Why Manufacturing IT, OT, and Operations Can’t Get Along: A Love Story in Three Broken Parts

By: A Disillusioned Factory Server Rack

Ah, manufacturing—the magical place where molten metal, blinking PLC lights, and corporate PowerPoint decks all somehow coexist under one roof. It’s a land of incredible machines, heroic operators, and enough corporate acronyms to choke a Kaizen facilitator.

But there’s one ancient mystery we still haven’t solved:

Why can’t IT, OT, and Operations just get along?

Let’s take a walk down the factory aisle and unpack this timeless tale of miscommunication, misaligned incentives, and passive-aggressive ticketing systems.

Part 1: IT – The Noble Defenders of the Network Perimeter

The IT team lives in the towering glass fortress downtown, where the Wi-Fi is strong and the snacks are free-range. Their mission: “protect the enterprise from threats, inefficiencies, and basically anyone who needs admin access.”

To them, the factory is a terrifying landscape of unsecured Windows XP boxes, ancient unmanaged switches, and machines with default passwords like “admin123.”

IT’s favorite phrase:

“No, you can’t connect your robot to the cloud without a security review, a VPN tunnel, and a 9-month approval process.”

Part 2: OT – The Keepers of the Sacred PLC Scrolls

Down on the plant floor, OT (Operational Technology) has been keeping things running since before IT learned how to spell “cybersecurity.”

OT controls the machines. They speak fluent Ladder Logic and occasionally ancient tongues like Modbus. They measure uptime in “weeks since last reboot” and view patching as an unnecessary risk unless something literally catches fire.

OT’s favorite phrase:

“If it ain’t broke, don’t upgrade the firmware you found on some vendor website.”

They trust their machines. They do not trust IT, who once bricked a perfectly good line during a “critical” network segmentation exercise.

Part 3: Operations – Stuck in the Middle with WIP

And then there’s Operations, trying to hit this month’s production goals while the other two throw passive-aggressive emails at each other.

Ops just wants the machines to run, the data to flow, and the orders to ship. But instead, they get to referee arguments like:

“Who owns the SCADA server?”“Can we open this firewall port?”“Why did you reboot the MES during a shift change?”

Operations’ favorite phrase:

“I don’t care who owns it, just make it work.”

Bonus Level: Vendors Stir the Pot

As if this wasn’t complicated enough, in stroll the tech vendors. Each one promises they can “bridge IT and OT” with their one magical platform, which costs as much as a new CNC mill but delivers the practical usefulness of a screen door on a submarine.

They hold workshops, give away branded water bottles, and declare your factory “Industry 4.0 ready” after installing one sensor and running a Power BI dashboard that updates quarterly.

Conclusion: Can’t We All Just… Nope

In theory, IT, OT, and Operations should work together like a finely tuned assembly line.

In practice, they resemble a three-headed hydra where each head thinks the other two are idiots.

But hey—at least the parts keep shipping. Mostly.