Over the last several decades, as industries transitioned from analog and pneumatic controls to digitalised PLCs, DCS and scada systems, operational technologies (OT) have provided plant personnel with ever increasing volumes of data to monitor, optimise and control industrial processes; however, there has not been a clear path for an organisation to leverage this data outside of OT domains. Differences in IT and OT functions, technology stacks and cultures have created significant barriers to OT-IT convergence.
This paper explores the challenges, benefits and how the modern PI System can support OT-IT convergence strategies. Successful execution will uncover latent value of existing industrial sensor-based data ecosystems to transform operations, business intelligence and enterprise performance.
Persistent challenges to OT-IT convergence
The design of OT and IT systems has traditionally met specific requirements in order to serve distinct enterprise functions and user bases. These differences in technology, organisational culture and function created an early wedge between the OT and IT environments. The division has persisted, creating barriers to capitalising on the benefits of OT-IT convergence.
Technology
In the 1980s, technical limitations prevented shared resources and architectures. IT systems were purchased as best-of-breed applications deployed on site-centric mainframes. As the commoditisation of technology, standardised operating procedures and the emergence of the PC drove IT outsourcing, OT migrated toward tiered control systems, segregation of control layers and adopting networking protocol standards. More recently, OT systems share IT-like characteristics such as the use of tools like Microsoft Windows, which have become integrated into these environments.
Internal and external drivers
Early IT systems were proprietary, required internal resources and programmers, and used to calculate dollar-denominated actions like payroll and cost of transactions. In contrast, OT were turnkey, vendor-proprietary systems designed to operate vendor-specific equipment. Later, Y2K ushered in ERP systems, and industries converged on standardised IT applications, data models and architectures. Regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) further drove standardisation of IT systems and data warehousing for analytics as financial reporting became mandatory. In contrast, regulatory requirements have not driven a consistent need to create enterprise OT KPIs. Unlike IT, current OT environments rarely have centralised governance and consist of many specialised, purpose-built systems that address local or project-based issues.
Culture
Historically, OT and IT have had different ‘owners’ with different priorities and backgrounds. OT personnel, including the COO, typically have deep industry backgrounds while CIOs and IT personnel have computer sciences or commercial training. Imposing traditional IT governance can often interfere with OT protocols that support real-time production parameters and thus profit and loss responsibilities. More recently, however, analysts suggest that CIOs should be familiar with and support operational requirements. As IT-like technology pervades OT, basic skill sets required for IT and OT are also converging. Nonetheless, resistance to change, fragmented OT, fears of security breaches and risk to process integrity weigh heavily against efforts to align architectures across functional departments. Even as technical barriers to OT-IT convergence fall, traditional cultural and functional boundaries remain.
Role of the modern PI System architecture
For over 30 years, OSIsoft has produced the PI System to capture, store and make high fidelity data available to people and systems. As IoT continues to grow, integrating vast quantities of sensor-based data sets with IT systems promises to enable innovation and business transformation. In this data-rich environment, the modern PI System has evolved to enable OT-IT convergence in three principal ways:
Unifies fragmented OT environments
The fundamental value of the PI System has always been to integrate disparate data sources to create a unified data layer spanning the enterprise. A PI System infrastructure also provides consistent engineering units, a common time scale and a shared reference system. People can access both real time and historical data from all operational sources such as pumps, turbines and engines even if data sources originate outside of traditional organisational, geographic or security boundaries. Using the PI System to create a single infrastructure resolves the fragmented nature of typical OT landscapes and makes data available for a broader array of purposes.
Enhances data governance
As part of initiating an ERP project, the first work product is the chart of accounts, or master classification system to define accounts, charge codes, accounting codes, etc. Referencing the chart of accounts for financial transactions is key to developing sound business intelligence.
The modern PI System incorporates a metadata layer, asset framework (AF), which enables people to create a common nomenclature and reference system by structuring data through familiar asset-based contexts. AF can create a chart of operations to organise operational data in the same way that an ERP uses a chart of accounts to understand financial transactions. As advances in IoT, connectivity and analysis platforms lower barriers to leveraging sensor-based data for operational intelligence, creating an enterprise chart of assets can improve governance, facilitate communication with IT and enhances the role of operational data in creating enterprise intelligence.
Automates connections
Operations rely on the PI system to provide real-time data for optimising industrial asset performance and process efficiency; however, time-series data is not immediately compatible with IT data or systems. By nature, time-series data has gaps, unexplained spikes or shifts in baselines, creating significant challenges when trying to merge it with structured and transactional data.
The PI system has out-of-the-box tools to shape and push time-series data with context into IT systems. These tools provide both native connectivity and management of time-series data to bridge operational data with analytics platforms and business systems already in place with no programming or custom coding.
Benefits
In consumer-driven industries, OT-IT convergence has enabled manufacturers to transform product design and supply chain management to meet changing consumer demand. In B2B or asset-centric industries like oil and gas, power generation or utilities, areas where OT-IT convergence enabled by the PI System can generate value include the following:
Improved bottom line
OT data typically minimises production costs through increased efficiency, equipment availability and reduced downtime. Unifying OT landscapes amplifies those effects by scaling best practices, validated models and liberating data for multiple purposes. Bridging OT and IT increases the prominence of operational data and enables a broader audience who can, for example, track financial impacts of decisions made in the production environment, adjust product output according to changes in market demand or base strategic planning on actual operational history – all without disrupting core processes. Simplifying complex architectures also reduces IT costs associated with maintaining purpose-built or systems built in house, manual data cleansing and custom coding associated with merging disparate data sets.
Improved governance
In fragmented landscapes, operational data lacks context that spans past local environments. Typically, only a few initial users responsible for control system naming convention can fully benefit from the value built into the semantic namespace. Others spend valuable time trying to find and integrate the ‘right’ operational data for reporting and analysis. Organising data through an overarching context layer, or a chart of operations, democratises valuable operational data so that it can propagate across traditional boundaries to create consistency around integrated enterprise KPIs, enable performance comparisons and drive adoption of common processes.
Risk reduction and resilience
Consolidating OT systems will be necessary to handle expanding data sources, amount and variety. Consolidation also offers opportunity to identify functional gaps, underperforming or outdated legacy systems that can introduce vulnerability. Using the PI System to integrate OT and IT also eliminates home-grown solutions that require significant or unique resources to maintain or update over time. Finally, OT systems that capture data for preordained purposes lead to rigid data structures and certain obsolescence. Developed on platform neutral technologies, the PI System is designed to be source and industry agnostic, and work as part of an overall IT structure that evolves as technology, business conditions and KPIs change.
A strategy to embrace OT-IT integration
Fundamentally, OT-IT integration enabled by the PI System does not interfere with daily or mission-critical tasks on both the operational and business side of the enterprise. Instead, making OT and IT systems interoperable enhances intelligence and real-time decision support in all parts of the organisation.
As technological barriers to OT-IT integration shrink, implementing it at enterprise scale will mean overcoming cultural barriers, legacy architectures and resistance to change. For now, overcoming many of the barriers to execute full-scale OT-IT integration may not be feasible for large, asset-centric industries. Rather than adopting an all-or-nothing approach, identifying defined areas where OT-IT integration can deliver tangible value can accelerate buy in from traditionally segregated roles and eventually earn support for robust, extensible architectures that support comprehensive OT-IT convergence. Part of that process includes eliminating systems that silo operational data and leveraging tools making it available to more stakeholders and systems in a scalable, secure way.
As the IoT, Big Data and advanced analytics play a more prominent role in industrial settings, OSIsoft and its extended Partner Ecosphere are working to support digital business leadership, enabling customers and partners to embrace OT-IT integration in an extensible, scalable and persistent manner.
For more information contact Nick Stead, OSIsoft, +27 (0)82 440 6100, nstead@osisoft.com, www.osisoft.com
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