Digital Transformation Ecosystem [3/8]

This is Part 3 of my series of posts on Digital Transformation Ecosystem. You can read here Part 1 and Part 2. We looked at two examples of ecosystem around business outcomes, such the ride share ecosystem powered by Uber and Lyft and the one around Digital Industrial companies, powered by GE Digital. Next we will focus on ecosystems to drive thought leadership, best practices and related frameworks. In March 2014, the five companies GE along with AT&T, Cisco, IBM and Intel, started the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) with the goal to integrate the physical and the digital world. “Technology leaders drive industry ecosystem to accelerate more reliable access to big data to unlock business value.” IIC is a good example of an ecosystem to drive the thought leadership, around the convergence of the physical and digital systems.

The Industrial Internet Consortium has become a leading non-profit organization, with a thriving ecosystem what is close to 270 member companies, with a common goal. This common goal is to promote the vision of Industrial Internet, which refers to the integration of complex physical machinery with networked sensors and software. Some of the work products of IIC are:

• Thought Leadership White Papers
• Reference Architecture for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)
• Frameworks for Security and Connectivity; and
• Testbeds (reference solutions for common Industrial Internet use cases)

A quick look at the types of companies who are part of IIC, shows us that it ranges from end users of Industrial Internet, platform and application providers, system integrators / ISV's as well as other government and industry consortia's. In addition to members, the IIC also has liaison agreements with other similar entities like Industrie 4.0 and the likes of IEEE and well as the other Standards Development Organizations (SDO's). IIC has been very successful with its Testbed program and we will look into its details in the next post.