The trend is clear: "There is increasing interest and investment in digital twins," quotes webwire.com Gartner Research Director Alexander Höppe as saying. "But creating and maintaining digital twins is not for the faint-hearted," he adds.

Gartner gives CIOs four tips for minimizing the risk of digital twin failure. These are: 1. Establish well-documented practices for constructing and modifying such models. 2. Enable the twins to access and use data from as many sources as possible. 3. Involve the entire product value chain, and thereby also those responsible for each relevant area, the reason being that digital twins can prove particularly helpful in cross-functional collaborations. And last but not least: 4. Ensure access cycles are as long as possible. With digital twins of buildings or ships, for example, which have long lifecycles that extend well beyond the lifespans of the software formats used to create them, there is a high risk that they will be unreadable throughout their service life.

Dr. Walter Huber and Uwe Weber follow a similar train of thought in German weekly Computerwoche : They believe that a homogeneous description language is needed to counter any heterogeneity and that it is vital to ensure the digital twin is developed step by step in line with agile patterns and that the designers study specific use cases