100 and Counting: Looking Back, Looking Forward

Three years ago, over a glass of wine during summer break, we decided to start writing. No business plan, no editorial calendar — just a shared frustration that the conversation around IT and OT in manufacturing was either too technical or too abstract. We wanted something in between. Something practical, honest, and maybe a little opinionated.

This week, we are publishing our hundredth piece of content.

Some are articles, some are podcasts (like this one). Every single one started with the same question: does this actually help someone working at the intersection of IT and OT?

To celebrate we sat down in the same room (David’s living room, to be precise) and hit record. No guest this time. Just the two of us, looking back at what we’ve built — and looking forward to what’s coming next.

Here’s what we talked about…

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Our Favourite Podcasts

We’ve recorded roughly 40 conversations over the past two years, starting with Shiv Trisal from Databricks back in April 2024. Picking favourites is hard, but here we go:

Dan Jeavons on AI and Physics: If you’re drowning in “AI will change the world” marketing material, this one is the antidote. Dan takes a fundamentally different look at how AI can reshape manufacturing — not by adding chatbots to help files, but by understanding the physical world in ways that don’t require manually modelling every asset in the plant. It connects directly to the two problems standing between you and industrial AI we wrote about recently: the lack of an integrated digital twin and the lack of understanding of the physical twin.

Nikki Gonzales from Automation Ladies: Completely the other end of the spectrum. Nikki lives and breathes the SCADA/OT world, and she speaks for the smaller manufacturers — the ones who are twenty people, not the ones who can hire twenty people. If you’re North American and into that HMI/SCADA layer, also check out her OT SCADA Con conference.

Our Best Trips

We don’t just write and podcast — we also speak at conferences, attend events, and occasionally manage to be in the same country at the same time.

Vegas and ETLS: Last year, we were invited to speak at the Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit in Las Vegas, organised by our friends at IT Revolution. Here’s the thing: ETLS is an IT audience. The focus was squarely on generative AI, vibe coding, and the pace of change in the non-manufacturing world. For us, that contrast was gold. Seeing how fast things move outside manufacturing gives you perspective on what’s coming — and what’s different when your systems run 24/7 and a wrong deployment doesn’t just crash an app but shuts down a production line. Also, the Hoover Dam was genuinely impressive. Built to impress, and still functional.

Hannover Messe: The size of Hannover Messe is hard to describe — it’s a village. What’s valuable is sensing where the industry is heading, shaking hands with the people building things, and seeing the common themes across big tech vendors and small start-ups alike. We’ll be back this April.

Our Favourite Articles

Writing an article sounds simple. It is not. The writing itself is the easy part — getting it down to around 800 words and one core idea that you actually remember after reading? That takes iteration. A lot of it.

But the process forces you to think through your own ideas, and they often change while writing. That’s the real value.

Ceci n’est pas IT/OT Convergence: A nod to Magritte, because we’re Belgian and we can. This one was written in under an hour, almost out of pure frustration. The term “IT/OT convergence” dates back to Industry 4.0, and it has been misused so thoroughly that it’s lost meaning. It covers everything from adding an ethernet port to a sensor to deploying advanced AI models. People either love it or hate it, but most don’t realise it has both an organisational and a technical dimension — and conflating the two is where the trouble starts. It remains one of our most-read articles.

IT/OT Cooperation Models: Willem wrote this one early on — October or November of our first year — and it’s still our most shared article. The core idea: when IT and OT need to work together, the problems are rarely technical. It’s about how you cooperate. Inspired by DevOps and Team Topologies, we looked at cooperation from an IT/OT perspective and defined models that go beyond “let’s have more alignment meetings” (spoiler: those don’t work). Since then, our thinking has evolved. We’ve come to appreciate that simpler cooperation models aren’t necessarily low-maturity — they’re great when used for the right problem. You don’t need a full-fledged cooperative project team just to get a laptop sorted. But when you’re building something complex together, simple won’t cut it. Much of this updated thinking has already made it into the Academy, and we’ll be publishing more on the blog this year. Also, check out our mini IT/OT book library — it’s consistently one of our top-five reads.

The ITOT.Academy

Speaking of the Academy: we launched it last year, and it’s become one of the things we’re most proud of. The idea was born on a tram in Hannover and started from a simple question: what training would we actually want to follow ourselves?

Not a week-long course. Not someone reading slides at you. Not a massive one-directional webinar. Something live, interactive, vendor-neutral, and focused on the people and organisational side of IT/OT — not on protocols and programming.

We’ve now had close to 80 people go through the programme across our first groups. The interaction is bi-directional: we teach, but we learn just as much from the participants. People from different backgrounds, different industries, all working on fundamentally the same type of problem. And the feedback from one group genuinely shapes the next.

The next group starts May 22nd. Head over to itot.academy if you’re interested in joining.(or take a look to our Hall of Fame if you are not sure yet)

What’s Coming Next

Cybersecurity: This is a big one. We chose to focus here because cybersecurity in manufacturing is non-negotiable, and with NIS2 and the CRA, it’s coming to your company whether you want it or not.

What we’ve noticed: not everyone has the same understanding of what OT cybersecurity means. Is it an IT problem? Is manufacturing somehow exempt because it’s “different”? (Spoiler: no.) We’ll approach it the way we approach everything — people and organisation first, technology second. Translating the legal texts into what it actually means for your plant, your teams, and your processes. Expect articles, podcasts, and a few good stories.

Hannover Messe 2026: End of April. We’ll be there. We already have meetings planned, and we’ll record a podcast somewhere on the fairgrounds (hopefully not on an ironing board this time). If you want to meet up, reach out to us.

And we’ll be making a major announcement. We’re not saying what it is yet. You’ll have to stay tuned.

Thank You!

One hundred articles. Roughly forty podcasts. Three academies. Zero regrets.

None of this would exist without the people who read, listen, share, challenge, and reach out. You’ve made the IT/OT Insider what it is. We started with a glass of wine and a blank page. Three years later, we have a community — and we’re just getting started.

Until we meet again — take care.

David & Willem

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