We’re launching the ITOT.Academy (and we can’t wait to get started)

Willem (00:00) We opened a new website. You know what it’s called? Yeah, because you registered a domain. So we opened the ITOT Academy where we will start accepting registrations for a training about IT and OT. David (00:05) Yeah, absolutely. I’m super excited, Willem. I actually didn’t know that the domain .academy existed, but since I knew that, I immediately went for itot.academy. Just sounds amazing, right? Willem (00:25) We had to take it. We had to take it. No way we could pass up on that one. So if you’re interested already and you don’t want to hear, you don’t need to hear more, just go to itot.academy and register and it’s gonna be fine. Don’t worry. David (00:44) Is this the end of the podcast already? Willem (00:46) It could be for that person that now just stopped the podcast and went to the website and just registered, it’s fine. For those of you who want to know a bit more about what we’re going to do there and what it is and what it isn’t, stay tuned. ⁓ We have some more information for you. David, we started a couple of weeks ago by sending to our subscribers an email requesting some feedback regarding training. What came out of it? David (01:09) Yeah, a lot. Thank you all for ⁓ the amazing response. ⁓ Lots of things. First of all, we asked some basic questions on the topics now. think everybody, well, it’s kind of obvious that our audience is very interested in bringing IT and OT together. So that was also the result of the, I don’t know whether that was actually a good question to ask, but in any case, it’s a confirmation of the work we’re doing. Willem (01:30) No kidding. David (01:38) ⁓ Data, AI, unified namespace, all those topics, ⁓ people ask questions about them. We ask them about, do you want to go for a lengthy academy? Do you want to go for short classes? Surprise, surprise, everybody wants a short class. And actually what’s… What also surprised me a little bit, I need to be honest here, what surprised me a bit was that the absolute majority of you, the ones who responded to our survey, said that they also want to be connected to peers ⁓ to get these, probably not face-to-face connections, but at least virtual connections to people who are facing the same type of problems, which I kind of understand because, well. My wife doesn’t understand what I’m doing. I don’t know what’s the case in your family, Willem. Willem (02:33) She still has absolutely no crew. I gave up, it’s okay. It’s nice, it’s nice because also my friends don’t understand it either. So I’m not that surprised that people want to talk to peers. David (02:36) maybe a couple of extra friends would be a benefit. No, no, it’s not. But it’s, I would say the response was overwhelmingly positive. So that means that indeed, in this episode, we are officially launching our ITOT.academy. So let’s go. Willem (03:00) Okay, great. So David, who is this training for? David (03:05) The people who do the work, short and sweet. And the people who do the work, obviously in the plants, who face problems every day, you’re still facing them, Willem. We’ve been facing them together for so many years in our previous job when we were working together. Willem (03:19) Absolutely. So people in IT in companies, people in OT in manufacturing companies, ⁓ trying to get a better grip to get some understanding, some new insights. David (03:35) Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, it’s not about IT OT convergence. It’s about IT OT collaboration. And in order to collaborate, If you’re sitting on the OT side, really, really, really need to understand how IT is thinking, how IT is working. No, they are not the enemy. ⁓ And same holds true for the other way around. If you’re working in IT, you also need to understand how operations is thinking, how OT is thinking, the differences. ⁓ And there are so many differences, but of course today, most of the topics we are talking about, or… where people are working on is sending data back and forth. Willem (04:21) A second group that we also get quite a lot of feedback from are people working in consultancy. They’re often looking for new ideas, other insights, or maybe just a way to get somebody up to speed quickly. ⁓ You have a new hire, you are working in this space, and you want to bring up speed in what the problems are that happen when you try to digitalize the manufacturing. David (04:34) yeah. Yeah, yeah, and it’s about the stories, but I think especially in consulting, it’s also about the frameworks. ⁓ It’s about our organizational frameworks. It’s about our capability maps, that type of things. And it just makes sense because it gives you some guidance. There is another group as well, and those are the technology vendors. Willem (04:51) Mm-hmm. Yep. David (05:15) It was a bit of a surprise for me. Of course, we saw that growing over the last year. ⁓ I thought that a ⁓ technology vendor, I would say, would just like to push their solution into the market. but by my amazing piece of software, which is gonna solve, miraculously gonna solve all your problems. And by the way, it comes with building AI or something like that, right? ⁓ But obviously they face… ⁓ Willem (05:29) Please buy my software here. Of course. David (05:44) they also have some things to solve because they also want to make sure that they understand the problem they want to solve for their customer. So this means that ⁓ we can also give them some guidance, again, using the examples we’ve been working on, ⁓ et cetera, to make those projects into a success and might probably also help them with the onboarding process, the same between the consultants. Willem (06:11) I think the good vendor also will be one that not only sells you a product, but also make sure that the product that they’re trying to implement with the customer also becomes a success. And that can also mean going a bit further than just the technology you’re doing, but could be like finding out how can we bring this cooperation up and running within the customer. David (06:32) Yeah and you know today the the world today is different than it was I don’t know. five, six, seven, eight years ago in the sense that today it’s all about ⁓ cooperation. Also from a technology perspective, there are no monolith solutions. There probably are still monolith solutions on the market, but this is not, I would say, this is not where we’re heading towards. It’s more about open systems. ⁓ It’s about collaboration between teams. It’s about data exchange, all these things. So I fully understand that it’s not just about them anymore. It’s about the entire ecosystem. Willem (07:08) I think that they’re definitely also a group that surprisingly is also very interested in what we’re ⁓ Wasn’t in our minds when we started. So ⁓ what is the format going to be? I think we already said it’s going to be shorter sessions. David (07:24) to sessions so we are not going to do pre-recorded videos or… Willem (07:29) You mean those with that you push the button, can I double the speeds or get some transcript and give me a summary after I put it through Chetch CPT? David (07:36) Yes, please do this in 1.5 speed while I’m checking my email and responding to five LinkedIn messages. That’s wrong. No, no, not that wrong. Willem (07:41) Okay, Yeah, okay. Now I think it was clear people are not interested in day-long trainings, especially when they’re remote. It’s hard to block my agenda for an entire day. And even if I would block it, I would still be bugged on chat, on mail, and there would be this urgent meeting I would have to drop out. So we get that. David (07:52) Hmm. Yeah, short, sweet, but still live because this interaction, the interaction we’re having now while recording the podcast, it just works. If you extend that to a bigger group, you can have the interaction, you can ask the questions. It’s a totally different dynamic than having a prerecorded video. So it’s going to be short, it’s going to be live. It’s going to be virtual, obviously, so we can reach people all over the world. It’s not going to be a technology training. Willem (08:29) know. We’re not going to talk about a vendor or a specific technology or what do need to do to implement ABC. David (08:39) No, A, there are so many solutions on the market and B, think it’s really our role. I think from an ITO insider perspective, we’re all about the more generic concepts, the vendor neutral concepts. And yes, obviously, we sometimes on our blog as well, obviously, we have interviews with people who are sitting on the technology side. ⁓ but it’s really to learn from their experiences. It’s not per se to promote ⁓ their products. So it’s definitely not gonna be a technology training. It’s gonna be more a conceptual one. And ⁓ so two hour sessions, that’s also kind of the max I can still. Willem (09:08) their products. Yeah, exactly. I think that’s the max. I think I can block my agenda for two hours and stop any chat from coming in for two hours. Resisting the urge to check my mail for two hours? Yes, because I don’t like to look at my mailbox. But I think two hours you can manage. We’re gonna have six sessions. We’re gonna start with the first three that are focused on the core concept. I think everything you are reading in the blog, the things we have been writing about all this time, but with a bit more depth and with a more coherent story, because I think in the blog, David, we try to keep it short and sweet to one small concept, 800 words, nothing more. David (09:59) Yeah. Yeah, and also the blog is, and I think that makes sense, it’s an organic thing. The articles we write, we just rewrite them because they happen. I don’t know how to put it. Willem (10:17) Yes. It’s very easy when you do something at work you and you think god damn it. Why don’t we do it that way? David (10:24) Yeah, you come across something and typically it’s either because I came across something when I was doing, I don’t know, consulting job somewhere or I was talking to a prospect or it’s because you came across something in your job and we went like, know, this makes sense to write something about this, but that doesn’t make it, I would say, into a coherent story. So our Willem (10:44) Yep. David (10:49) core track of the training. So the first three sessions are about what we believe is the core concepts or the three core concepts of our work. And that’s what we call ⁓ understand, cooperate and scale. Now all the details, you know, that’s for the training, but understand is kind of clear, the language of IT and the language of OT basically, but still it’s super important. ⁓ Willem (11:18) Absolutely. David (11:20) Cooperate, that’s our work around our cooperation models. So how do you make teams work together? Willem (11:26) I think we can also say that since we’ve written that we’ve also had more feedback and also refined everything that’s behind it. So there’s also definitely new content. It’s not just rehashing of what you can read. David (11:33) yeah. Yeah. No, no, absolutely. We’ve been working on quite lot of new content which will be drip feeding into the markets and the time to come. But in the academy, we really bring that together. then scale. Scale means ⁓ how do you make sure you don’t end up with five failed pilots? ⁓ That’s the core program. ⁓ Yes. Willem (12:02) That’s a good one. Now we have three more lessons. Three more lessons, yes. More on the practical. David (12:10) more on the practical things. Willem (12:11) Yeah, so of course we’re not just gonna go and give you a development environment, like we said, it’s not about technology, but we’re gonna bring it together on a use case. And we’re going to work as people who join Sweet Harmony Treats. It’s a company that makes waffles. Because even though David and I have a background in ⁓ chemicals, et cetera, it’s just not so tasty to work with, I don’t know. David (12:20) Mm-hmm. waffles because Willem (12:39) polyethylene or something like that or any other chemical. So waffles it is. Yeah. So we’re going to put you together with your peers in small groups because if you’re working with remote sessions, et cetera, you have big groups. It’s a recipe for no interaction whatsoever. So we’re going to bring you together in very small groups to work on that use case, applying the concepts, but also discussing those concepts with peers. That’s the first session of the three. The second one is… David (12:44) Waffle to this, absolutely. Mm-hmm. Willem (13:07) Also, that was requested a lot is getting ⁓ an interactive session with people who actually did the work, who managed to deploy globally ⁓ solutions on the shop floor, bridging that gap between IT and OT, and having an interactive session about it, maybe have some feedback on the use case. ⁓ And David, what’s the last session to wrap it all up? David (13:32) I’m gonna wrap everything up. ⁓ It’s an Ask Us Anything session where ⁓ I’m sure that there will be topics which we can’t, ⁓ I would say, or questions which we can’t answer ⁓ during the first session. So the last one is an Ask Us Anything. ⁓ Ask us all the difficult questions you want us to try to answer. Willem (13:37) Yeah. Not great. So if you’re still listening and you’re curious ⁓ when is this gonna happen David? When do need to clear up my agenda and free it up? David (14:01) Yup. So yeah, we’re gonna start with two groups starting ⁓ end of August, beginning September. ⁓ We have one group, which is perfect for European time or even ⁓ Asia, well, a little bit later in Asia, but still doable. And the second group is perfect for ⁓ US, Canada, American time zones. So two groups starting end of August, beginning September. All information, registration, all the Q &A type of things you want to know can be found at, again, because I still just like the domain name, itot.academy. ⁓ And yeah, if you have questions, we’re happy to answer them. can email us at academy at itotinsider.com. ⁓ Willem, I’m… Willem (14:49) Yeah David (15:04) really, really, really excited. This is for me, for you, for the IT insider, which is really the next step. We’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I don’t know we first started with this idea. But in any case, it’s very, very, it’s a fun, it’s a it’s a big next step for us. So we really hope to welcome Willem (15:14) A long time, a long time. David (15:31) many of you in our upcoming groups. Again, find us at itot.academy and we hope to see you there soon. Willem (15:40) to see you there, really. David (15:45) Thank you and next time this will be another normal podcast I assume. Willem (15:50) I think we will continue doing regular stuff after this one. David (15:55) Thank you so much. Take care and hope to see you soon. Bye bye. Willem (15:57) Bye.