| | MAY 20219CIOReviewgrow the platform incrementally with business-prioritized use cases. With this simple framework JEA moved into the IIoT space, focused on priorities that drive business value.Despite an effective approach and a common objective across both business and technology, opportunities remain for JEA's fledgling IIoT program. Across the landscape of potential sensors supporting electric, water, and wastewater operations, proprietary packaged solutions provided by vendors offer a trade-off. While they are perhaps easier to install and implement, they include their own communications technology (usually cellular), their own hosted SaaS application, and their own data repository. A proliferation of these proprietary solutions leaves the utility with too much to manage ­ too many networks, too many SaaS portals (some lacking accessible APIs), and too many disparate data stores. All of these factors make centralized data and operational alarm management much more difficult. User expectations are another opportunity for effective management ­ some business partners expect all data to be readily accessible and to integrate with existing tools, but the reality is that this takes time. One key lesson learned is the focus on data integration and accessibility; these factors empower the users to spend more time doing the analysis and analytics, and less time wrangling with the data from disparate systems.Other lessons learned have emerged as well. Our IIoT program guiding principles call for a separation, both physical and logical, of the IIoT system from existing OT control systems. IIoT data collected is indication only, with no control capabilities or outputs. This helps a new program avoid the heavily regulated, reliability-focused network used for established controls. Additionally, legacy OT protocols mapping tag-based licenses are not designed for high throughput, and are unnecessarily complicated for our data collection purposes. Moreover, for the new IIoT network, modern security needs dictate that protocols must support encryption and security certificates. Our IIoT network is focused on data collection, is reliable but not mission-critical, and benefits from reduced regulatory burden, streamlined change management, and more agility when a modification is needed. Despite these opportunities and lessons learned, the future of IIoT utilization at JEA is extremely bright. Low cost sensors and lowered monitoring costs enable monitoring that was previously prohibitively expensive. Cheap data networks and cloud computing allows collection of data from distributed sources like never before, and intelligent devices continue to spread out at the edge. Our move towards enterprise scale management of the IIoT platform will incorporate new tools (both open source and commercial), opportunities to leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning libraries, and interoperability of systems using open APIs. With almost too many options, the technology is not the hard part! A clear objective shared across the operations and technology has made possible our move to IIoT, and the development of the nascent IIoT platform has enabled new capabilities and improving efficiencies and effectiveness for our utility business.
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