Bringing IT and OT together for success in a digital future
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is blurring the lines between the physical and the digital spheres of production. With the now-ubiquitous connectivity of people, machines, and real time data, the physical and digital spaces are converging to reshape the way by which organizations design, manufacture, and distribute products.
Unconstrained design with algorithmic optimization and customer co-creation, flexible production with fewer steps, batch size of one and shorter lead time, unchained distribution with multi-component consolidation, distributed production, and reshoring are accelerating value creation from production lifecycle.
Speed is the dominant factor of transformation required to remain competitive in this world of connectivity. If companies cannot develop at a pace that enables them to win, they will fall behind very quickly.
One of the critical components for enabling output speed is organizational alignment between the Information Technology (IT) and Operations Technology (OT) groups. With an increasing thrust toward the digitization of operations, there exists a need to align IT and OT teams to enhance end-to-end visibility of data and decisions and to permit scale at speed while ensuring increased security controls.
Digital / technology sphere is traditionally organized under two umbrellas – IT and OT
Aligning IT and OT teams, however, will be difficult. Traditionally, the teams have been driven by their different priorities and end-user expectations (See Graphic # 1). While the IT team traditionally focused on managing business applications, enabling information sharing, and enforcing standards throughout the organization, the OT team focused on driving operational efficiency at the sites, thereby ensuring continuity of operations with high availability of underlying technology resources. End-user expectations drove different behaviors: IT teams were expected to make core IT operations efficient and stable at reduced costs, while OT teams concentrated on supporting real-time actions and rapid response to site-specific technology needs.
These differing priorities and user expectations have manifested in organizational silos and in limited interactions, alignment, and coordination challenges across functions—eventually leading to different IT and OT budgets and goals.
The new Digital Age is closing the gap between these two traditional roles, forcing convergence of IT and OT into a common technology group. This convergence is leading to change across three critical areas (see Graphic #2):
Alignment across technology groups becomes more critical when the firm moves from experimenting with digital to scaling capabilities across the organization. One of the critical enablers for achieving this alignment is having greater unity and collaboration across the IT and OT groups.
So, how are the IT and OT teams brought together to support the ‘new’ digital future? The organization must make changes across its mindset, skillset, and toolset to drive the needed change within the three critical dimensions.
