Decision analytics mobilized with digital coaching

Summary The context to be addressed is the digitalization of industry and industrial processes. Digitalization brings enhanced customer relationships and value‐chain integration, which are effective instruments to meet increasing competition and slimmer margins for productivity and profitability. Digitalization also brings more pronounced requirements for effective planning, problem solving and decision making in an increasingly complex and fast‐changing environment. Decision analytics will meet the challenges from the growing global competition that major industrial corporations face and will help solve the problems of big data/fast data that digitalization is generating as a by‐product. A mantra is appearing in business magazines – that powerful, intelligent systems will be effective tools for the digitalization of industrial processes – but much less attention appears to be paid to the fact that users need advanced knowledge and skills to benefit from the intelligent systems. First, an effective transfer of knowledge from developers, experts and researchers to users (including management) will be needed; second, the daily use and operations of the systems need to be supported, as automated, intelligent industrial systems are complex to operate. We look at this transfer as knowledge mobilization and will work out how the mobilization can be supported with coaching; this coaching needs to be digital, as human coaches are both scarce and too expensive to employ in large numbers.