PARTNER FEATURE: The Global Industry Organisations Roundtable (GIO) initiative is fresh off the back of a successful MWC Barcelona 2022, celebrating a roundtable event and the launch of a new whitepaper as the group continues to tackle the challenges and opportunities presented by the digital transformation of all industries.

Founded by Huawei in 2018, GIO is an environment for discussion and open exchange amongst global industry organisations involved in digital transformation and ICT.

Its membership now boasts more than twenty global industry organisations, from mobile groups such as the GSMA, 3GPP, 5G Automotive Association and TM Forum, to wider vertical industry groups including the Alliance of Industrial Internet and the Industrial Internet Consortium.

Speaking to Mobile World Live at MWC, GIO’s special advisor Martin Creaner highlighted the initiative’s objectives: “We’ve had industry organisations participating from all over the world, between the US, Europe, China and Japan. And they address not only the ICT industry, but also other vertical industries such as manufacturing, automotive, healthcare, etc, and these particular industry organisations have been working together to try and better understand how to solve the general problem of digital transformation and how to accelerate digital transformation in each of our chosen industries.”

Creaner noted that GIO chose MWC as a venue for its latest activities because verticals such as manufacturing, automotive and healthcare all “intersect with the overall traditional ICT industry.” A major objective is to determine “how do we work together to make things better for all of those industries?”

9th GIO Roundtable
To that end, GIO held its 9th roundtable event at MWC Barcelona 2022 (March 1), with participants also joining online from around the world. It was co-hosted by GIO and British Standards Institution (BSI) and saw main conclusions shared from a Digital Health Workshop (held February 27) and Industry Data Value Workshop (February 28), focusing on the analysis of ecosystem collaboration across digital platforms in an effort to accelerate digital transformation of vertical industries.

Supported by the China Association for Medical Devices Industry (CAMDI) and HL7 Europe, the Digital Health Workshop facilitated sharing and discussion on the industrial environment shaping an innovative digital health area, the standardisation practices of consumer products in the healthcare area and the advances in data sharing for consumer products. The main conclusions of the Digital Health Workshop demonstrated that the rapid development of innovative digital active health devices and the software industry in general has presented new challenges to regulators and industries, necessitating the strengthening of industrial dialogue, promotion of industrial consensus, and standardisation implementation.

The Industry Data Value Workshop was co-hosted by GIO, IDTA and AII. Cutting-edge manufacturing technologies and practices in Europe, Japan, and China were discussed, and potential opportunities for cooperation to promote industrial digital transformation were explored.

Whitepaper
A highlight of the roundtable was the launch of a new GIO whitepaper: ‘Industry-Specific Ecosystem.’

GIO’s Martin Creaner explained the theme of the paper: “It really surrounds the idea that different vertical industries are all trying to pull together ecosystems in order to help them transform, to do things differently, to sell new services, to do things more efficiently, and to do things more sustainably.”

A recent McKinsey Global Survey found that in traditional industries such as automotive, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and oil and gas, only between 4 and 11 per cent of digital transformation projects were deemed successful. In many cases, a number of projects suffered from lack of appropriate skills and effective partners to help the organisation implement change effectively.

The GIO whitepaper investigates four different aspects of how ecosystems can be used to more effectively support digital transformation opportunities.

Section 3 of the paper introduces models and frameworks that offer an approach for how to think about ecosystems and understand the various stages in developing a new ecosystem or engage with an existing ecosystem. This section goes on to describe a methodology for selecting which ecosystems might be suitable to engage with for specific use cases.

Section 4 explores the challenges of sharing data across ecosystems and the trust infrastructures that are emerging to support this data sharing. It discusses initiatives like International Data Spaces (IDS) and GAIA-X. All of these suggest IT architectures and a collaboration framework that help with the safeguarding of data sovereignty.

Section 5 examines the role of platforms and platform business models in making ecosystems practical, and proposes the concept of industry specific platforms as a way of bringing vertical industry ecosystems to life.

Section 6 highlights the wide range of transformative case studies that are emerging in the manufacturing vertical. These show that manufacturing has a mature and vibrant ecosystem that is already driving digital transformation value within the vertical.

The whitepaper can be viewed in full here.

Expanding focus areas
Other verticals such as healthcare and automotive will be explored in future editions of the whitepaper, and GIO’s Martin Creaner is confident the initiative will continue to expand its areas of focus. “Some of the areas that are going to be of interest later on and pushing out into the rest of 2022 and 2023 will be topics around AI [Artificial Intelligence], developing trust infrastructures across different countries so that we can not only build collaborative solutions within Europe, but also say between Europe and Japan, or between Europe and China, or even more multilaterally than that.”

He concluded: “The future is really bright around how these different organisations may work together. I think we’re seeing great value in having a common forum within which to share our ideas.”

View the full video interview with Martin Creaner at MWC here.