.However, that's not what we mean when we talk about Digital Strategy. Digital refers to the con-nectivity of machines and the use of analytics to drive productivity, reduce equipment downtime and enhance profitability. For example, right now, if something fails with a piece of equipment, we send a per-son and a part to fix the problem. It means we're eliminating unexpected failures, which is of direct, obvious value. But Digital takes it a step fur-ther, the idea being that it'll also al-low us to obtain new insights into making the machines work substan-tially better in the first place.Digital is also inextricably linked to AI or artificial intelligence. When we use insights derived from ma-chine data and analytics in order to influence or enhance the behavior
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