To respond to the increasing demand for more custom products and experiences, organisations must pivot from an operational mindset around throughput and efficiency to a market-driven mindset.
As IT and operations technology (OT) converge, companies will focus on using digital capabilities to build a resilient organisation through instrumentation, infrastructure, integration, and insight.
By 2025, intelligent enterprises will see 100% increase in productivity, resulting in half the response time of peers due to an ability to anticipate market and operational changes and 25% increase in success rates of new product introductions.
To help organisations expand to the OT buyer and become resilient decision makers, International Data Corporation (IDC) has published a new Future of Operations (FoO) framework.
The Future of Operations is marked by resilient decision making. IDC defines resilient decision making as having the ability to use all available data and information to rapidly and effectively make decisions that keep your operations aligned with customer expectations and demands.
Traditionally, operational data has been siloed by both technology and organisation. Systems have typically been in place to pull critical financial and compliance information from operations by the IT organisation. And those same systems push down orders and demands as gathered by the IT systems. It is then up to the operation to have processes and systems in place to turn that flow into an executed business function.
The drive to the Future of Operations rests on having the ability to move beyond the push/pull nature of information flow.
“Digital engineering is the piece that companies have been missing to become more resilient and to tightly align operations with their customers’ needs,” says Kevin Prouty, group vice president of Manufacturing and Energy Insights. “The convergence of IT and OT is the driving force behind digital engineering and the resiliency at its core.”
IDC is guiding organizations to stay true to these five key tenants:
* Evolve beyond continuous improvement, lean, and six sigma to resiliency and market focus;
* Embrace complexity in products, services, and markets while minimizing complications;
* Resilience in adapting to changing markets and demands without losing the core operational purpose;
* Use digital capabilities to build a resilient organisation and operation; and
* Develop a converged IT and OT function in digital engineering.