Last week's poll: Industry’s digital revolution - fact or fad?

But is digital transformation really providing new tools and ways of thinking, or has little changed?

The Engineer – in partnership with Babcock International – recently held a special roundtable debate exploring this issue in more detail, examining how advances in our ability to gather and analyse data are reshaping manufacturing business models and skills requirements. The results of this session will be published in the March 2020 edition of the magazine.

This prompted us to ask whether the so-called digital revolution is affecting your business and your role? For 41 per cent of respondents, digitalisation is having an impact on the companies they work for and their roles. This left 61 per cent agreeing that the fourth industrial revolution had passed them by.

In the comments that followed, Jack Broughton said: “As I’m sure is the case for most engineers, keeping up to date with digital developments is very difficult. Massive claims are made of potential benefits, but massive costs and operational problems have been incurred in many IT and digitalisation projects.”