4. Industry Best Practices for Successful Convergence

Achieving successful IT/OT convergence extends beyond mere technological integration; it demands a holistic approach encompassing strategic organizational alignment, adherence to robust cybersecurity frameworks, effective data management, and proactive skill development.

Strategic Organizational Alignment and Target Operating Models

A successful digital transformation fundamentally requires a reconceptualization of existing operating models.²This necessitates the development of a Target Operating Model (TOM) that defines the transformation strategy and outlines future requirements for organizational structures and processes within both IT and OT departments.²

Key elements of this strategic alignment include:

• Clear View on Application Landscape: Organizations need to achieve a clear view of their total applications landscape. This is a crucial step in IT/OT convergence, as it helps to lower and minimize the risk of malfunctioning applications and security breaches.⁶
• Platform-Oriented Landscape: Transitioning towards a secure, platform-oriented landscape allows companies to leverage their platforms to enable various use cases with consistent value generation, data needs, and support requirements. This approach propagates data across enterprise systems and ensures data accessibility from a single master source when needed.⁶
• Data Center of Excellence: To optimize production performance, reliability, and reporting, building analytics capabilities is paramount. This involves setting up a data center of excellence, an organizational entity that educates, trains, and introduces innovative working methods across business units, manufacturing sites, and functional groups. It also drives data science innovation by sharing best practices and new analytical methods.⁶
• Integrated Teams and Business Ownership: Delivery teams should be structured around specific use cases, ensuring that vertically integrated applications are owned by the team responsible for that use case, rather than being exclusively allocated to IT or OT.⁶ It is vital to foster business ownership while maintaining a comprehensive overview of the applications landscape.⁶ This requires creating integrated teams comprising members from both IT and OT, with strong leadership endorsement, cross-departmental communication, and adaptive organizational structures.⁷

Robust Cybersecurity Frameworks: Adhering to ISA/IEC 62443 Standards

Cybersecurity is not an optional add-on but a non-negotiable foundation for IT/OT convergence. The ISA/IEC 62443 series of standards defines comprehensive requirements and processes for implementing and maintaining electronically secure Industrial Automation and Control Systems (IACS).¹³ This standard provides a "defensive playbook" specifically tailored for OT equipment, focusing on the unique realities and risks of industrial environments where downtime is intolerable.¹⁴ Adhering to these standards helps reduce the likelihood of cyberattacks and mitigates serious regulatory, financial, and safety consequences.¹³

Key principles and practices within IEC 62443 include:

• Layered Defense: A core principle is layered defense, which involves splitting facilities into security zones and linking these zones through carefully monitored conduits.¹⁴
• Cybersecurity Management System (CSMS): The standard outlines how to build a CSMS and perform risk reviews that are tailored to real-world OT constraints. A mature CSMS operates through continuous loops of risk awareness, risk mitigation, and performance refinement.¹⁴
• Zones and Conduits: IEC 62443 frames industrial cybersecurity design around segmenting the "System under Consideration" (SuC) into protected areas (zones) with common security levels (SL-T, SL-A) and managed pathways (conduits) that link them. Conduits must meet or exceed the higher security-level requirement of the zones they connect.¹³
• Security Levels (SL): The standard defines four escalating Security Levels (SL 1-SL 4) that reflect increasing threat sophistication and risk tolerance, guiding the appropriate level of security implementation.¹⁴
• Secure Product Development Lifecycle: IEC 62443 guides every phase of the product-development lifecycle for industrial automation and control systems, covering design, integration, and plant floors. This involves embedding security requirements into product design and support lifecycles, including secure-coding practices, threat modeling, and linking risk management to release gates.¹³

IEC 62443-3-3 sets forth seven Foundational Requirements (FRs), each with detailed Requirement Enhancements (REs), defining a "secure-by-design" approach for control systems and products.¹³ These are critical for building a robust IACS cybersecurity program:

FR Category	What It Addresses
User Authentication & Access Control	Who gets in and how...source

The repeated emphasis on IEC 62443 and its detailed foundational requirements, such as network segmentation, access control, and audit logging, highlights that security is paramount. The integration of IT and OT inherently increases the attack surface, making a "unified cybersecurity" approach essential.³ Without a strong, integrated security posture, the benefits of convergence are overshadowed by unacceptable risks to operational continuity and safety. This implies that security must be "baked in" from the design phase and managed throughout the entire lifecycle, rather than being an afterthought or a separate IT-only concern.

Data Management and Governance for Unified Insights

Effective data management and governance are critical for extracting unified insights from converged IT/OT environments:

• Single Master Source: A fundamental prerequisite for a platform-oriented landscape is that all data must be available from a single master source and provided within a single view for the enterprise and its partners.⁶ This eliminates data silos and ensures consistency.
• Real-time Data Streaming: Leveraging technologies like Apache Kafka and Flink is essential to ensure a real-time, unified data architecture that eliminates redundant processing and provides immediate usability across both operational and analytical workloads.¹²
• Schema-based Data Governance: Implementing robust schema-based data governance is crucial to ensure compatibility across diverse IT and OT systems and to reduce data duplication by ingesting data once and distributing it to all required systems.¹²
• Integrated Data Management (Hybrid Cloud/Edge): Hybrid cloud/edge architectures incorporate an integrated data management component that provides economical, long-term storage for large volumes of data, complemented by local caches for near-instantaneous access to critical industrial processes.⁵

Addressing Skill Gaps and Fostering Cross-Functional Collaboration

Bridging the cultural and operational divide between IT and OT requires significant investment in human capital and organizational transformation:

• Education and Awareness: Developing education and awareness in IT-OT alignment is crucial. This can involve hosting joint workshops where both teams share insights about their respective domains, conducting on-site visits to foster mutual understanding of operational realities, and facilitating collaborative sessions to identify common goals and challenges.⁷
• Tailored Training Programs: The emergence of IT/OT convergence highlights existing skill gaps, necessitating enhanced training for both IT and OT personnel.⁸ This includes implementing tailored training programs, creating cross-training opportunities, and fostering specialized skills development to equip the workforce with the necessary competencies for converged environments.⁷
• Continuous Learning: Fostering a culture of continuous learning is essential to adapt to the rapidly evolving technologies and threats inherent in the converged environment.⁷
• Enterprise Architecture (EA) Integration: Enterprise architecture (EA) is recognized as a critical function in IT, supporting cost reduction, risk mitigation, and enhancing a company's efficiency and adaptability.⁴ Incorporating EA concepts into OT projects is fundamental to transforming isolated views into a holistic one, thereby improving cybersecurity measures in OT environments.⁴ A scholarly article proposes adding "operational technology architecture" as a new architectural activity area to existing EA methodologies, justified by the convergent characteristics of OT systems that differ from current IT practices.⁴ This implies that architecture professionals require differentiated and specific knowledge not common to traditional IT professionals, such as expertise in industrial data historians and industrial cybersecurity measures.⁴

While technical solutions like Kafka and hybrid cloud/edge are crucial, the consistent emphasis on "organizational barriers," "skill gaps," and the need for "process or organizational convergence" ³ indicates that technological integration alone is insufficient. The call for "reconceptualization of existing operating models" and "target operating models" ² signifies that if IT and OT teams remain siloed, with differing priorities, communication breakdowns, and skill mismatches, the full potential of converged systems will not be realized. This leads to inefficiencies, security vulnerabilities, and resistance to change. This implies that investment in cross-functional training, integrated teams, shared governance, and a unified organizational culture is not merely a "soft skill" but a strategic necessity for long-term, successful IT/OT convergence and digital transformation.