The Need for Digital Architecture in Operationalizing Digital Engineering Strategies for Smart Production Systems

Many organizations in the production industry domain are struggling with mapping their high-level digital engineering strategies to working digital solutions in the context of their existing systems landscape. They understand that a digital transformation is necessary to deal with changing, more dynamic markets. But they often develop very specific digital innovations based on very broadly stated strategies. Often, they also do not know how to position individual digital technologies in their overall digital transformation, certainly not where it concerns currently hyped technologies like AI in general and GenAI specifically. Consequently, they fail to align requirements pull (what they need) with technology push (what technology can do) forces - and digitization projects fail. In a short commentary paper, we explain why explicit attention to digital architecture can (or even should) be a structural basis for operationalizing digital strategies into working smart production solutions.

You find our paper (in open access mode) here: https://www.mdpi.com/2079-8954/14/3/297