The Leadership Gap

IT and OT have different perspectives on who is responsible for driving IoT initiatives, creating a Leadership Gap that may impact the efficiency and success of IT/OT collaboration.

When it comes to IoT implementations, the existence, and importance, of collaboration between IT and OT teams is evident. But the question exists, who is driving these initiatives? Given the importance of IoT to operational performance, it is imperative that OT is highly involved in this process, and the survey data bears this out. Overall, close to 80 percent of all respondents either Agree or Strongly Agree that both IT and OT are driving strategic IoT initiatives. However, there is a perception that IT plays a stronger strategic leadership role for IoT initiatives: the Leadership Gap.

We asked survey respondents to evaluate how strongly they perceived IT and OT to be driving IoT Strategy Initiatives. In a balanced organization, it would be reasonable to have IT and OT collaborating, and leading, equally, and our overall data generally bears this out:

30.2 percent of all respondents indicated they Strongly Agreed with the statement “IT is driving IoT Strategy Initiatives within your organization”

and

27.2 percent of all respondents indicated they Strongly Agree with the statement “OT is driving IoT Strategy Initiatives within your organization”

However, when the data is broken out into IT-focused and OT-focused responses, we see the perception gap emerge.

Source: Futurum Research, Bridging the IoT Perception Gap, Survey of 500 IT/OT Professionals

In a head-to-head comparison, IT focused respondents perceive that leadership is roughly equal between IT and OT, with OT holding a slight edge (33.1 percent to 31.9 percent). However, only 19.5 percent of OT respondents Strongly Agree that they are driving IoT Strategy Initiatives, leading to an interesting disconnect. Given the importance of IoT to business operations, it would be expected that OT, where the value of IoT begins, would view itself as being in a stronger, or more equal, leadership position.

Leadership Gap - Bottom Line

IoT, like most technologies, delivers the best value when the teams that are most likely to benefit from the value drive initiatives. Remember that while IT is focused on the communications and computing systems to gather and process IoT data (for the benefit of all business units), OT is the group that manages the sensor-based machinery, tools, fleets, and control systems, and will be interpreting and leveraging the data to make day-to-day operational decisions based on the data). If OT perceives itself as less of a strategic driver of IoT initiatives, the chance exists for IoT to become more technology and communications-driven and less operational-value driven.