Volatile markets and global and inter-industrial networks are creating a radically more dynamic market environment which calls for considerably greater on-demand flexibility in resource deployment. Today’s businesses have to respond to evolving trends. As well as increasing flexibility, this also means taking action in two further areas, namely increasing transformability and responding to demographic change. Furthermore the global change towards a fully networked society is in progress, in Germany, in Europe, and of course in the United States – actually more or less all over the world. In this context one significant topic is the “Internet of things and services”. The digital transformation changes business and private life likewise – in a radically and sustainable way. The economic potential is enormous. Topics related to the networking of the internet by far have the most economical potential worldwide. The world becomes more and more digital. This is the Big Business of the future. Digitally networked and data-intensive are the main attributes of a smarter production, the so called industry 4.0. But not only in technology many things are changing, humans and the society transforms, too. To achieve a positive influence on key performance indicators, organizational approaches to enterprise architecture should not be restricted to purely technical aspects but should instead put the focus firmly on employees. The study examines initial design approaches in the areas of qualifications, leadership and demography-resistant work architectures

Collaborative industrial robotic arms (cobots) are integrated industrial assembly systems relieving their human coworkers from monotonous tasks and achieving productivity gains. The question of task allocation arises in the organization of these human–robot interactions. State of the art shows static, compensatory task allocation approaches in current assembly systems and flexible, adaptive task sharing (ATS) approaches in human factors research. The latter should exploit the economic and ergonomic advantages of cobot usage. Previous research results did not provide a clear insight into whether industrial workers prefer static or adaptive task allocation and which tasks workers do prefer to assign to cobots. Therefore, we set up a cobot demonstrator with a realistic industrial assembly use case and did a user study with experienced workers from the shop floor (n = 25). The aim of the user study is to provide a systematic understanding and evaluation of workers' preferences in a practical context of human–robot interaction (HRI) in assembly. Our main findings are that participants preferred the ATS concept to a predetermined task allocation and reported increased satisfaction with the allocation. Results show that participants are more likely to give manual tasks to the cobot in contrast to cognitive tasks. It shows that workers do not entrust all tasks to robots, but like to take over cognitive tasks by themselves. This work contributes to the design of human-centered HRI in industrial assembly systems.