Control Systems, IT/OT

Yeah, right, let the office nerds mistakenly enter 48.0 rather than 480 volts into your generator control scheme, and brown out your whole factory.

Put some good read-only and password controls into your system....

Yes, the "PC brigade". I have a Mostek Memory Data Book 1979. 16k Dynamic RAM was the lead product. Interesting info in it - an 8 bit Dynamic RAM array (8 chips) will be hit by a cosmic ray annually. No wonder they need a parity bit! There is no shielding which will stop a cosmic ray. DRAM capacity is much greater, but I do not think the silicon area is any less now than then (but the amount of charge per bit is). So a PC [with lots of DRAM] can expect to have its memory scrambled annually. PLCs have far smaller operating systems in firmware, not DRAM. The PLC I know best has stopped once in 20 years, after a lightning strike, but as soon as the programmer was connected, its message was "reload the application software" - immediately that was done - it ran again OK. I mention this cosmic ray problem when folk want a PC to do anything "vital to generation".

Welcome the idea but point out to them that your industrial programmers need a specialist set of skills. To acquire these skills they have to be competent IT specialists, so once the IT and OT functions are integrated there will no longer be a need for the specialist IT staff, and ditching them would save money as well. See how quickly their enthusiasm wanes.

We currently have this situation and to be honest it is great - not from a production/ safety point of view but just from the hell of watching the IT "gurus" solve the OT issues. Almost every week they try to perform "updates" and we all just sit back and watch the fun unfold. The controls group thinks this is great since they get loads of overtime fixing the updates. It does not save money, it actually costs money. It would be much more beneficial to the company if they took their ashma, pollen and nut allergy medicine as well as heir "Control System for Dummies" books and stayed away. But they do produce nice colorful Pie charts so all is not lost.

You (and everyone) should read Edward Tufte's The Cognitive Deficiencies of PowerPoint. It will really crack you up, especially the AutoChart graph of "Fourscore and seven years ago..."

Tufte is a foremost genius in the visual presentation of information, and his brief pamphlet is very rewarding.