What is the influence of IT on System Administration/ Diagnostics Approaches in Automation/ Operations  Systems?

The continued transformation of the automation/ operation systems under the significant influence of IT continues 14 to 15 years after the influence started to be felt during the “year 2000” panic and awareness. To me the most significant impact of this period was that corporate IT become aware during the software audits of the amount of desktop/ and servers running on the plants. From this time I have sat in many meeting where leading company IT engineers have discussed how they can bring more management and therefore sustainability to these systems.

The pressures on these trends / discussion continue and for good reason:

·         Security and threat of cyber security attacks down in plants is now not a dream but a reality

·         The continue stream line of IT and driving the IT cost down through outsourcing.

·         Also the never ending annual, and sub annual upgrading of OS especially now that most automation/operations systems run on Microsoft Operating systems, there is a treadmill of upgrades, due to security and technology evolution.

These are to name a few, and this is so different to 80s and 90s (when many of the current automation systems where originally developed), where the OS was isolated from these outside effects.

But the above pressures will not go away, no matter how much automation engineers “dig their heads in the sand”, because the reality of:

·         information distribution to a much bigger audience in the plants

·         alignment between operational and business

·         operational empowerment

·         driving of cost out of systems

·         increasing reliability

are only going to grow.

So in the last 12 months I have been increasingly asked and internally we evolving the System Administration/ Diagnostic functions to be not built by likes of the automation vendors like Invensys, but for our systems to plug into the System Administration tools already adopted by IT to manage their overall backoffice and server systems. To be honest this makes a lot of sense, as these tools Microsoft System Center, IBM Tivoli, etc, as they are rich in administration functions and are understood.

So now if we take or existing:

·         Licensing management

·         Patch and software version management

·         System Diagnostics

·         Security Management

Extending it with the virtual machine management, which is becoming a natural way for deployment in automation and operational systems, but with no overall co-ordination.

This all seems the natural evolution for the automation vendors including DCS/ PLC control system administration to be developed into services that naturally run in these powerful IT System Administration tools, extending them with the industrial domain.

Another aspect we seeing is the remote diagnostics outsourcing of automation/ systems to a remote expert systems that pro-actively monitor the systems and engage the plants in a pro-active way. This I will walk through next week, but again it is a natural concept that has come from IT.