The digital transformation is happening in all industries and businesses are striving towards Industry 4.0. One industry that is still struggling to realize the full potential of Industry 4.0 is the manufacturing industry. Technological readiness is defined as necessary pre-requisites for successful Industry 4.0 technology adoption, and the research field on readiness for Industry 4.0 technology adoption address dimensions, drivers, and barriers for successful adoption. There is a technological dominance in research on Industry 4.0 and previous research highlight the importance of a socio-technical approach. The concept of technological readiness is dominated with quantitative methods and statistical analysis and conceptual frameworks. Thus, in order to gain deeper understanding of the concept this study investigates the perception of technological readiness and its sociotechnical barriers through a qualitative in-depth case study at a large manufacturing firm. Through semi-structured interviews of 16 participants and document analysis the empirical evidence was collected and then thematically analyzed which presented in five themes related to the study’s research questions. The identified themes were: (1) The work that constitutes technological readiness is business as usual, (2) Legacy and tradition – a double edged sword for technological readiness, (3) The creation of technological readiness involves factors beyond technological capabilities (4) The missing pieces of the strategy puzzle and (5) The expectations on ROI and focus on smart technology implementation. The themes were discussed in relation to previous research and a sociotechnical perspective. The study confirms the need for a holistic and sociotechnical approach when creating technological readiness and show that work that constitutes readiness may or may not be done with intention for Industry 4.0 technology adoption. The study highlights that technological readiness is dependent on several non-technical factors that needs to be considered to create technological readiness, such as business and user needs, system and data governance and ownership, considerations of non-digital processes and infrastructure and employee competence and mindset. The barriers found related to creation of technological readiness identified was the unawareness of strategy, the inability to relate technological readiness work to a digitalization goal, the lack of a facilitator for non-technical aspects, the unacknowledged independent importance of technological readiness, and resource scarcity beyond initial pilot stage of digitalization. Having too large focus on implementation of Industry 4.0 technologies without considering technological readiness from a holistic perspective might create barriers for long term success and realization of value. The study concludes that there is a need for a holistic perspective in terms of creating technological readiness for Industry 4.0 technology adoption and implies benefits of taking a sociotechnical perspective. This study contributes to the concept by showing the interplay between technical and non-technical factors, the possible impact of history and context of the system, as well as highlighting the importance of considering future unknown aspects in creation of technological readiness.