Welcome to a new age!

The Internet of Things has immense potential − but it also calls for data sovereignty. It is the key to unlocking knowledge and data silos in a way we can control.

The digital transformation in the 2010s first and foremost connected people. The 2020s herald the start of the Internet of Things era: Intuitive buildings that react to the needs of the people living in them. Autonomous vehicles that can draw on a sea of data. Critical infrastructures such as decentralized, intelligent networks that will autonomously manage renewable energy sources.

The merging of the physical and the digital world holds immense potential. Billions of devices and appliances are already interconnected. They generate a valuable data pool which remains untapped in many areas. At the same time, we are seeing new forms of collaborations between partners (we call these ecosystems) that are opening the door to completely new business models. There is also a huge potential in efficiency increase, sustainability and energy saving initiatives. We can, for example, increase the capacity of public transport by 20 percent without having to build any new physical structures!

But I do see challenges here too. Around 60 percent of industrial companies have yet to implement any notable industrial technologies for the Internet of Things. In many sectors, production IT and the internet still tend to be separate entities. The question “what will happen to my data if I share them?” creates a lot of uncertainty, as shown by the recently published “Data economy in Germany” study conducted by the BDI. In addition to absolute data security, the question of data sovereignty also comes into play. For end customers, data sovereignty means that each and every person, as a consumer, can actively control and autonomously decide the use of their personal data. Similarly, in B2B sectors it means that companies can access and use their data through an autonomous management procedure. In other words, decide who gets which data for which purposes.

It’s not easy to strike a good balance between data sovereignty of the stakeholders and practicability in terms of cooperation.

The key aspects:

1. Infrastructure
A robust infrastructure with the highest data security requirements must be provided (see also our “Charter of Trust” initiative).

2. Data sovereignty
Contracts between the cooperation partners are the method of choice. They must appropriately consider the interests of all, very often complex, industrial frameworks for data use. Siemens works on the principle of responsible data management. For example, we are collaborating with a number of partners to devise, on our industrial IoT platform, standardized contract templates for Shared Data Pools.

3. Legal and political frameworks
I welcome in principle the latest political initiatives of the European Commission and the German federal government for improving the use of data and creating support frameworks in order to do so. We need to be empowering the stakeholders and dispelling the legal uncertainties caused, for example, by the unsurmountable hurdles to B2B data cooperations under cartel law or concerning anonymization and pseudonymization. Another step forward is to create cross-industry infrastructures and ecosystems, such as the ones in the European initiative GAIA-X.

If industry, the policymakers and society act smart and work together here, the German and European economies will be able to boost their innovation strength and competitiveness. And this is not just about economic prosperity, it also involves sustainability, efficiency and resource conservation! We need to unlock knowledge and data silos in a way we can control so that all industrial partners can create value and innovation together in ecosystems. Data security and data sovereignty of all stakeholders are the basis that will allow this to happen. Trust in the idea must grow and be earned through the right decisions!