"To Bit or Not to Bit. That's the Question"

1. The Contradiction

In Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1, the Prince faces the most famous question in literature: "To be, or not to be." In the context of the plot, it was presented as a question of life versus death, but in the end, it was a question of action versus paralysis. Hamlet argued that we endure the known suffering of life rather than fly to the unknown suffering of death, because "the dread of something after death... puzzles the will". I can't imagine a more solid parallel to this than our current way to manage industrial facilities and assets... you'll see!

Hamlet was deciding on his own fate, in the dark. He had no models. No simulations. No way to quantify the "undiscovered country". So, as a conclusion, he froze.

Today, industrial leaders face the same existential tension: "To Bit, or Not to Bit."

Most leaders, like Hamlet, consciously or unconsciously choose the known suffering. They, at their pure hearts, stick to spreadsheets, tribal knowledge, long meeting debates, and isolated studies, just because the digital alternative feels like an "undiscovered country", like "there, I don't feel I am at control as a manager!". Of course, this is carried inside their hearts as a "secret", as secret as other dark pleasures, because these days to be accepted or promoted to a manager, the "right" face to display is that of "I'm all about digitalization and AI!!", even if one doesn't have a clue about what that means...(i.e. What is an AI model actually optimizing, token by token, when it generates an output?")

Do you feel the "dramatic tension" now? Advocating for the unknown is commonplace nowadays.

But ...Is here where the analogy ends, and where your advantage, as an Industrial Manager, begins?.

Hamlet failed because he (as all of us) lacked data on the very specific topic of life and death. But you do not, because luckily our job, as Industrial Managers, is to decide on Industrial Assets that have never-ever killed anybody (Bhopal, Texas City Refinery, Piper Alpha and Chernobyl as just some examples for our tranquility!).

So, this blog entry (blueprint-wanna-be) is about Digitalization, but not about buying digitalization technology. It is about helping you to build a Digital-Decision-Making Strategy that feels realistic, comfortable and even attractive, so you can, honestly, open your heart to digitalization without faking (too much) with it, but truly know the new land you are entering.

2. The Stage 1: "Faking it"

Every industrial leader today faces the same quiet crisis: You are asked to sponsor "digital transformation" while knowing, in your gut, that most of it is theater.

• Dashboards that don't decide.
• Algorithms that no one really understands, where many of those recommendations don't even respect the physics of your industrial process.
• Promises that don't survive the control room.

So, to be honest, all Digitalization projects start not by true digitalization but like more decision fragility dressed in bits. Do you truly believe the commercial representative of XYZTech.co has any clue on what is going on in your own manufacturing process, when your own engineers are still confused?

But there is a twist. Even as useless as it may look-like at the start, the "fake it" part allows some people to entertain the idea. "And, if we truly master this?", or "Hum. This may work if we stop, study, reach for help and make ONE thing real, one thing that works". And then, miraculously, out of a marketing hype we get people TRULY interested in study, research and understand what is all this thing of the digitalization about. And, hidden in those reflections, the first marvelous revelation appears.

3. The Accusation: Three Sins of Industrial "Digitalization"

To move forward, in our dramatic presentation, we need the "antagonist", the "enemy" (the Claudius in the original Hamlet). We must name the enemy. Most initiatives fail because they commit to one of these demons:

Revelation 1: We Don't Digitalize Machines. We Digitalize Decision Architecture.

There is a misconception that we digitalize assets. We do not.
What we digitalize is the Decision Architecture.

An Industrial Digital Asset (IDA) is the concrete embodiment of this idea: a computational platform that integrates:

• Process & Control Data Gathering (real-time operations, historians)
• Reliability, Performance & Degradation Physics (technical measurements, failure distributions, creep, corrosion, erosion, etc.)
• Market & Contractual Context (price curves, delivery obligations)

The result is (definitively) not a dashboard. We aim (in the language of MBSE) for "a single source of truth" that answers one question:

In our experience working for leading organizations, in a regular project we mine over 30 - 50 million data points, we integrate hundreds of probabilistic models, and written thousands of lines of custom logic, and all that not because we want to "visualize a dashboard", but because we want the tool to explore and amplify diversity of future scenarios through simulation. Those simulations allow to convert questions into forecasts and such forecasts, when integrating all what is known about the business are the specific resource by which we support the decision making.

If you:

• Leave the decision architecture undefined or fragmented (before across spreadsheets and now across expensive tools),
• Allow for the "gut-feeling" and "long table/ meeting debates" to keep as the main decision scenario, where old anecdotes and tribal "knowledge" are used as the "de facto" decision tools.
• And, if every new decision doesn't make easier the next one,

Revelation 2: In "Asset Intensive" Business, Thermodynamics Is Non-Negotiable. Physics Beats Algorithms, Politics and Psychology.

This one is easy!. Let us strip away the titles. Plant Manager. Maintenance Director. Operations Lead, all these positions, in the end, have a core occupation identical to that of a bakery owner, a power plant operator, or a steel mill director.

And this is not philosophy. It is the operational absolute of every industrial asset on earth. No matter how many "HR initiatives" you have, they are secondary to a perfect awareness of the thermodynamics of the business. Sometimes I see in client organizations 25 programs on how to become better "friends at work" and leadership, and that's marvelous IF you first mind the very critical amount of energy concentrated in your asset that can easily erase all that community from the planet. I know this is controversial, but managers in general tend to forget there is indeed a tremendous amount of energy and power trapped in the industrial asset. The fact that it's normally silent doesn't mean is less important than the workers associations fighting for their rights. The most responsible act of love you can have with your entire team is making sure you and your team are competent enough to face all the challenge such levels of energy can impose on your control capacity. What do you prefer, angry faces, or an undesired release of dangerous levels of energy and chemicals? Both are definitely important, but with the people you can negotiate. With the laws of thermodynamics you have to OBEY! (haters... proceed!)

So, In context:

• Thermodynamics answers: "Is it safe to do this?" Is there enough energy? Will the material creep? Is the risk acceptable?
• Market Dynamics answers: "Is it advisable to do this?" Is the margin positive? Is the demand real? Is the opportunity cost too high?

The Tragedy of Industrial Management is that these two forces are usually at war during the decision-making process, and it is exactly there where your Digitalization Initiative must support you:

• To maximize Market Value, you know some teams inside the corporation will ask you to push the unit harder (higher temperature, longer cycles).
• To maximize Thermodynamic Integrity, some other teams (more precisely those guys putting their own skin next to the asset) will ask you to slow the unit down (lower stress, frequent shutdowns).

Historically, managers have been forced to choose sides. The Technical Team protects the physics (sometimes even over-maintaining, killing margin). The Financial Team protects the P&L (often under-maintaining, risking failure and dreaming the business has an asset that is not really there).

The Proof: When leading organizations deploy their Digital Asset, they don't just find a better maintenance schedule or a better production plan. They find consensus, unified view and consequently they find harmony.

• Thermodynamics: A mature Digitalization initiative should be able to model risk across 10-year horizons, ensuring safety limits are respected even when extending operational cycles and integrating all the undesired event related to a plant not fully controlled.
• Market: A mature Digitalization initiative also identifies that extending a turnaround cycle by just one year can reduce total cost impact by tens of millions of dollars and increase cumulative production by significant fractional percentages. It is also aware of the market cycles and it can calculate the effective impact on cash of executing the turnaround in January vs in June.
• Harmony: Teams achieve better performance by cooperation, not by competition. Financial goals don't need to be seen as enemies of technical limits simply because a major event is very expensive, so everybody looking at the same picture generates agreement, not competition. It is not only possible to achieve Better financial performance without exceeding risk thresholds, simply because events and major events are crazy expensive!. The risk profile remains stable while profitability surges.

The power of cooperation between diverse teams it's also easily capitalized. In one recent implementation, data analytics revealed operational optimization opportunities (such as reaction temperature control vs. product yield) in the order of $10M/year—found not by trial and error in the field, but by simulating the physics against the economics in the digital realm, in an effort where technical teams and financial teams were all giving us the set of "business rules" they had learned about the asset and the surrounding context. Those 10 MUSD appear without adding any single sensor or database. It was money lying there, but hidden below 30 million of obstacles that needed to be properly addressed by Digital means; a task no way possible by human means, where digitalization demonstrated very clearly its value.

Revelation 3: Concrete Metrics, Honest Limitations, Iterative Validation

Credibility comes from transparency about limitations, not from overpromising. So, in case you are dreaming whatever software or simulation team will make everything to be all right magically, you'll be disappointed. These are going to be all right once you YOURSELF make them to be all right, and that implies using Digitalization to truly allow YOU to understand YOUR own business.

Recent deployments have shown that risk projections can be limited by partial inspection data or outdated reliability baselines. Risk levels may appear artificially low if physical degradation models are not yet fully integrated, and all that are evolutive stages of a Digital Asset. Like a kid, Digitalization projects first lay there doing nothing but "sucking resources", then start to crawl, eventually walk and later run, faster than yourself!. That's the way it works. It's a well planned and coordinated evolution, not a hectic and magical revolution.

This evolutionary way is not a failure of the tool; it is a call to action for the manager. It means you must invest in the quality of your underlying data (RBI, maintenance histories, operational logs) with the same rigor you invest in the software itself. The Digital Asset exposes your data gaps; it does not hide them, so you have the option:

• A) Blame the new digital asset by not being perfect from the first time, or
• B) Understand the "massive levels" of knowledge synthesis and codifications required for the Digital Asset to truly act as a performing advisor.

It is up to you.

Revelation 4: The Human Gap — Can a Non-Digital Manager Sponsor This Type of Effort?

Well...and here I am incarnating the very Claudius for you, dear reader. Here comes the most uncomfortable question.

Can a "Analog Manager" who became a Manager using "the ways of the analog" before the digital age, be a great sponsor for Digital Initiatives?... (uncomfortable pause) Well, I don't know. What is known is that only when an analog manager admits what they don't know, there's a chance for the initiative. Otherwise, the Digitalization Project would be a dead man walking. The reason is clear for me (after hundreds of hours with my clients around the world). It's easy to see managers applying "analog" thinking to digital projects. You see easily the discomfort of being a leader sitting in the middle of a meeting where nothing makes sense because even the language is different. It's a personal option to take:

So, of course I am not defending confusing jargon, but I do defend to level the language and the thinking completeness to the level of complexity of the interaction of these two complex processes: The thermodynamics of the plant, with the Dynamics of the market. This is NOT a matter of unduly oversimplification or a case where, because "I am the manager and I am too busy, you have to explain it to me simpler that it really is". It is, on the contrary, a situation where "I am the (Digital) manager, and as so, I must be able to see and face 100% of what is in there, no matter if it is complex and no matter if I am happy or pleased" (More of this in the next FANTASY MOVIE from Pixar ;). )

The Distilled Blueprint: 8 Steps, 3 Iterations, 1 Mindset

In summary to succeed in a Digitalization initiative, we need a "cognitive shift". Not "brave claims" not, "motivations speeches", not artificial "over-simplification by magical softwares", but serious and mature development of cognitive skills able to match the promise of the Digitalization project. Here is how to reorganize your thinking on Digital Decision Making:

Cognitive Shifts: Reorganizing the Mind for Digital Decision-Making

First 90 Days / First 2 Years: Action Plan for Leaders

Closing: Bits That Respect Heat

In the end, the drive for transformation has such a power that "To Bit or Not to Bit" was never the question. The bits are inevitable. The real question is: Do our approach to bits respect our thermodynamics, illuminate our market dynamics, and empower our decision architecture?

Whether you run a refinery or a bakery, you are playing with mass and energy to support societal needs, so embrace fully the completeness of the situation with the aid of Digital Means, and cancel once and for all the addiction to oversimplifications.

• If you ignore the Thermodynamics, the asset fails (no bread, no gasoline, and maybe no more industrial asset).
• If you ignore the Market, the business fails (no profit, no society).

And of course you can't ignore your teams, but be wise in picking the battles.
The laws of nature are NOT open for negotiation, the laws of team work, on the contrary, give you more room to negotiation, so solve first things first!.

Your job is not to "manage people". Your first responsibility is to keep them alive and allow them to better do their work to create a safe and profitable relationship in the triad Physics/ Market/ People.

Start with one decision. Build one initial version of your Industrial Digital Asset. Validate it rigorously. Transfer the capability. Scale with discipline. That is how you move from decision fragility to predictive clarity.