Over the past year, we’ve had the privilege of engaging with so many experts and leaders from across industry. Each of them shared some hot tips that we’re taking with us into a new year of digital opportunities.

1. There’s a silver lining to the pandemic for heavy asset industry

The pandemic has left its mark on most industries in every corner of the planet. It’s represented more of a sharp turn rather than a learning curve for most of us, which is where Accenture’s CEO Julie Sweet says we can find the “silver lining”:

“If there’s a silver lining to the pandemic, it’s that it has required companies to accelerate their digital transformations. We can use the technology to achieve our goals around sustainability much faster than pre-pandemic. This is a huge opportunity, and we should all take it.”

Susan Peterson Sturm, VP of Security at Cognite, looks ahead at how the cybersecurity landscape will change in 2022:

In the Operational Technology (OT) security space, 2021 has brought enough change to make a security professional’s head spin.  It’s in this context that I want to share some perspectives on the macro industry trends that are likely to influence OT Security Teams in 2022.

Expect an accelerated pace of change in OT Systems 

After spending 20 years in the OT energy space, I used to observe a “set it and forget it” mindset quite often, with energy operators minimizing changes to OT systems, especially in Purdue Model layers 2 and below. While IoT tech has driven a great deal of visible changes in layers 3 and above, I think we will see the pace of change in systems 2 and below increasing, which will enable industry to operate smarter.

Mark Zuckerberg strikes again, collecting news headlines and global attention (and creating distractions), and ensuring that the word “metaverse” worms its way into our everyday vocabulary, whether we like it or not. While we’re grateful that this isn’t another story of a billionaire dreaming of space odysseys, it’s still all about conquering another kind of kingdom—a virtual one.

So, will Meta (formerly known as Facebook) be the master of the metaverse? Or will the practical utility of a 3D virtual world outweigh consumer entertainment for once? Asset-heavy industry is definitely a metaverse contender, having already shown its love for digital twins and computer vision to test, predict, inspect, and conduct a host of other tasks from the comfort of a leather-padded office chair.

Until May last year, health centers in Japan used fax machines to send handwritten reports of COVID-19 cases to the health ministry. Hanko seals (a carved stamp) and paper documents, in lieu of digital ones, are still part of the country’s work culture. Hard cash continues to circulate, due to widespread refusal to adopt digital payment systems.

Though highly diversified, Japan’s industrial sector has been slow to digitalize, driving production from stagnation into a steady decline. Despite Japan’s innovative image on the world stage, it ranks only 27th in a survey of how countries (and their industries) deploy digital technologies, according to the IMD Digital Competitiveness index. Other reports show that only 13% of Japanese organizations are actively working to digitalize.

What exactly is the holdup when it comes to digitalizing a country seemingly as advanced as Japan?

Answering this question has become a priority for Japanese leaders. It portends to be a long-term competitive catastrophe in the making, which is perhaps why former Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga prioritized digital reform when came into power in September 2020. The country has long struggled to deliver on administrative reforms, which has served as a barrier to admittance in the digital era.

This week, Japan elected a new prime minister to replace Suga: Fumio Kishida. Kishida is expected to follow through with Suga’s digital reforms, specifically the “digital garden city state” concept that seeks to boost regional economies through the use of advanced  technology.

Ignite News spoke with Junji Yamamoto, an executive advisor for Yokogawa Electric Corporation’s industrial automation and life innovation business, about what’s behind Japan’s societal reluctance to digitalize.