An IT representative drew a diagram that put the plant on the periphery, revealing he'd never visited the facility. The speaker argues this IT-OT divide is common and blocks Industry 4.0 progress. Fixing it requires cooperation on data governance, cybersecurity, and shared communication.
One kind of extreme example of this is I was involved with a customer, went in to do a site survey and was working with the people at the plant. Somebody from IT actually showed up on the second day there, and we went through and talked about a lot of the different infrastructure that was in place. And I asked him at one point to draw out on a whiteboard What the actual IT primary components were of the infrastructure. And he went through and put in the ERP system and their data store and their engineering systems and so forth. And he sat down, I asked him, are any of those located at the plant? And he said, oh, and he got back up and he drew a little circle down at the bottom of the diagram and wrote an arrow and it just said plant. Yeah. So he had no idea of any software that they were running within the operational technology side. And when I talked to the plant manager afterwards, the plant manager told me at dinnertime that that was the first time that anybody from the IT organization had ever set foot in the plant. Now, I don't think that most companies have this big of a divide between IT and OT, but that divide divide definitely exists within an awful lot of organizations. And so what we try to do is we talk with companies and talk about how to implement Industry 4.0. Data governance, cybersecurity, you know, how you integrate the different systems together and so forth are of critical importance to driving eventual success. And for that, you need the cooperation between the— IT and the OT side. And so part of what we try to do with customers is to establish a common structure for communication and so forth.
