Why are IT and OT converging?

Historically, there’s been a wall dividing info expertise and operational expertise. IT supplied providers to each a part of our enterprise, however we stopped on the manufacturing line. As vegetation have turn into extra digital and community primarily based, although, there’s a necessity for IT to cross over to cowl information, safety, backup, restoration, and redundancy. Crops now want the identical infrastructure resilience as enterprise operations. However we should be cautious as a result of after we do upkeep, upgrades, and modifications, we will’t disrupt manufacturing. IoT within the manufacturing strains creates a number of information. The place will we retailer and use that information? Does it go to the cloud? How will we management it? These are the questions we’re now beginning to deal with. So with this convergence, we’ve added OT-specific sources within the IT group. These are individuals who have an OT background; they perform as enterprise relationship managers with the vegetation.

One of many advantages of scaled enterprise IT platforms is that groups have extra bandwidth to innovate. What’s your innovation engine?

We’ve began with communities of observe (COP), one for every key enterprise course of or expertise panorama, and these communities will evolve into mature facilities of excellence over time. The COP creates the pipeline of alternatives, filters for finest match and profit, after which plans and sources every venture. They’re additionally spawning some very high-value tasks, and can assist us plan by giving us that pipeline for future investments.

The COP sits in IT and is led by enterprise relationship managers from every of our companies. As soon as 1 / 4, they lead innovation workshops for every enterprise unit, attended by IT individuals and course of house owners from that enterprise.

Many of those workshops deal with innovation alternatives from the manufacturing facet of the enterprise, and we’ve led one on the digital buyer expertise, which was throughout all the companies. On the subject of scaling these concepts, we attempt to not boil the ocean. We take a crawl, stroll, run strategy beginning with one location and one enterprise unit. We decide the areas the place there’s a excessive likelihood of success as a result of that enterprise has the necessity, bandwidth, and fortitude to stick with it. This fashion, by the point we fund the concept and switch it right into a venture, we all know that everybody’s all in.