Digital Services for Industry 4.0: Assessing Collaborative Technology Readiness

Collaborative technologies, such as peer-to-peer (P2P) communication systems, social media tools, shared information space technologies and team meeting technologies have been available in the last decade as part of the available digital services for the daily operation of businesses. We investigate how this type of technologies can adapt and further underpin businesses collaboration towards enabling the emerging fourth industrial revolution. As such, in this paper, we present a review of extant digital services providing collaborative capabilities and assess their readiness to support Industry 4.0 goals. Results of our analysis first show that there is a lack of a shared conceptualisation of how such digital services and tools should be, where the concept, applications and characteristics are unclear among industrial and academic stakeholders when referring to supporting Industry 4.0. We propose a classification scheme using a taxonomic solution as a useful approach for further assessment of collaborative technologies readiness for Industry 4.0.