KEY ISSUES FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IN THE G20

The private-sector-led standards paradigm of development of technical specifications within industry consortia
or alliances is considered more focused on particular market needs or opportunities, as well as targeted
technology integration. As noted, consortia standards-development bodies’ members are primarily enterprise
actors. Their output has been increasingly influential in the past decades due to several factors. These include
increasing market influence of transnational corporations and the emergence of GVCs across various countries.
Often co-ordinated by “lead firms”, members of consortia use common technical specifications as a means to
govern market-deployable value chains across the globe to help ensure coherence between value chain
partners. In the consortia model, technical specifications can often be developed and deployed in the market
more rapidly than those developed in other paradigms since the actors are not seeking wide industry input or
consensus, and are focused on particular vertical markets or specific technology domains and solutions.
Voluntary standards can serve as tools to help users meet regulatory requirements. In cases in which the law
requires a particular outcome, voluntary standards may offer an effective means to achieve this, but without
these means ever being mandatory; they are simply recognised as valuable. Any organisation remains free to
use any means other than those in the voluntary standard, provided that the outcome required by law is
achieved.
The current standardisation system reflects the more traditional industry supply chain focused on products
and the efficient movement of physical goods. Industrie 4.0 and IoT applications are forging new paths to
standardisation systems that are more aligned with industry efficiency, serviceability, and supply and value
chains focused on an outcome economy.
In the emerging “outcome economy”, businesses compete more on their ability to help customers achieve
quantifiable results than on the product used to achieve those measurable outcomes. To thrive in this
environment, companies will increasingly rely on business partners, connected ecosystems, advanced
analytics, and new data management streams from smart products in the field to gain timely insights about
customer needs and behaviours.
At the same time, a more agile standardisation system for the IoT and Industrie 4.0 is taking shape. In a time of
exponential change driven by the rapid rate of technological development in IoT, the capacity of open
standardisation processes to become more agile will be essential, especially to reach the level of
interoperability necessary to realise its full-scale benefits.
How, and to what extent, companies invest their time in standardisation is contingent on the role that they
specifically play. No one company or government can build the IIoT alone. And developing the technology and
related capabilities to deliver business outcomes is a challenging task. Few companies, even the world’s largest
ones, are in a position to entirely “own” Industrie 4.0’s emerging digital value chains.
To be successful, companies increasingly need to have a clear strategy on how they want to participate in
emerging industry platforms and ecosystems. There are a number of possible lead and supporting roles:
platform owner, data supplier, service aggregator, and so on. Since delivering outcomes often demands
problem solving above the level of an individual product or solution, companies will gain from working
together to meet the needs of customers and societies at large. For example, in an application space as
complex as IoT for smart cities, the corporate logic of an individual manufacturer/supplier will need to account
for potentially far-reaching social, environmental, ethical, and socio-political questions. Such questions will be
best addressed collectively in requirements-oriented communities of interrelated actors.
As IoT and Industrie 4.0 comprise a cross-disciplinary and cross-industry sector, increasing levels of
collaboration across ecosystems of business partners will be expected to bring together players that combine