How Do We Blend OT Expertise with Custom Software Development?

[Cengiz Özemli]

## How Do We Blend OT Expertise with Custom Software Development?

Industrial automation has for decades been built on a simple and successful model, typically involving the implementation of off-the-shelf commercial (COTS) platforms, configuring these platforms for specific applications, and scaling them reliably. SCADA, historian, and MES systems easily adapt to this approach and deliver highly effective results when used for their intended purposes.

However, industrial data needs are changing. Manufacturers are demanding more comprehensive insights, richer user experiences, and tighter integration between operations and the rest of the business. This reveals that configuring systems alone cannot meet all needs. System integrators now have to offer capabilities that increasingly resemble modern software development processes. This brings both opportunities and risks.

### The Safe Haven of Traditional Platforms

The greatest strengths of SCADA and MES platforms are their predictability. These systems are designed for uptime, deterministic performance, and longevity. They are also backed by decades of field knowledge regarding industrial operations. The configuration-based approach reduces risk by ensuring systems are set up consistently and based on standard vendor support models.

For system owners, this methodology is reassuring because skills are transferable, lifecycle expectations are clear, and system behavior is familiar. However, when advanced workflows, personalized user experiences, and needs requiring inter-system coordination emerge, and these structures go beyond visualization and basic reporting, they become challenging.

### The Shift Towards Custom Software

Modern manufacturing projects often begin with these questions:

• How do we gain operational insight from data coming from different systems and areas without forcing it into a single, heavy platform?
• How do we provide a coherent and near real-time operational view of data located in both local and cloud environments, overcoming latency, accessibility, and data ownership constraints?
• How do we implement security, access control, and data governance across all these environments to deliver the right information to the right user, ensuring accessibility and protecting the operational system without compromising ease of use?

These questions require combining OT data with contextual metadata, business rules, and interaction models spread across multiple user profiles. Such customizations do not fit into traditional screens and off-the-shelf reports.

Custom software becomes the preferred choice at this point. It allows for design around use cases rather than being limited by platform constraints. Furthermore, the application architecture can be aligned with security and governance models. Custom UX/UI design, purpose-driven workflows, and interfaces similar to modern applications increase ease of use and adoption.

### Human and Process Risks

Custom software is not just a technology choice; it's an organizational decision. Unlike traditional SCADA projects, it requires different skills, including front-end UX/UI design, back-end services, data modeling, API design, testing, and deployment processes. DevOps concepts such as source control, automated builds, continuous integration, and environment management become crucial.

These differences create an unfamiliar pace of work and different failure modes for OT-focused teams. Therefore, some custom software-enabled projects may fail not due to technological errors, but due to issues in planning, personnel, management, and lifecycle ownership.

### The Harmony of Platform and Custom Software

Successful projects do not choose between "platform" or "custom"; they consciously blend the two. While traditional SCADA continues to provide core functions like reliable data collection, visualization, and alarming, the custom software layer offers carefully selected, targeted experiences, advanced workflows, and cross-domain insights using contextual data. Thus, SCADA becomes a foundation, not a limitation, and software engineering becomes a complement to OT expertise.

### The Importance of OT Expertise

Industrial data is complex; it is time-series heavy, context-dependent, and tightly linked to physical processes. Without an understanding of how data is generated, its meaning, and the ability to make safe assumptions, custom software can become detached from reality. Inconsistencies in data modeling, naming, and process context, when moving beyond a single pilot application or plant, lead to unusable applications.

The role of industrial data operations is significant here; it bridges the gap between raw OT data and high-level software applications, creates a common namespace, and gives operational data structure, shared context, and consistent meaning. This approach is not new in software engineering but has become critical in OT-centric initiatives.

### New Skill Intersections

Industry is not abandoning its roots; it is expanding them. System integrators must now operate at the intersection of software engineering and operational technology. At this point, UX design aligns with process knowledge, the DevOps pace of work aligns with uptime requirements, and flexibility aligns with reliability.

This convergence makes both disciplines more important. The challenge is not choosing a side, but recognizing and investing in the appropriate place for each. The biggest risk is not the adoption of custom software, but its unsustainability if OT experience is overlooked or software engineering maturity is not increased. The future of industrial systems will be shaped by teams that can bridge this gap.