A crisis (derived from the Greek κρισις meaning "to separate" and "to decide") is a crossroads where dangers and opportunities intertwine.
After more than a month of home confinement and tele-working, we have already been able to learn international best practices for early pandemic management and remote work organisation. In all of them technology and digitalisation have been key.
As a result of the management of this crisis, many sectors - from healthcare, education to industry - have already identified how technology could have helped them much more if they had been digitally prepared and had cloud or other services been available. Nor are there few companies and organisations that have had to urgently activate their digitalisation processes to cope with the crisis and the new landscape. The education sector is in this sense the most paradigmatic and the one that is transforming most rapidly. And it will do so just around the turn of the summer with the exponential growth of online training.
The brutal challenge to our systems and models of social and industrial organisation that the Coronavirus crisis is posing will open up new windows of opportunity for a 5.0 industry and society. This is not a fiction but a model already anticipated in Japan by its government and which explains perfectly why this country was prepared for this crisis and has managed to handle it excellently. This model of Society and Industry 5.0 is based on two aspects: on the one hand, the accumulation of massive data in real time from all sectors and, on the other hand, a culture "...that is based on a culture of innovation and innovation".monozukuri"The "lean manufacturing" habits and excellence.
The mirror for Europe after COVID-19 is the Japanese model of Society 5.0. The solutions and opportunities opening up for digitalisation on the post-crisis horizon can be grouped into four areas: health, mobility, infrastructure and FinTech.
At the level of healthThe application of big data to medical data for detection, screening and treatment has been shown to enable effective treatments, as we have seen clearly. Our hospitals should be equipped with autonomous mobile robots for the disinfection of surgical areas and ICUs as well as for the transfer of medication to the rooms, avoiding physical contact with patients and providing support to nurses. Finally, remote medical care should be incorporated for communication between professionals and patients.
The mobility and logistics will also be affected after coronavius. We already have the technology to deliver all kinds of goods to the doorstep of anyone, quarantined or not. In the case of post-COVID-19, this will mean automating many systems at scale, using drones and automated guided vehicles. In this sense, the robotisation of logistics processes should be another urgent commitment to the digitisation of our manufacturing industry on the agenda of company managers.
The infrastructures are another area of opportunity. The internet of things together with artificial intelligence and robotics will help us to inspect, maintain and control public spaces and infrastructures.. We should learn these lessons in order to have prepared scenarios in which strategies to control people's movement are fully effective.
Finally, the physical money has operated as one of the most important routes of transmission of the virus. The use of blockchain for money transfers is another window of opportunity, in addition to its use in other areas such as logistics (if we have blockchain transactions, we will not have any more cases of scams involving rapid virus detection tests).
These scenarios are not a dystopia. They are routes that in this crisis we may or may not choose and develop with vision and consistency.
Let's not forget that the post-coronavirus digital transformation process will only accelerate the importance of Industry 4.0 enabling technologies (soon already in a 5.0 model) whose strategic enabler is digital talent. If we do not cultivate both aspects (technology and talent), the next viral crisis will hit us again with the same or greater virulence, widening our economic and death gap with respect to the best.
This article has been published in ABC. You can access through this link.
Roberto Ranz