'Unless digital transformation gets into every department and process, it won't work' says Siemens customer solutions CEO

"It cannot be the task of a corporate department," says Dr. Norbert Gaus

Digital transformation cannot succeed unless it's carried out by every department and process in an organisation, Siemens customer solutions CEO Dr. Norbert Gaus says.

Kicking off Teradata Universe 2016 in Hamburg today, Gaus implored delegates to realise that digital transformation "cannot be the task of a corporate department", and that the message needs to be fed down to relevant departments to start seeing a true return on investment in digital spend.

In a system it calls "Sinalytics", Gaus explained how Siemens - which still classes itself as an engineering firm - is trying to leverage the need for "synergy" across organisations by drawing together a number of existing technologies.

"It basically combines common technology to form a platform for tasks where we wanted to leverage synergy in order to reduce complexity, or speed of development and so on," explained Gaus, showing a data lake comprised of a relational data warehouse powered by Teradata, as well as a NoSQL layer comprised of Hortonworks, Hadoop and Teradata. A "Smart Data Lab" also makes use of Teradata's "advanced" Aster analytics suite for more complex big data needs.

Gaus admitted that, by offering big data analytics as part of its existing services in energy management, building infrastructure, healthcare, transport and more, the analytics aspect has almost become a "utility", and Siemens itself "has now become an IT company".

It's also finding such ranged success with its big data solutions across so many sectors, that's it's at risk of starting to cannibalise its own profits:

"With the example of a train operator, a train has a few hundred sensors all being monitored for 26 high speed trains. And the great thing is, this customer, based on this service, was able to take away significant market share from the airlines," said Gaus.

"Although the airlines are also our customers, so hopefully we can help them on how they go forward," he quipped.

But technology aside, Gaus' other message was strong: distributing the technology to those in the company who really need is a the path to real success:

"What [customers have] achieved is driven by the whole corporation," he said, "with domain-specific applications in wind and gas power, and transportation and healthcare, that business units are in charge of.

"The benefits of this are that we do what needs to get done where we do it the best. We have the domain know-how in the business units, and the data analytics know-how centrally.

"In each division we have the people who understand what drives their customers. It's the people in the train divisions, for example, who know how a rail company needs to differentiate against its competitors". It's there where we have the people who understand their business models, and where the many hundreds of sensors sit on a train, and why they sit there."

In this way, he argued, digitalisation "becomes the task of the whole company".

Without company-wide drive of digital transformation, digital applications would not emerge, and that would be "very, very visible" on a company's ongoing balance sheet, Gaus told delegates.

"Digitalisation cannot be the task of a corporate department," he summarised.

"Unless this gets into every department and every process, digitalisation will not work. It's the difference between digitalised departments, and a digitalised business."