Inter­net of things

Inter­net of things belongs to one of the sig­nif­i­cant trends of the tech­nol­o­gy indus­try. Not only com­put­ers or smart­phones are con­nect­ed with the inter­net but also cars, elec­tri­cal house­hold appli­ances or indus­tri­al machin­ery. The net­work­ing of the indus­try is often called “Indus­try 4.0”. Machines are equipped with sen­sors, which deliv­er enor­mous amounts of data. The eval­u­a­tion of these data should help to increase the pro­duc­tiv­i­ty of the machin­ery or to avoid dis­rup­tions.
Which effects will Inter­net of things have on the cur­rent world of work? There will be no answer for this ques­tion at that time. Lead­ing HR Man­agers have already said that the lack of open spaces and exper­i­men­tal fields for human resource pol­i­cy and labor orga­ni­za­tion jeop­ar­dize the chances of Ger­man / Euro­pean com­pa­nies in the dig­i­tal age. The Ger­man, much vaunt­ed dual voca­tion­al edu­ca­tion is not aligned to give spe­cial­ists suf­fi­cient com­pe­tence in deal­ing with dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies. Besides the qual­i­fi­ca­tion of the employ­ees, flex­i­bil­i­ty and greater free­dom of the labor orga­ni­za­tion are becom­ing more deci­sive. What is more, besides the clas­sic employ­ment, oth­er types of employ­ment e.g. self-employ­ment or vol­un­tary work are more and more impor­tant. Not only pol­i­tics but also asso­ci­a­tions and social part­ners are request­ed to check whether the con­tent of such voca­tion­al edu­ca­tions that are deal­ing with dig­i­tal­iza­tion needs to be reformed. There is not much time left!
The good news is that the impor­tance of a human being for pro­duc­tion will be increased in strength. He could take and also needs to take a new place. The demand struc­ture of con­sumers has changed immense­ly. Indi­vid­u­al­ized prod­ucts are para­mount. Thus the undoubt­ed strengths of humans name­ly to be able to react flex­i­ble on chang­ing process­es and local changes are to com­bine with the strengths of man­u­al and auto­mat­ic labor name­ly flex­i­bil­i­ty and effi­cien­cy to cre­ate an opti­mal ben­e­fit. To ful­fill this a com­plete new social-tech­ni­cal sys­tems is required in which humans and machines are work­ing togeth­er as a team. Human being and machine should com­mu­ni­cate with each oth­er in dig­i­tal and social net­works with­in a con­nect­ed indus­try.
This new “Social Net­worked Indus­try” stands for an Indus­try 4.0, which puts a stronger focus on the indi­vid­ual human with his per­son­al sense of respon­si­bil­i­ty and which uti­lizes his spe­cif­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills. So that the vision of a col­lab­o­ra­tive labor of humans and machines can become real­i­ty, the indus­try needs to engage itself in the new way of coop­er­a­tion. Besides the mechan­i­cal respon­si­bil­i­ty with which machines needs to be equipped, life­long learn­ing of humans and machin­ery is an essen­tial fac­tor of suc­cess.

Let’s tack­le it!