There’s a question I like to ask whenever I meet IT teams who are convinced they can revolutionize their company’s manufacturing operations. It’s a simple one: “When was the last time you had lunch in the factory cafeteria and spoke with the maintenance manager or the machinery technicians?”
The silence that follows says everything.
Most IT-driven industrial modernization efforts are born in meeting rooms, not on factory floors. They’re designed by people who understand compute, networking, and automation pipelines, but not vibration, dust, and the noise of a press line. Meanwhile, the OT teams who live with the daily consequences of downtime are often handed systems that look great on PowerPoint but make their jobs harder in practice, or worse, are just plain irrelevant.
The illusion of convergence
We’ve been hearing about IT-OT convergence for over a decade, but much of what’s happened so far is simply IT pushing technology into OT’s world, rather than partnering with it. Servers are deployed where cooling and connectivity can’t be guaranteed. Cloud dashboards are introduced to teams who still rely on clipboards. And technologies built for sanitized data centers are expected to survive on vibrating, dusty, greasy factory floors that never sleep.
Take Kubernetes, for instance. IT sees it as a modern miracle, auto-healing, highly available, and indestructible. Yet to OT, “indestructible” is a dangerous word. Because the truth is, the control plane components (even in a HA configuration) remains a single point of failure (etcd, kubeDNS). Lose it, and your entire cluster goes silent. For the factory, that’s not theory, it’s downtime.
More often than not, three discrete single-node clusters, each fully isolated but running identical workloads, would be a far safer design. It’s not elegant, but it’s survivable. And survivable is what matters when a production line can’t afford to stop.
The empathy deficit
The problem isn’t Kubernetes, or servers, or software. It’s empathy and conversations. IT and OT teams rarely walk in each other’s worlds. IT sees “edge sites.” OT sees living systems that can’t go offline for patching windows. IT measures uptime in percentages. OT measures it in parts lost and dollars wasted.
If IT truly wants to help OT, it needs to stop designing solutions for the idea of the factory and start engaging with the reality of it. That means spending time on the floor. Talking to the people who perform the maintenance, not just their managers. Observing where problems actually occur, and where technology can genuinely shift the balance from reactive to proactive.
Because here’s the hard truth: if your solution doesn’t reduce the number of times the maintenance team is called into emergency situations, if it doesn’t help detect failures before they happen and free up time for improvement rather than firefighting, then you’re not really solving problems, you’re just introducing new ones with shinier packaging.
The real way forward
Real convergence starts with respect. IT must respect OT’s reality, and OT must respect IT’s expertise. Together, they can build systems that balance reliability with innovation, control with flexibility. But it begins with a change in posture, from deploying technology to solving for people.
So before you plan your next rollout, do something simple. Go to the factory. Sit down in the cafeteria. Talk to the maintenance team. Ask what breaks, what’s unreliable, what wastes their time. Because until you understand what keeps them awake at night, no amount of Kubernetes clusters, dashboards, or digital twins will make a factory truly modern.
