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As OT capabilities grow, leaders need intentional structures to unify IT/OT roles, refine workflows, and enable digital transformation to scale.

 

TAKEAWAYS:
● Successful IT/OT integration requires a clear understanding of current personas, workflows, and capability gaps across both technical and operational domains.
● Technology investments should intentionally free up time for higher-value work and reshape responsibilities across IT and OT roles.
● A future-ready IT/OT structure must be adaptable to company size, talent availability, and evolving digital and operational technology needs.  

 

The operating technology (OT) landscape is rapidly evolving. Many industrial operations now rely on OT solutions that didn’t even exist five years ago. With this accelerated change, manufacturers struggle to evolve their organizational structures to keep pace and properly govern the OT space.

Some organizations have applied the same governance models to both IT and OT, but with limited success. In reality, OT presents distinct challenges compared to IT, including strict uptime requirements, harsh environments, equipment-level connectivity, and varied user sophistication.

This structural lag often causes confusion over who truly owns OT—whether IT, engineering, or operations—and can prompt a “land grab” for responsibility. This struggle can produce a site- or project-specific approach to OT, leaving it disconnected from a broader technology strategy. Without a deliberate, integrated approach, OT efforts become isolated, making it harder to replicate successes, share lessons learned, or drive transformation across the enterprise.

Current State of IT/OT Organization Structures

Typically, OT capabilities evolve organically in response to specific needs. As a result, companies often accumulate underused and overlapping resources, hindering their ability to reallocate budgets to high-impact areas and scale appropriately (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Design of OT capabilities does not enable digital transformation

Note: For most manufacturers, OT capabilities haven’t been properly designed to enable digital transformation, typically falling into one of four organizational structures.

All four of these current-state organizational models for OT are suboptimized for spending purposes and frequently result in fragmented projects, missed opportunities for economies of scale, and limited visibility across operations and IT.

Designing Your Future IT/OT Organization

Even with a clear vision, integrating IT and OT is a formidable challenge for technology leaders. Leaders need a structured approach, beginning with an understanding of their teams’ current structure and the strengths they want to retain (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Foundation: The IT/OT Competency Model

Note: Many IT and OT team responsibilities fall into these six domains.

Start by inventorying your organization’s current capabilities across these six domains. Identify the critical responsibilities your new organization must manage. Then, evaluate each capability’s current maturity level and its strategic importance to future business and technology objectives. These maturity levels and responsibilities will inform time allocation, gap analysis, and the key workflows that your organization must be able to perform.

Step 1: Understand Current Personas and Responsibilities

To build a successful OT/IT model, you must first understand current stakeholders’ roles, needs, and challenges. Focus on those who interact frequently with your IT/OT systems, as their input will shape the adoption approach and ultimately dictate success (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Summary of roles to analyze when building a functional OT/IT model

Step 2: Assess Time Allocation Opportunities

New technology can significantly reshape how personas allocate their time. For example, automation platforms can allow control systems engineers to shift from reactive maintenance to proactive optimization. Artificial intelligence (AI) and agentic AI solutions are accelerating the evolution of many IT and OT roles, requiring an increasing focus on data integrity and security both on-premises and in cloud solutions. Technology investments should explicitly target time reallocation opportunities that align with strategic business objectives.

Next, assess in-flight technology initiatives that may change responsibilities. Map these changes to understand staffing impacts, skill development needs, and persona capacity to support future technology objectives. Consider how these in-flight initiatives will impact time allocation and responsibilities moving forward.

Step 3: Define Critical Workflows

Next, begin mapping the critical processes the new IT/OT organization will support. These processes can vary by organization but broadly fall into several categories (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Common categories of processes that an IT/OT organization must support

These critical processes will form the foundation of the newly designed IT/OT organization, establishing standards for communication and collaboration regarding how members will perform critical functions.

Technology can automate workflows, reducing the manual effort and time required. As AI agents, dashboards, and workflows increasingly automate system monitoring, incident response, and vendor management, a future-focused IT/OT organization must carefully assess how new technology initiative will change staffing roles and responsibilities.

Step 4: Skills Matrix and Gap Analysis

With a clear understanding of personas and future processes, develop a skills matrix to map current capabilities to needs. This matrix should encompass both technical skills (e.g., industrial protocols, model training, security frameworks) and soft skills (e.g., cross-functional collaboration, communication).

Assess both depth and breadth of expertise. While some roles require deep specialization, successful IT/OT convergence requires T-shaped professionals who can bridge technical and non-technical domains and adapt to emerging technology opportunities.

This skills matrix assessment pinpoints weaknesses or gaps, helping to determine whether current resources can support IT/OT goals, or if new roles and training are needed to support the organization’s technology strategy.

Step 5: Tailoring Your IT/OT Structure to Your Setting

There’s no one-size-fits-all model. The ideal organizational structure depends heavily on company-specific factors, including size, capital access, location, and existing capabilities (Figure 5).

Figure 5: Adapting organizational structures depending on size

Organizations in major metropolitan areas typically have access to diverse talent pools, enabling them to recruit specialists in both IT and OT. In contrast, rural, specialized, or localized industrial locations may need to focus on developing existing talent, agentic capabilities to elevate existing skillsets, or leveraging remote work arrangements to access specialized IT and OT skills.

It’s important to assess your competitive position in the talent market and adjust your organizational design accordingly. Some organizations may benefit from hybrid arrangements with shared service centers, while others may need to simplify governance, limit locally managed processes, or tailor responsibilities to match available skillsets.

Step 6: Mapping Processes to Roles

With your organization’s IT/OT structure defined, the next step is to assign roles (Figure 6). Each identified critical process should be clearly mapped to specific roles and teams, with a defined reporting structure and resource allocation. For individuals sharing multiple processes, clarify how their time will be split across responsibilities, taking availability and persona analysis into account.

Figure 6: Guiding principles for organizational process mapping

Successfully designing a joint IT/OT organization begins with assessing current capabilities and resources, understanding critical workflows, and thoughtfully considering company-specific realities. Whether your organization employs standalone IT and OT functions, an IT-, operations- or engineering-led model, or nested OT functions within IT, success depends on an the organization’s ability to serve its internal functions effectively.

As technologies evolve and business needs shift, IT/OT structures must adapt to sustain operational efficiency. Organizations that build adaptability and innovation into their foundational design will achieve sustainable operational efficiency in an increasingly connected industrial landscape.

By following this framework, companies can move beyond disjointed, ad-hoc IT/OT collaboration toward a purpose-built structure. This structure aligns strategy with execution, capabilities with business imperatives, and people with processes that drive value, resulting in a future-ready organization positioned to thrive in the converged digital and operational technology landscape. M

About the authors:

 

Will Rosengarten is Data Strategy & Architecture Lead at Rockwell Automation Digital.

 

 

 

Thomas Swigon is a Senior Consultant at Rockwell Automation Digital.