SPOTLIGHT

Sponsored by: AspenTech DataWorks

With new data modeling and advanced analytics methods available, every industrial
operation strives to become more data driven. Yet, to succeed at scale, organizations
must adopt new processes for data integration and management that account for the
complexity of operational data.

Optimizing Industrial Operational Data

July 2023

Written by: Jonathan Lang, Research Director, Worldwide IT/OT Convergence Strategies

Introduction AT A GLANCE
As the sophistication and capabilities of technology expand, companies of
all types are seeking to become more data driven across the organization. KEY TAKEAWAYS
This is particularly true in industrial operations functions in industries such » Industrial organizations are seeking to
as manufacturing, oil and gas, and utilities. These operations settings are become more data driven and capitalize
on new AI and analytics capabilities.
highly and increasingly instrumented and connected, and the ruthless
» To do this requires a stable data
pursuit of operational efficiency and cost and waste reduction is foundation and data operations and
tantamount. For these teams, data has always been integral to decision engineering capabilities to abstract OT
making, but the volumes, methods, and reach of its analysis continue to data effectively.
reach new thresholds. » Companies seeking to accelerate the
successful development of such a data
In IDC's discussions with these industrial enterprises, becoming a data- foundation should consider tools that are
driven operation has become the north star of digital transformation industry and purpose built for the unique
efforts. The user base and accessibility to operational data is expanding requirements of operations.
thanks to technologies like the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), edge and
cloud computing, and advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI). The goal of this data-driven approach is to achieve
two seemingly conflicting goals at once – to become leaner and more efficient while also gaining the flexibility and agility
necessary to serve volatile and rapidly shifting markets. Atop the pressures of these volatile markets is an increasing social
and economic pressure to reduce the nonmonetary costs of consumption through sustainability-focused business
decisions. Indeed, new and existing lines of business have never demanded more visibility and access to operational
performance data.
As companies pursue these endeavors, it has become abundantly clear to IT organizations tasked with architecting and
standing up these new data pipelines that approaches to integrating and managing data that have been successful in
back-office and enterprise-side functions are ineffective when working within operational technology (OT). Operational
data and the technology landscape it is sourced from is notoriously heterogeneous, isolated, high speed, voluminous, and
ungoverned. The approach many organizations have attempted to apply in OT use case pilot programs of manually
cleansing and integrating data via one-off efforts does not scale and is significantly inhibiting the potential value of digital
transformation initiatives.
SPOTLIGHT Optimizing Industrial Operational Data

Weaving the Industrial Data Fabric

A confluence of technologies is enabling access to operational data — but does not offer integration or contextualization
of the data. IIoT, edge computing, and cloud computing have opened the flood gates of digitizing operational assets and
processes. Many organizations report having explosive growth in operational data but significant challenges in putting it
to good use. Abstracting and contextualizing operational data has become the major bottleneck to scale out of virtually
all value-rich use cases. According to IDC's 2022 Worldwide IT and OT Convergence Survey of over 1,000 IT and operations
professionals, 63.1% of respondents expect operational data to grow in excess of 15% in terms of terabytes per day in
just 12 months. And in IDC's 2022 Future of Operations Survey of a similar cohort, 53.1% of respondents stated that they
have more than enough data to support their key initiatives, but that the data is trapped in silos or difficult to extract
value from. This is why the majority of industrial enterprises are actively strategizing and working to develop a data
abstraction and operations layer now (see in Figure 1).

FIGURE 1: The State of Operational Data Management and Analytics Strategies

Q Which best describes the state of maturity of your operational data management and
analytics/artificial intelligence strategy?

n = 1,028
Source: IDC's Worldwide IT and OT Convergence Survey, July 2022

What is observed at mature digital industrial enterprises, and what is needed by all, is a unified set of technology
capabilities to enable a data abstraction layer. This abstraction layer must meet OT data where it is, regardless of data
quality, legacy software and database formats, and lack of context. This market need has given rise to a new category of
industrial data operations software tools that are purpose built for these unique challenges.

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The data engineering efforts that take place at this data abstraction layer must be collaborative between IT and
operations — but ultimately will set the conditions for scalable use of contextualized and actionable data. These data
abstraction capabilities carry multiple requirements:

» Connect to diverse, high-volume structured and unstructured data utilizing a variety of protocols and data formats.
Time series data stemming from data historians, IIoT platforms, and directly from dozens of industrial equipment
protocols are important, but SQL databases and others also supply critical information that must be integrated.

» Abstract or virtualize the data without removing it from the source location. IDC refers to this approach as building
a digital thread, which contrasts a failed approach many organizations have attempted of simply duplicating data
into a data lake with the intent of untangling its meaning at a later time. In this capability, the structure of the
source data must be retagged with consistent metadata attributes such that it can be analyzed effectively across
multiple sources.

» Use role and access management to govern the data usage as it becomes available to new and existing roles. This
data governance ensures that sensitive information is not exposed unnecessarily or edited in ways that could
introduce business risk. It is also necessary to ensure that users of the data can find what is relevant to them
without becoming overwhelmed.

» Build data pipelines that deliver data to a variety of destinations in support of different use cases. The key capability
is to support this effort in a scalable, repeatable, templatized, and user-friendly manner. By contrast, many
organizations have built custom one-off integrations to support proof-of-concept initiatives, only to realize they
have built a house of cards that does not scale and requires maintenance every time there is a slight change in
sources or destinations.
Many organizations may have already discovered that this independent data layer is the key to scale without building
technical debt in the upkeep and customization of data integrations, but there are best practices IDC has collected from
discussions with IT teams largely responsible for the technical end of these efforts:

» IT tools will not gain adoption from OT subject matter experts who hold the knowledge necessary to contextualize
and upkeep the data. The environments where OT staff are asked to contribute to this new, additive responsibility
to their normal day-to-day tasks must be purpose built for the industry and come from technology providers that
the operations staff view as credible to be adopted sufficiently.

» Approaches must leverage industry and use case–oriented frameworks to accelerate the data ingestion process.
Many companies report that the use of open-ended toolsets requires significant data science skills that they do not
have in-house to use effectively.

» Approaches and tools must meet security standards and pricing/licensing models and carry change management
capabilities that fit with the volumes and needs of OT data.

» Companies advise their peers to start small and get to value quickly, which in turn will ultimately accelerate
investment willingness from executives. This requires subject matter expertise on the provider side to assist with
rapid implementation and first use case buildout.

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Benefits
The primary benefit of utilizing such an approach to operational data abstraction and management is to develop a
repeatable and scalable approach to supporting OT data use case requirements that does not require massive services
budgets or stacked talent pools of data scientists and engineers. However, there are additional benefits that
organizations can expect:

» Traceability of data across a product, process, or site footprint for both sustainability initiatives and for satisfying the
requirements of already highly regulated industries that are coming under even more regulation

» Greater collaboration between OT and IT, relieving some of the burden on either group in transformation projects
and building business relationships that will extend into other areas of digital innovation and solution development

» Positioning OT data to be available for future novel analytics and use case efforts such as generative AI, next-
generation automation capabilities that will be more dynamically data driven, and others yet to be revealed

Technology or Vendor Profile

Aspen Technology Inc. (AspenTech) is a global software provider that aims to help industries at the forefront of the
world's dual challenge meet the increasing demand for resources from a rapidly growing population in a profitable and
sustainable manner. AspenTech solutions seek to address complex environments where it is critical to optimize the asset
design, operation, and maintenance life cycle (see Figure 2).
AspenTech DataWorks, a business unit of Aspen Technology, seeks to be a global leader in industrial data management
solutions. The company's mission is to accelerate data-driven value creation in the asset-intensive industries through
robust data software offerings. The primary objective of AspenTech DataWorks is to unlock key industrial use cases by
unifying companies' industrial data architectures. From these unified environments, organizations can leverage
DataWorks to aggregate and contextualize operational data across disparate sources.

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FIGURE 2: AspenTech Inmation

Source: Aspen Technology, Inc., 2023

Challenges
Some companies prefer these data abstraction capabilities be sourced from vendors that focus exclusively on this
offering as a way to ensure they are fully agnostic to all of the systems and data in their current technology landscape.
AspenTech will have to demonstrate to these companies that they are capable of supporting competitors' systems and
data in addition to their own. Necessary data integrations are growing beyond time series data to include other OT and IT
system data. AspenTech will have to continuously expand capabilities to support a growing data landscape in terms of
both sources and destinations.
The emerging industrial data operations software market is growing explosively. Companies are being bombarded with
similar data operations tools. AspenTech will have to raise awareness of its offering and educate buyers on areas of
differentiation to gain meaningful traction.

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Conclusion
Companies are looking to do more with what they view as underutilized With digital twins, AI, next-
and value-rich OT data. What they have found through trial and error is
that point-to-point integrations do not scale and are brittle and labor
generation automation, and
intensive to maintain. With digital twins, AI, next-generation automation, so many exciting new
and so many exciting new possibilities on the horizon, companies must possibilities on the horizon,
have a stable data foundation in place to be able to capitalize on companies must have a stable
innovation rapidly. Developing a data abstraction layer is key to the
data foundation in place to be
scalable use of OT data to innovate in new use cases, and purpose-built
tools offered by companies with industry and domain knowledge are able to capitalize on
critical to the success of such a technology offering. innovation rapidly.

About the Analyst

Jonathan Lang, Research Director, Worldwide IT/OT Convergence Strategies
Jonathan Lang is Research Director for IDC Industry Operations Insights responsible for the IT/OT
Convergence Strategies practice. Mr. Lang's research focuses on digital transformation strategies in
environments where operations technologies are deployed including manufacturing, utilities, oil and gas,
and healthcare provider settings. As IT capabilities redefine and extend the core value drivers of operations
technologies, Mr. Lang's research examines strategies, road maps, and governance models to drive this
convergence and manage the new data and processes it requires.

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MESSAGE FROM THE SPONSOR

The AspenTech DataWorks Solutions
AspenTech Inmation™: Centralized data management system that allows for the ingestion, processing, augmentation
and storage of diverse data, empowering your team from the plant floor to the executive suite.
Aspen InfoPlus.21®: Process Historian that helps you collect, merge, store and retrieve large volumes of time-series
data and make it accessible for analysis and reporting by client users, business systems and production applications.
For more information, go to: www.aspentech.com/dataworks

The content in this paper was adapted from existing IDC research published on www.idc.com.

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