8 JULY - SEPTEMBER - 20208 July - September 2020IN MYPINIONSTAYING IN-TUNE TO A RAPIDLYEVOLVING ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY LANDSCAPEBy Sharon Gietl, CIO, The Doe Run CompanyPlease elaborate on the challenges that are prevalent in the enterprise technology landscape? Through the challenges that we have tried to address we have known that the actual challenge lies in understanding the IT and OT operations technology interfaces and also working through disparate worldviews. In the IT world, it's essential to keep things moving; accordingly, we have created a role within the organization that serves as intermediary responsibility and collaborates with both the OT and the IT side. So, having the allocation of a resource that takes care of integration, collaboration, and implementation of novel technologies will be the key to success.What are some of the emerging technology trends that you see in the market?Hiring the staff for intermediary roles is one of the major concerns. Colleges and universities haven't addressed this notion of getting the millennials trained for emerging technologies. For instance, we had a fresh graduate with high potential whom we had to prepare for the intermediary role because this job doesn't exist today. To make this objective a success, one has to make the role interesting so that the folks are willing to accept it and not feel like it's going to be a dead end job. To this end, we are providing OT training. As an experiment, we bought a couple of drones and then our OT analysts were put together in a cross-functional team comprised of operational, environmental, IT people to collaborate. Apart from one use case the rest of them did work, and it's created a lot of excitement across the company. In the same way, we are adding other technologies with better openness between the operational and the IT people.Could you talk about your approach to identify the right partnership/solutions providers from the lot?Firstly I've been working with a company and their venture capitalist, and they have steered us in the direction that they think might be a good fit for us. Another aspect is performing proof of concepts; this is the path that small to midsize businesses take to look for potential partners. We will have folks reach out to us; we will research in various industry-related journals, or through the venture capitalist that we have partnered with. When we observe that a particular offering might be a good fit for us, then we go ahead develop and design a proof of concept to determine if this is the route we want to go. Individuals in the schools need to focus on gaining knowledge on the emerging technologies at an early stage
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