Imagine that you’re tasked with designing a factory, but you don’t know what product or products the factory is going to be tasked with producing. What challenges might you encounter? Well, you might be able to make some basic design choices that adhere to broad industry best practices (adding fire exits, for instance), but when it came time to make any specific decisions you’d probably be at a loss. If you’re used to creating plants for automotive manufacturing, you might be loath to rely on your usual instincts, in case the plant will actually be making much smaller goods; you might not even know how large the facility itself should be.

This might sound like a completely far fetched scenario to most readers—and with good reason! But it’s exactly the sort of situation that many IT leads find themselves in when it comes to Industry 4.0 transformations: they’re being tasked with adopting new technology to drive an ongoing digita