Co-Creating the Future: Part 5 – The Way to Digital Transformation

In part five of our Co-Creating the Future series, we put the spotlight on our own playbook for digital industrial transformation and examine its five key pillars. This post was originally published on SIG’s SIGnals blog.

In part four of our Co-Creating the Future series with SIG, we looked at the final stage in future-proofing a plant’s production with predictive analysis and maintenance. However, it’s one thing to understand the advantages of digital transformation. It’s another to understand how, when, and where to get started.

At GE Digital, we’ve developed a digital transformation playbook—based on learning from our own transformation—to help customers and partners embark on their own journey. It boils this journey down to five key pillars in order for transformation to be successful, sustainable, and scalable.

The first step for any transformation is to re-think the organizational capabilities needed to start, scale, and sustain a transformation. This requires developing an end-to-end view of all the competencies, tools, processes, and governance needed to succeed as a world-class digital industrial. Companies can then determine where and how these capabilities are organized and executed within their own organization – particularly vertical and horizontal business lines.

Build or buy? It’s a common dilemma when implementing an IIoT platform, and a huge amount of resources are needed to even begin developing the foundation for such a platform. In our own experience, Predix Platform was purpose-built to meet the scale, complexity, speed, and security requirements of industrial companies and assets. The result is a world-class application development platform for the Industrial Internet that lays the foundation for our portfolio of  industrial applications—solving customer challenges, driving outcomes, and creating new business opportunities for customers accelerating their digital journey.

During our transformation, we realized that it  could be significantly scaled with partner companies, increasing the number of opportunities in the pipeline and the ability to win in global markets. It therefore created an open-innovation partner ecosystem spanning industrial markets and outcomes. This ecosystem now includes a vast range of partnerships serving everyone from global corporations to early-stage startups. And, crucially, its open-innovation model means that partner solutions built on Predix Platform can be certified and made available to our global install base.

Digital transformation requires people to think and lead differently. This means rebuilding a company’s culture around rapid decision-making, learning from failure, and driving innovation. To support this, we changed the way we recruited, developed, and incentivized talent—attracting the right people needed to become a digital industrial leader.

For us, business model innovation relied on operations agility and productivity improvements. Internal improvements, for example, can self-fund the next stage in the digital journey, while enlisting early champions can be crucial in creating momentum and awareness amongst employees. Once operational agility has been established, companies can then begin to experiment with new business models.

What does a successful digital transformation look like? Don’t miss part six of our Co-Creating the Future series where we’ll showcase our Predix portfolio in action. 

Read part 6 of our series: Innovation in Action.