A practical guide to IT OT convergence – getting value from your business analytics

Abstract

A lot of time, effort and money has been and is being spent by operating companies and service companies in collecting data from many different sources, agglomerating that data, carrying out analytics on that data with the intention of turning that data into actionable insights that positively impact safety, environment, operations and profitability. This has been done with varying levels of success by approaching the problem from either an information technology (IT) or an operational technology (OT) point of view. What we are finding is that the best outcomes are achieved by having IT and OT domain experience with operational industry expertise within the same team. This has proven to be the case in other industries. There is also a need to understand edge and cloud actionable insights delivery in order to determine the optimal balance of edge and cloud delivery in a hybrid solution model. There is a continuum of analytics from high speed analytics at the edge, for such things as assisting regulatory control and real-time safety system diagnostics, to data lake analysis in the cloud, for planning, supply chain and business prioritisation and optimisation. Some analytics are best done at the edge; some are better done in the cloud. It’s a ‘horses for courses’ approach. The nature of the desired outcome, the required actionable insight and the nature of the data gathering are critical in determining the most effective approach. This paper discusses several examples of how this integrated IT OT approach took a desired outcome and turned it into an analytics platform that delivered significant value to the business. This paper cites examples of edge and cloud analytics that are enabled by integrating clever and sufficient industrial internet of things (IIoT) connectivity, which lead to actionable insights. These, in turn, ensured the correct action was effectively applied to the correct part(s) of the business operation, resulting in effective achievement of the desired outcome.