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If Part 1 on our discussion on unifying IT and OT laid out the ‘why’, this installment is your guide to the ‘how’. We’ll be breaking down the key systems, stakeholders, and technical frameworks required to build a unified, contextualized data estate that powers operational intelligence, step by step.
Unifying IT and OT is as much about people as it is about platforms. Success requires cross-functional collaboration:
Stakeholder alignment ensures that IT and OT initiatives aren’t happening in isolation. When both sides are working toward shared operational and business outcomes, a noticeable transformation begins to take place. A unified task force helps break down internal silos, eliminates redundant investments, and fosters a culture of co-ownership.
How Willow Solves this: Willow engages with OT and IT parts of the organization. As an example, the BMS system from OT is leveraged to identify key points to monitor telemetry for. As insights are generated, work orders are issued in the CMMS system managed by IT.
By assembling a cross-disciplinary task force, teams ensure shared KPIs that span both digital and physical domains, e.g., “Reduce energy use per square foot by 15% while improving asset uptime.”
After you’ve determined who the stakeholders and collaborators are, the next step is to identify your systems and determine how integral they are to your process. A good start is creating a comprehensive inventory of your systems across both IT and OT domains. Typical systems include many or all of the following:
OT Systems:
IT Systems:
Modern facilities often sit atop decades of isolated, siloed systems. Identifying which systems produce valuable operational data and how that data is currently used is critical to building a rational integration plan. You don’t need to start with everything; start with what matters most.
How Willow Solves this: Willow delivers insights with KPIs that help identify areas with the highest business impact. Understanding all avoidable costs and monitoring what portion of it your organization has realized to date as your action insights helps target high-energy-consumption systems that touch multiple assets across buildings.
This is the technical heart of a unified data estate: a living, contextual graph that understands how assets, systems, people, and workflows relate.
Core components:
The value of a knowledge graph is in its ability to translate fragmented system data into a holistic, queryable model. For example, understanding that a specific HVAC unit (from BMS) services the west wing of a hospital and is linked to temperature complaints (logged in the CMMS) creates a powerful, actionable insight. Assets in the CMMS systems that reference physical devices in the HVAC system are mapped as unified twins in the Willow knowledge graph, ensuring that data is no longer siloed and insights can flow across systems.
How Willow Solves this: Willow provides a ready-to-deploy knowledge graph foundation, complete with digital twin models, ontologies, and AI-powered connectors. This enables customers to unify their data estate rapidly, without having to build it from scratch or hire a team of software engineers. Willow helps your team get the data they need to make better decisions at any point in the process.
A unified estate requires unified governance:
Governance is about clarity just much as it is about control. By formalizing governance across IT and OT, organizations can confidently scale pilots into enterprise-wide platforms. Having a shared language for quality, privacy, and risk accelerates adoption and reduces internal resistance.
How Willow Solves This: Your dedicated single-tenant instance ensures data privacy. Additionally, role-based access control is fine-grained enough to enable setting appropriate access for all uses across both IT and OT. Finally, data normalizing ensures that telemetry streams can be utilized effectively, while bootcamps bring together IT and OT to recoup ROI.
When it comes to unifying your data estate, the real transformation happens when frontline teams, engineers, and decision-makers gain the ability to act faster and smarter with quality data at their fingertips.
As one facilities leader put it:
“Doing more with less is giving our frontline workers what they need every second of the day, in a format that makes sense to them… I just don’t know how they did their job beforehand—whiteboards, ring binders… There’s still a lot of that in the basements of our customers.”
How Willow Solves This:
Tools like Willow Copilot make advanced insights accessible to all—not just BIM experts or software engineers. Natural language queries mean anyone can get precision answers and act with confidence.
This shift improves workflows and unlocks new ways to find and scale digital initiatives as well. Rather than wait for new funding, leaders are redirecting existing capital—like small CapEx allocations—toward digitizing infrastructure. This helps them identify underutilized space, avoid unnecessary builds, and make data-backed decisions that stretch every dollar further.
Another facilities leader had this to say:
“We had a provost request a new College of Business building. But with digital occupancy data in Willow, we realized we could renovate the existing one instead. That’s how we work smarter with the dollars we have.”
The journey to unify IT and OT isn’t linear, but it’s no longer theoretical. Organizations that invest in the right systems, the right people, and the right data architecture are quickly gaining operational clarity, financial returns, and strategic agility.
IT/OT convergence is foundational to unlocking operational AI, enabling digital twins, and future-proofing not only your built environment but the built world. With the right approach, your data estate becomes a competitive differentiator and not just a technical asset.