A couple of months ago, Factory Software invited us to keynote their ASKxUNITE Conference. We said yes before we’d even finished reading the invite, because if there’s one thing we can’t say no to, it’s a room full of people willing to hear us talk about IT/OT cooperation for 30 minutes straight.
The recording is finally out, and honestly, it’s one of the best things we’ve put our names on. So this is mostly a “just go and watch it” post. But we’ll give you the highlights first.
Stand up if this sounds familiar
We opened the session the way we open most conversations about IT and OT: by asking a room full of people to admit how much it hurts.
Everyone stood up. Then we asked them to sit down the moment a statement stopped applying to them.
You’ve waited more than three months for a network change request.
You’ve had to drive to site at 11pm because remote access decided not to work.
You’ve had to explain that no, ChatGPT is not going to run the plant next year.
You’ve had to tell IT they can’t “just patch” that server.
By the end, almost nobody was still standing. Which was exactly the point: everyone in that room already works at the intersection of IT and OT, whether their job title says so or not.
The Oprah moment
Then came the part David has apparently been rehearsing for his whole career 😀
Three years ago, David told Willem: “Instead of just writing blog posts, let’s write a book. Shouldn’t take more than six months.” It took two years longer than planned. But on that stage, in front of everyone, we handed out early copies of the finished book before we’d even seen a printed one ourselves.
David’s reaction to handing out exclusive copies is the kind of thing you have to watch rather than have described to you. Turns out this is what an Oprah moment looks like when it’s two Belgian engineers on stage instead of a daytime talk show host giving away cars 😂
Why this is the video to watch on cooperation
Here’s the more serious reason to watch, though. If you want the clearest version yet of how we think about IT/OT cooperation, this talk is it.
We told the story of Patrick, an engineer at one of your plants who wanted to swap paper SOPs and inspection rounds for tablets. Cheap, sensible, no reason it shouldn’t happen by Friday. Except it needed a wifi password, and the moment IT and OT actually had to talk to each other about that password, everything slowed to a crawl. A ticket here, a “please open a request” there, a scope discussion that outlived the original problem. By the time anyone had agreed on anything, the tablets were still sitting in a box, wrapped in plastic.
Patrick’s story isn’t really about tablets. It’s about what happens when an organisation only knows how to handle two kinds of work: routine tickets, or capital-P Projects. If your request doesn’t fit either box, you’re stuck, no matter how sensible it is.
We also walked through why this is a management problem, not a Patrick problem. Operations optimises for cost and output at the plant level, IT optimises for security and scalability across the whole organisation, and both are right on their own terms; that’s the shared-goals gap. Then there’s no system of cooperation sitting between “file a ticket” and “start a project,” so anything in between falls through the cracks. And because nobody has invested in the technical foundations that would let small projects reuse what already exists, every one of them starts from zero, which makes each one slower and more expensive than it needs to be.
Your cooperation language
From there we introduced the three dimensions that actually determine how IT and OT need to work together on any given problem: work coupling, system coupling, and change velocity. How dependent are you on the other side to get anything done, how tightly are your systems wired into theirs, and how fast do you need to be able to change your mind?
Get a read on those three and you can start recognising which cooperation pattern you’re actually operating in, from silos, to shadow teams, all the way to long-lived, cross-functional product teams. In the talk we zoomed in on one in particular: Facilitation. If Patrick’s organisation had someone whose actual job was to build a bridge between IT and OT, without changing the org chart, this story plays out very differently, and probably ends a few weeks later with tablets that are actually switched on.
What to actually do about it
We closed with three things you can start doing tomorrow, no management mandate required.
Meet each other. Organise a site visit. Most IT and OT people have never actually seen where the other one works, and most managers won’t prioritise fixing that for you.
Ask the right questions on every project: what happens after go-live, and who do I call when it breaks? Questions like that expose the gaps before they become Patrick’s problem.
Facilitate without asking permission. You don’t need a mandate to start having better conversations with the people on the other side of the IT/OT boundary. It’s low-risk, low-cost, and it’s the fastest way to stop waiting for “the organisation” to fix this for you.
Patrick would thank you.
If Patrick’s story hit close to home, we go a lot deeper on cooperation models in the IT/OT Handbook. Pre-order now and register to claim your bonuses, including a free cooperation masterclass and cheat sheet (pre-orders really help us to beat the Amazon Algorithm Overlords 🙂).
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And really a last call: this is your final chance to join the next ITOT.Academy cohort, kicking off September 18 with an updated programme.
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Willem & David