In part 1 of the talk with Professor Thome we will take you to a fascinating journey containing over half a decade of projects on computer, software and services. Professor Thome experienced the entire journey, starting with a huge IBM machine in 1966, implementing one of the first standard software solutions to a medium-sized company in 1979, and now working on intelligent, interactive systems, cloud services and more. Professor Thome predicted a lot of developments and trends very early. In the early 2000s he predicted his students cashless-stores that Amazon opened in 2018. He also mentioned the opportunities of Cyber Physical Systems.

The big question now: What`s next? Therefore, we talked about topics that might characterize our current future. Two very hot topics are flexible and intelligent robots and intelligent information systems. Information systems that are connected with sensors giving the opportunity to know about everything that is happening around us. For companies this opens up huge opportunities, for instance, if you think about logistics and material flow. A company will know exactly where the material is and how fast the flow is of a customer-ordered item on the work-bench. If you have precise real-time information about that, this will give absolutely new possibilities of producing in the right time, in the right form, and serving the needs of customers.

Digital transformation is a (fast) ongoing process. And we have to be aware that everything is going to change continuously again and again and again. If companies do not understand that and don't have the mindset for this change, they are really in trouble – Kodak!

https://www.wiwi.uni-wuerzburg.de/lehrstuhl/wiinf/mitarbeiter/prof-dr-rainer-thome/

http://www.prof-thome-gruppe.de/