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CP: What type of organizational obstacles should I expect as we try to embrace digital transformation, who are some of the key stakeholders I need to make sure are involved?
MN: In my experience, I've seen a variety of people who are interested in this idea, but I typically spend a little more time on the OT-IT divide problem. What we're talking about there is getting our operations technology and the people who are on the front lines, working with our equipment, getting them connected and working with our information technology folks. The big problem there is that what you're working with is two totally different cultures. So the question becomes, How do you get these two folks to work together? And honestly, the answer is different for every organization. A chemical manufacturer we worked with actually had a lead executive who was appointed to develop and chart and roll out their digital transformation story.. But that's traditionally the biggest hurdle is, how do we get OT and IT working together? And usually, it just takes someone at the top with a grand vision that makes everybody happy leading that effort.
CP: You have laid out several different approaches to digital transformation. Have your customers found that one particular area is a good place to start to show quick wins?
MN: In my experience, the concept of mobile technology typically has the quickest ROI and the reason for that is you're getting data right into the operator's hand. You're starting to collect information that you never really had access to and opens up new perspectives and identifies new opportunities and new problems that hadn't been exposed before. But you can't fix a problem until you're aware of it.
CP: What do you do with all this data when you get it?
MN: When people talk about big data they should add the word problem after big data. It's a problem on a number of levels. You’ve got to think about our infrastructure that we currently have wasn't necessarily designed to support the amount of sensor data that we're starting to pull in, especially in an industrial plant environment. So that's where the concept of things like edge computing come into play, where we can do some analytics on the data that we're collecting at the edge before we pass it up the line where we might have more congestion. So, it's really about pushing intelligence further out to the edge, collecting, aggregating, sorting, filtering the data, and then pushing it back up to the cloud where we can do even better, more advanced analytics on it.
CP: What about cybersecurity?
MN: There's no silver bullet for cybersecurity. I always tell everyone in the industry that before you do any kind of project, the first thing you should do is involve someone like a certified Information Systems Security Professional. They will go beyond things like making sure that your system is patched and that you're using the right Wi-Fi security. They take a step back and look at things like risk mitigation, understanding criticality of assets, what systems are most important, and then deploying the right type of security solution.
