Phase 2: Evaluating your current state
A complete IIoT digital transformation journey encompasses not only the IIoT-specific devices and strategy but also a holistic consideration of how those IIoT assets integrate with your IT and OT infrastructure and operations personas. Your infrastructure might be on-premises (local), or it might be hybrid of both on-premises and cloud infrastructure. Migrating your infrastructure to the cloud allows you to take full advantage of cloud-native features to improve agility, performance, and scalability.
In this phase, you do the following:
AWS Professional Services uses a set of prescriptive offerings that are tried-and-tested with other customers. We can help you assess your current state and build a phased roadmap for your target state.
Focus on people and culture
One of the key challenges is not having the proper team skill sets to enable and sustain the IIoT digital transformation. You need to upskill your team, create new roles, and hire new talent to drive success. Unlocking success in digital transformations
Cloud technology stack expertise
Primary technical skill sets such as:
IIoT
Machine learning (ML)
Data analytics tools and methods
Data lakes
Online analytical processing (OLAP) and online transaction processing (OLTP) systems, such as SQL/NoSQL databases and data warehouses
Business intelligence tools
Real-time monitoring tools
Web application development, including frontend and backend
Operating systems, such as Linux
Programming languages, such as Java, Python, JavaScript
The resources to build software products and solutions, including:
Business analyst
Product owner
Project manager
UX/UI designer
Software architect
Data architect
IoT architect
Software developer
Software testing and automation engineer
Development Operations (DevOps) engineer
Data scientist
OT subject matter experts (SMEs), such as processing engineers, production engineers, plant managers, and line managers
The team is sized and structured according to agile principle and practices
Partners for long-term and short-term acceleration and training
Another important point is having an innovative culture to embrace digital transformation and drive it. Because even if you have the correct strategy, processes, and tools in place, if your organizational culture does not encourage innovation and adoption, the digital transformation is less likely to be successful. Consider some of the following strategies to encourage adoption of the digital transformation in your organization:
Having a North Star vision, values, and principles (for more information, see North Star vision)
Having senior leadership support
Having a roadmap that minimizes disruptions to operations
Promoting an entrepreneurial mindset and accepting failures
Having data-driven, customer-focused goals
Adopting agile process and tools
Recognizing individuals who advocate for the digital transformation, and providing them opportunities to lead or participate in the initiative
Involving employees in the initiatives
Providing more autonomy and flexibility for the teams
Promoting teamwork, communication, and transparency
Having strong and fast feedback mechanisms
Discover your current systems and technology stack
The technical capabilities of your existing systems define the scope of the future system architecture. Therefore, you need to discover your IT and OT infrastructure to understand its current technical capabilities.
Consider the following to assess the current edge infrastructure capabilities:
Current edge architecture
Existing IoT or IIoT systems or solutions and their capabilities
Current data analytics and machine learning use cases, such as descriptive analytics, predictive analytics, anomaly detection, predictive and preventive maintenance, near real-time dashboard, and BI reporting
Scale of existing solutions and future requirements
Data sources and their capabilities for ingesting data, including:
Devices or tools, such as sensors, actuators, programmable logic controllers (PLCs), gateways, and OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) servers
Supported protocols for those device and tools, such as Modbus, BACnet, MQTT, and OPC UA
Data specifications, such as telemetry frequency, size of typical message, format, and volume
Network infrastructure for clear isolation between OT and IT network
Network connectivity, such as Ethernet, Wi-Fi, LoRaWAN, and 5G
Existing historians and data storage systems
Existing cloud connectivity options
Consider the following to assess the current cloud infrastructure capabilities:
Current cloud architecture
Data lakes
Data analytics
Data transformation
Data service layer
Data monitoring and BI
Machine learning
Web applications
Review other key considerations
In addition to the infrastructure considerations, there are also security, compliance, risk management, governance, and operational factors that you need to account for when assessing your current state. Assess the following topics in depth to address some of these considerations:
Information security strategy that assesses and mitigates threats.
High-availability requirements, such as recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) for the system.
Data governance and access control.
Identity and access management for the system.
Data retention policies.
Data classification and sensitivity.
Data encryption, at-rest and in-transit.
Compliance and regulatory requirements for processing and storing sensitive data are critical. This includes regulations such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), personally identifiable information (PII), and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
Service-level agreements (SLAs) for downstream data consumption and applications.
Business risk management.
Asset and device lifecycle management.
