Breaking the Silos: Why IT/OT Convergence Fails and What Actually Works
Why does IT/OT convergence keep failing? Not because of the technology — because of the people.
In this episode, Phil Seboa and Ed Fuentes sit down with David Ariens and Willem van Lammeren, co-founders of The IT/OT Insider and co-authors of The IT/OT Handbook. Both spent years at BASF Antwerp working inside the IT/OT divide before independently arriving at the same conclusion: the silos aren’t a wiring problem, they’re a trust and culture problem.
Together they’ve distilled twenty-plus years of plant-floor experience into a practitioner’s guide that adapts Lean, Agile, DevOps, and Team Topologies for manufacturing environments. The result is seven patterns of collaboration that hold up in the real world.
David Ariens — Managing Director, Analytics For Industry (AVEVA); co-founder of The IT/OT Insider and co-author of The IT/OT Handbook. David has spent his career at the intersection of industrial digitalisation and OT. He led IT/OT programmes at BASF Antwerp and now works with manufacturers across Benelux and Scandinavia as part of AVEVA. He co-founded The IT/OT Insider (10,000+ subscribers) and The IT/OT Academy to help practitioners close the gap faster.
Willem van Lammeren — Tech Lead, Industrial IT at Syensqo; co-founder of The IT/OT Insider and co-author of The IT/OT Handbook. Willem’s background is rare in IT: he came up through production operations. At BASF he was one of the few IT professionals the plant floor actually listened to — because he’d worked there. He is currently building an operational data lake at Syensqo and co-founded The IT/OT Academy.
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