Recommendations

Advice for the C-Suite

Other practical guidance to aid convergence

Here are a few other ways you can apply the insights in this report to accelerate your own IT/OT convergence:

Focus on business outcomes: Projects involving IT/OT convergence should start by defining the business goals behind the organization’s intended transformation. Toward this end, consider the following:

Identify a clear business need.
Assess current processes, procedures, and operations, then evaluate how they could be transformed or improved.
Define clear objectives of IT/OT convergence for such projects — such as ability to meet Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) or achievement of specific Return on Investment (ROI).

Integrate, blend, repeat. To achieve true IT/OT convergence, you need to integrate key members of the IT team into your OT environments:

Create blended teams where IT members can absorb and shadow their plant counterparts. Doing so will allow them to gain a greater understanding of the terminology, plant dynamics, and operational issues their OT colleagues face.
Ensure blended teams also drive joint IT/OT transformation projects.

The C-Suite takes the lead. Many OT teams have shifted their organizational structures to now report directly to the CIO. But CIOs should be cautious with this revised structure. Here are a few insights for moving forward:

View plant and field leadership in the same way as your organization's critical Lines of Business (LOB).
Meet monthly or more often with plant leadership to learn their top pain points, top objectives, and to discover how IT can best serve their needs.
Define a joint vision both the wider IT organization and OT leadership can rally behind.
Avoid imposing wide-ranging edicts. These may ultimately delay the transformation you seek.

Guidance continued...

Start at the platform/foundation level. Avoid the urge to tackle big projects or “moon shots” right away. While tempting, these are rarely successful. Follow these steps instead:

Deploy smaller, less-risky "green patch" projects in your existing legacy OT environments. The Industrial Internet Consortium offers useful guidance and examples.
Build out a common platform that generates buy-in from the various business units. The platform should be able to extend IIoT capabilities across the enterprise for many smaller projects. Smaller projects may not be as flashy, but they are more likely to bring early success and show returns. Plus, they allow you to grow your common platform through repeatable, scalable practices. Share the lessons you learn to spread success across other business units.

Promote learning. To set joint goals surrounding less-understood technologies, such as AI and machine learning, it may be necessary to:

Use trusted partners to help educate both IT and OT teams about the "Power of the Possible."
Ask vendors and partners to share examples of other manufacturing environments where the organization successfully shortened their time-to-value with AI, IIoT, and cloud technologies.