Assessing OT/IT Vendors Against a Written Checklist

Context

As IT Solutions Architect at Angola LNG, I review how business IT connects to the plant's operational technology — SCADA, PI, the chromatography lab, and fiscal metering — the OT-adjacent half of a broader integration-architecture practice that also covers SAP, Documentum, and cloud connectors.

Responsibility

Part of the role is making sure a change to a server or an integration doesn't stop a shift, in a plant that runs around the clock. The other part is keeping new vendors honest before any of them are trusted with a piece of it.

Method

Vendors get assessed against a written checklist rather than a slide deck. Tracing any single requirement — a metering figure, a lab result — back through what it actually depends on usually follows the same chain: PI, then network reliability, then identity, then governance, since none of those systems were built knowing the others existed.

Constraint

This record has thinner sourcing than the others here. There's no single dated project or signed artifact behind it — the Chronicle doesn't yet cover IT/OT work by name, and what's published is a role-level description on the Integration Architecture page and this Pillar's own caption, not a specific review walked through in detail. This record states only what's published at that level, rather than inventing a vendor, system, or date to make it read as more concrete than it currently is.

Result

The checklist is a standing practice — still how new OT-adjacent vendors get evaluated today, not a closed project with a single date attached. That's also why, unlike the other records here, this one doesn't end on one.