Information and operational technologies nexus for asset lifecycle management

Abstract

Contemporary enterprises rely on accurate and complete information to make optimal decisions. In order to do so must have the ability to harvest information from every repository that will provide them the necessary information for good decisions to be made. Asset managing organisations have in recent times moved towards integrating many of their information systems but have, in most cases, focused on the business process enabling properties of information technologies, and have tended to overlook the role of these technologies in informing the strategic business orientation. In the same vein, asset managing organisations consider IT as a business support area that is there to support business processes or operational technologies to ensure smooth functioning of an asset. However, even these operational technologies are embedded in IT, and they generate information that is fed to various other operational systems and administrative legacy systems. The intertwined nature of operational and information technologies suggest that this information provides for the control of asset management tasks and also acts as an instrument for informed and quality decision support. There exposes the active and dynamic link between IT and corporate governance. The scope of IT governance should, thus, be extended to include the operational technologies so as to develop a unified view of information and operational technologies. This paper attempts to uncover the peculiarities and variances of the relationship between industry specific operational technologies used for asset management and organisational use of mainstream IT applications for business execution. This paper puts forward the proposition that in order to achieve a high degree in data driven decision making particularly at the strategic level of the organisation a confluence of information technology (IT), operational technology (OT) and information management technology (IM) needs to occur.