Early 80’s Gartner was stating that in the future corporate IT system is a combination of best applications of dedicated business segments, like administration, sales, materials and production planning & control. That vision was not realized perfectly. Year 2000 changed everything. Corporate IT became almost like a synonym to ERP: monolithic era was coined. This IT policy was justified with “harmonization”: in practice all applications or solutions are provided by one vendor. This culture, however, lead to excessive growth of corporate legacy systems, like MS Excel.
Industrial Internet or Industry 4.0 enables and encourages integrate best-of-breed applications to combine an IT infrastructure which will not compromise. The IT system has to support growth and transformation.
Heikki Aalto, 12.06.2015
