In January, GE announced plans to move its headquarters from Fairfield, Conn., to Boston. The move to the Seaport District, the city’s innovation hub, is symbolic of the digital transformation the 123-year-old company has undertaken.
Central to GE’s transformation plan is the decision to integrate its software unit, global IT and commercial software teams, and cybersecurity capabilities into a new digital business unit. GE’s goal is to make its industrial products “smart”: Connected to the company’s ecosystem of apps, these machines will communicate automatically when they need maintenance, thus eliminating downtime and lapses in productivity. With this move — arguably GE’s most ambitious undertaking since its Edison Engineering Development Program — the company is aiming to become the dominant player in the industrial Internet of Things.
