Reply To: Is it? Or is it not?

[Henry Fenby-Taylor]

Well, first off, let’s have that conversation! I think we need to have it.

This article made me think. On reflection, I have two concerns about the direction this conversation is taking.

One, that we don’t want to see our businesses and our clients’ organisations sold products that don’t deliver the benefits of digital twins. The digital twin movement loses, the client loses and the winner doesn’t create a sustainable business for themselves so ultimately they lose too. We’re taken in by gimmicks, we create wealth in a short sighted fashion and productivity doesn’t improve.

Two, once something is decided, that means we can stop thinking about it. That’s the point of making decisions. So if it was decreed that only a physical system connected to a digital management system providing real time data counts as a digital twin then we would lose out as well. Suddenly certain data sets, applications and approaches ‘don’t count’. Everyone loses again, the digital twin movement loses key collaborators and innovations, these brave outsiders lose, because they’re out of the fold pushing a genuine solution that the general consensus tells people isn’t worth it and the clients lose, because despite having a solution that ticks all the boxes and ‘counts’, they don’t have a solution that serves their actual needs (I’m thinking of logistics and city management systems here).

I don’t think there is a complete answer, in the words of Michael Grieves “it’s an analogy, so don’t take it too literally”. So we should be careful about going into the depths of over qualifying what is and what isn’t a digital twin. At the same time we should be able to recognise what is and isn’t a digital twin and even more than that we should be able to recognise the genuinely ground breaking innovative work when it happens.