Three Key Considerations to Frame the Industrial Operations Software Architecture

This IDC Perspective poses three strategic considerations to help guide organizations to improve their software architecture for IT/OT convergence. Industrial enterprises today are chasing new business capabilities enabled by business, rightly with a focus on discrete use cases. Yet, in doing so, many organizations find themselves deeply mired in a complex and rapidly growing portfolio of platforms, applications, and resultant integrations. To achieve a strategically architected operations technology environment that is capable of management and extensibility at scale, organizations must apply principles of enterprise architecture to their strategy."A lot of companies I talk to struggle with data accessibility and usability, management of multiple platforms, and operationalizing analytics projects into business value," says Jonathan Lang, research director for IDC's Worldwide IT/OT Convergence Strategies research program. "If they take a step back and really think critically about the overall architecture, a lot of that pain can be avoided or resolved."