The (Not So) Ultimate IT/OT Reading Guide
Three years of articles and podcasts, organised around the one framework that holds them all together: Understand, Cooperate, Scale.
Blogs and podcasts have a structural flaw. Content gets published, gets read, gets shared for a week… and then quietly disappears into the archive. Three years in, we have written well over a hundred pieces, and unless you were there when we hit “publish” the first time, you would have no reasonable way of knowing which ones matter or how they connect.
This article is a small map pointing you to our best content. It is for readers who want the bigger picture, and for those of you who arrived recently and are wondering where on earth to start.
📣 A quick reminder before we start: our next ITOT.Academy cohort kicks off in September, and the early bird offer ends on 24 July. Want to join our fifth group and learn how to bridge IT and OT? There is no better time than now.
👉 Check the curriculum and enrol via ITOT.Academy.
Where the structure came from
When we started writing, we honestly did not know what we were doing. We knew we wanted to write about IT/OT things. Beyond that, we improvised.
The idea of writing a book is roughly as old as the blog itself, and it forced a question we had been happily avoiding: what is the actual shape of this? What comes first, what comes second, and why?
The answer turned out to be three steps: Understand, Cooperate, Scale. It is the framework this blog, the Handbook and the Academy are all built on. Not because it sounds neat, but because in that order our work actually holds together 😀.
Step 1: Understand
Every transformation runs on trust, and a bridge between IT and OT is no exception. Trust begins with IT genuinely understanding Operations and Operational Technology and Operations and OT genuinely understanding IT. Not just who these people are and the world they work in, but what each of them needs in order to be good at their job.
Do this properly and the requests start arriving on their own, from every direction. Can you help me get more throughput out of my lines? Can you help me meet these new cyber security guidelines? That is the moment you know understanding has landed: nobody has to sell the collaboration any more.
Start reading here:
Step 2: Cooperate
Understanding each other is necessary but not sufficient. To make progress, you have to work together and cooperation takes wildly different shapes depending on what you are trying to do. It might be three people in a corner building a pilot nobody asked for. It might be an enterprise platform team keeping the company’s core data infrastructure alive around the clock. Both are cooperation. They are not remotely the same thing.
This is where we make those formats tangible: the organisational maturity stages, how to get started, and how your organisation should evolve as the complexity of the work grows. Only once you have found a way of working together does it make sense to step into the technical and solution domain.
Start here:
⚠️ A note on these: they are still relevant, but the articles are partly out of date. Our thinking has moved on considerably and now lives in the IT/OT Handbook. Updated articles will follow over the coming months. In the meantime, if you have already ordered the book, do not forget to register for the bonuses: there is a new cooperation masterclass and a cooperation cheat sheet, both available immediately.
Step 3: Scale and Sustain
Groundwork done, it is time to execute! This is where technology finally enters the conversation. Start small. Solve a real, immediate problem with something practical. Then scale that success until it becomes the way the organisation works.
The tension here is permanent: short-term wins versus long-term vision. Lean too far towards the wins and you accumulate a graveyard of clever one-offs. Lean too far towards the vision and you spend two years building a platform nobody uses. What you need is a way to select, implement and scale data initiatives that survives contact with an industrial environment.
We have collected everything on scaling, data platforms and UNS on this dedicated landing page: itotinsider.com/operational-data-platform.
The essentials:
Where do I start? A three-step framework (free workshop guide)
The one chart you really need to understand about scaling:
This chart is explained in full here: https://itotinsider.com/operational-data-platform/
Why our framework is a loop, not a ladder
Each step builds on the one before it, a bit like levelling up in a video game: you do not get to fight the final boss before you have learned to move. Everyone knows this. Plenty of organisations still try to skip straight to buying a platform nobody asked for.
But getting through the three steps once is not the finish line. Digital transformation is not a project with a start date, an end date and a closing slide. It is a cycle. Done well, every solution you deliver sparks the next idea, and the whole thing starts again with deeper understanding, stronger cooperation, and broader scale each time round.
That is also why we do not think you ever really “arrive”. You just get better at going round.
And this is what it looks like as a book…
The IT/OT Handbook is that framework, worked out properly and at length, with the case studies, the diagnostics and the practical detail that a blog post can never quite carry. Its three parts map straight onto the three steps.
Part I: Understanding the Challenge is for everyone: practitioner, leader, vendor, integrator, consultant. It introduces the three groups whose collaboration decides everything (Operations, OT, IT), traces how we got here (the era of happy silos, the years when IT scaled globally while OT converged vertically, and today’s data convergence), and looks hard at why organisations get stuck: the CIO–COO disconnect, the reality that Operations always comes first, and the warning signs of divergence.
Part II: Cooperation Patterns is where the cooperation models you know from the blog have grown up. It starts with the DevOps precedent with a proof that warring technical tribes can learn to work together, because IT already did it once. Then come the seven patterns, from complete silos through shadow teams and facilitation to product teams, with a clear view of when each one works and when it fails. It closes with how to move between patterns, brought to life through the Halifax Water case study.
Part III: Building the Technical Foundation is the technical half: why operational data is genuinely different from IT data, why so many initiatives stall on that difference, what capabilities a real industrial data platform needs, and how to define your goal, start small and evolve without turning today’s solution into tomorrow’s legacy. We walk it through end to end at a (fictionalised, but very real) waffle manufacturer called Sweet Harmony Treats.
Want to learn more?
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