Operational technologies (OTs) are the technology systems that help your physical assets – your physical processes, devices or infrastructure – run. In a business, the OT environment is where your employees operate your most valuable assets and the efficiencies of how your business runs (and ultimately, what adds money to your bottom line… because let’s face it, time = money), can be won or lost.
Historically, within the operational technology environment, employees have existed in their own silo, operating a facility that has little, to no, digital integration in the rest of the business – balance reports, or profit and loss statements. The data curation could be managed by a handful of in house “excel jockeys”.
Enterprise machine learning has eroded the OT silo. The new world – one where technology is constantly evolving – marches towards granularity in feedback. Instead of understanding what has gone on within the facility daily, weekly or monthly to produce a balance report or P&L statement, machine learning and data driven solutions can arrive at efficiencies and suggestions that are much more specific, ie: “Hey operator, it looks like the pressure in this vessel is above the average, I would recommend you do x, y, or z in the next hour”.
The commoditization of storage, compute and capability in the cloud, and we have seen an expansion in how organizations are able to analyze and optimize their operational functions like never before. This has increased the specificity of analysis and the recommendations on physical assets that follow. This breaks down the traditional OT silo even further.
As technology continues to advance, Machine Learning opportunities also speed up the intersection of Operational Technology and Information Technology. Cloud vendors and many OT software tools have provided safe and secure ways for businesses to move data to the cloud. This data convergence has added a certain degree of complexity to the data value stream, raising data governance questions such as who owns it, where accountabilities should lie and how downstream users of the information then consume it.
But we’ll have more on that later as we continue this blog series.
For now, if you’re interested in reading more about how Operational Technologies can help you move your business forward, check out our informative four-pager here. If you’d like to chat about how Arcurve can help you set up these Operational Technologies, reach out to our Advanced Analytics Team.
