So, Why Isn’t the Entire Industry Digitalized?

The problem isn’t that manufacturers don’t know what the opportunities are. Instead, the industry is being held back because businesses don’t know what’s achievable.

The terms that those of us in the IT world are throwing around can be ambiguous. Terms like Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Services and Internet of Services are just words that don’t even begin to describe the business transformation opportunities that they represent. And even if you have some idea of what AI is, not everyone knows that it’s available as an online service that you can ‘plug into’ with relative ease.

So, it’s not surprising that many businesses do struggle to develop a coherent digital transformation strategy. Can you blame them when there’s not enough material out there to explain exactly what these IT terms mean?

To tackle this innovation bottleneck, you need to start empowering your employees with knowledge. Martin Clothier, our Technical Director, believes there’s a lot of untapped innovation within in-house teams.

“Every company has people on the shop floor who know the business, the processes and how to change and improve them. But they’re not IT people or software developers so they end up creating wonderful spreadsheet solutions that plan and run the whole business,” he says.

That leads to the common problem - the knowledge is siloed.

“To relieve that bottleneck, you can train those people to become citizen developers,” recommends Clothier. “They can then take innovative ideas and turn them into reality.”

“Train your employees to become citizen developers so they can take innovative ideas and turn them into reality.”