From Visibility to Control: Establishing a Scalable OT Operating Model

A global life sciences and manufacturing organization operates highly complex production environments where uptime, quality, and safety are non-negotiable. Like many modern enterprises navigating Industry 4.0, its operational technology (OT) footprint had grown rapidly across plants, lines, and control systems.

With this growth came a new reality: unplanned downtime carried significant risk, cyber threats targeted industrial systems directly, and Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) was becoming harder to measure and improve. OT data existed across security tools, ERP systems, and plant-level platforms, but not yet within a unified operational system of action.

Leadership made a deliberate decision to change that. The organization set out to establish ServiceNow as the unified system of record and system of action for OT, bringing visibility, governance, and service management into a single enterprise platform.

Visibility Without Governance Is Not Control

As the transformation effort began, several structural challenges became clear:

• OT assets were not consistently captured in a governed CMDB
• Asset lifecycle data (procurement, contracts, deployment, retirement) lived outside of operational workflows
• Vulnerability data existed in security platforms but lacked full OT context for prioritization
• OT incidents and changes were managed separately from IT, but without standardized, measurable workflows
• Access to OT data required strict site-based controls that traditional IT models could not enforce

Without a single, authoritative platform for OT, the organization faced:

• Limited confidence in asset capture goals
• Manual tracking of MTTR
• Fragmented remediation workflows
• Regulatory and cybersecurity risks that could not be centrally governed

The problem was not with the tooling, but rather with the orchestration

A Purpose-Built OT Program Takes Shape

The organization engaged a specialized ServiceNow OT partner to implement the ServiceNow Operational Technology Management (OTM) suiteusing a structured, release-based delivery model.

This was not positioned as a single deployment. It was designed as a multi-release transformation program anchored in the partner’s OT IGNITE methodology, focused on:

• OT Visibility
• OT Asset Management
• OT Vulnerability Response
• OT Service Management
• Advanced Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
• Deep integration with industrial cybersecurity and vulnerability platforms

The mission was explicit: create a governed, secure, and measurable OT operating model within ServiceNow, one release at a time.

Building the OT Operating Model, Layer by Layer

Rather than pursuing speed at the expense of structure, the program followed a deliberate foundation-first design.

Access controls were architected around hierarchical industrial data, ensuring that site teams, central security groups, and enterprise leaders each saw only what they were authorized to see. Segregation was enforced not just at the record level, but down to attributes and value streams.

Structural victories:

• Hierarchical, site-based RBAC
• Attribute-level access control
• Full separation of IT and OT security domains

Program Governance, Enablement, and Production Readiness

Across all workstreams, the program followed a formal release cadence supported by:

• Technical and functional enablement
• User Acceptance Testing (UAT)
• Production release planning
• Post-release hypercare
• Formal change management and adoption support

Each major capability, like RBAC, OT CMDB, OT Asset Management, OT Vulnerability Response, and OT Service Management, was designed to be delivered as a distinct, production-ready release for a structured 38-week timeline.

OT Visibility and CMDB Foundation

Workshops defined a formal ISA-95 industrial hierarchy for sites, areas, and production lines. OT-specific configuration item (CI) classes, list views, and forms were designed directly into the CMDB.

Service Graph Connectors were configured to ingest OT asset data, establishing the backbone for operational technology.

Structural victories:

• Formal industrial asset modeling using ISA-95
• OT-specific CMDB schema
• Automated OT data ingestion and reconciliation via Service Graph Connectors

OT Asset Management, from Static Records to Full Lifecycle Control

The program extended beyond visibility into full OT asset lifecycle governance. Asset states, procurement data, contract associations, stockroom workflows, and disposal processes were mapped and configured.

OT CI records were linked directly to hardware asset records to create a holistic lifecycle view that spanned finance, operations, and service.

Structural victories:

• OT hardware asset and model record configuration
• Lifecycle state management (in stock, deployed, retired)
• ERP and asset data ingestion alignment
• Unified CI-to-asset linkage for lifecycle visibility

OT Vulnerability Response, Turning Security Data into Action

Risk scoring and remediation prioritization were defined based on business criticality , not just technical severity. Vulnerability data from industrial and enterprise scanners was integrated into ServiceNow to correlate threats directly with OT assets.

Custom dashboards and approval workflows were created to support real-world security operations.

Structural victories:

• OT-specific risk calculators and remediation targets
• Vulnerability-to-asset correlation
• Conditional risk deferment approvals
• Dedicated dashboards for remediators and security leadership

OT Service Management, Making OT Measurable

OT incident and change workflows were formally designed to align with manufacturing operations while retaining ITIL rigor. Differentiated SLAs, OT-specific playbooks, and a dedicated OT Service Portal were configured to ensure industrial issues could be tracked with the same discipline as enterprise IT.

Structural victories:

• OT-specific incident and change categorization
• Differentiated SLAs for OT vs. IT
• State models and notifications for OT operations
• Automated MTTR measurement capability

A Governed OT Platform Built for Measurable Outcomes

The program also formalized quantified success targets for the post-go-live phase, including:

• 80% OT asset capture at initial sites
• 50% improvement in time to locate asset ownership and contracts
• 25% reduction in OT Incident MTTR within six months
• 30% reduction in critical OT vulnerability backlog
• 5% integration uptime
• Zero unauthorized cross-site data access events

These metrics now serve as operational truth tests for the platform as it moves from structural readiness into sustained execution.

Why This Story Matters

This was a deliberate construction of an enterprise OT nervous system. Instead of bolting security, service, and asset data together after the fact, the organization chose to design governance, access control, and lifecycle intelligence into the platform from day one. The result is not simply better visibility. It is measurability, accountability, and control at an industrial scale.

The victory here is not yet in the numbers. It is the fact that the numbers can now be proven, trusted, and improved.