Private IT/OT Academy
Your team.
Your context.
Your pace.
The public IT/OT Academy brings your people into a room with peers from across the industry. Sometimes that’s exactly what you need. Sometimes you need something built entirely around your own organization: your product, your accounts, your people, your timeline.
Our Private IT/OT Academy is a tailored version of everything we’ve learned running the public cohort but now reshaped around your team and delivered on your terms, live or virtual, in a single session or a full program.
Your teachers: David and Willem
Our Academy is trusted by end users from these companies:
Who we’ve done this for
Every private engagement starts from the same place: understand the specific friction your team is facing, then build around it. We don’t publish client names for private engagements as that is almost always delivered under NDA, but here’s the kind of work we’ve done.
A leading cloud data & AI platform
We worked with their sellers across the globe to help them speak confidently into manufacturing accounts. They know IT inside out (and IT knows them), but to the operations and engineering stakeholders who actually decide whether an industrial data platform gets funded.
A globally active renewable energy company
Their IT/OT architects and product managers were speaking past each other. We gave both groups a shared vocabulary and a shared set of frameworks. That means that architecture discussions stopped being translation exercises.
A newly funded OT startup
After a fresh round of investment, they were standing up a local sales team who had to take over sales from the founders. We helped that team find its footing fast: how to qualify a prospect in the first conversation, how to talk about the technology without losing the room, and how to sound like they’d been doing this for years.
A European-wide distributor of OT software
Their sales and pre-sales teams were getting lost in competitor comparisons that went nowhere. We gave them the tools to position themselves confidently against adjacent (and sometimes overlapping) vendors, and build urgency without turning a three-month deal into a two-year project.
What’s different from the public cohort?
Focus : solve the problem you want solved by focusing on one specific topic. Allows for more depth and optimizes the time usage of your team.
Your people, your language. No mixed room of practitioners, vendors and integrators. Just your team, free to ask the questions they wouldn’t ask in front of a competitor. They’re able to use the language they do every day.
Your scenarios on the whiteboard. We work through your architecture, your deals, your accounts; not generic case studies.
Built around your roles. Sales, pre-sales, architects, management… each group gets what’s relevant to them, not one-size-fits-all content.
Content you can keep using. Materials and pre-reads can be reused internally for onboarding long after the session ends. E-learnings and recordings are options too!
Flexible delivery. Physical, virtual, or e-learning. Built around how your organization actually learns.
How we work
We don’t run one fixed curriculum, that’s why we do an intake first, we design the content together, you get your offer, and then we set out to develop the training , set dates and get going!
Here are some possible building blocks:
- Foundations. Understand, Cooperate, Scale: why IT and OT think differently, and how to actually work together
- Architecture. Whiteboard sessions using your own scenarios and accounts
- Cybersecurity fundamentals. The OT-specific realities of segmentation, patching, and vendor access
- Digital maturity. Our framework for assessing where an organization actually stands, and what that means for what to sell or build next
- Management track. Sponsorship, KPIs, and the decision points that make or break a rollout
- Role-play and objection handling. For sales and pre-sales teams, built around real deal friction
- Case study work. Our own Sweet Harmony Treats case, the same one we use in the public Academy, applied to your context, or your own case.
We shape the mix together, based on the challenges you’re facing.
Trusted by technology vendors, consultants and system integrators from:
Formats
Physical
Delivered on-site or on a location of your choice. Since we’re already there, we can often extend into a team event, a sales meeting, or whatever else makes sense. Participants can receive a physical copy of The IT/OT Handbook.
Virtual
Best run over multiple shorter days, one device per participant, no shared conference rooms. We lean on interactive tools to keep it from turning into a long stretch of passive screen time.
E-learning
Self-paced modules, built to your needs and deliverable through your own LMS.
Or a combination of all of the above 😁
Why it works
We’ve run this training with over 100 students through the public Academy and over 200 students in our private groups. This is also the same foundation behind The IT/OT Handbook, published by IT Revolution. The frameworks we teach aren’t improvised for the occasion, they’re the ones we’ve been refining publicly since 2023.
Stepping into a new role in the IT/OT space, the IT/OT Academy was a fantastic experience to quickly get into the subject and understand the complexities in this area. It covered both the technological, organisational and human aspects when two different worlds meet. The content was well-structured and practical. The wealth of experience from the instructors, guest speakers, and participants was impressive and provided a great learning opportunity!
The IT/OT Academy is a great resource for people who are trying to solve problems and build solutions in the real world overlap between IT and OT organisations and technologies. Refreshingly free from buzzwords and vendor hype it is by practitioners and for practitioners.
We worked on a real-life use case of a company facing operational inefficiencies, which made the exercise feel relevant and hands-on. I especially valued the opportunity to collaborate with people from different industries and roles — from OT to IT — and to hear their perspectives. It really highlighted how complex OT/IT cooperation can be, with multiple steps and stakeholders involved in driving a successful project.
What an experience! Packed with inspiring insights and lively interaction with many other participants, we were guided through the topic of bridging the gap between IT and OT in interactive sessions and practical experience reports. I can highly recommend this course to anyone who wants to learn more about Industry 4.0, digitalization in a production context, and IT/OT integration. I am looking forward to what probably comes next!
P.S.: Now I am well prepared to do more than just start my own cookie factory 🙂
After the session: private advisory
Skills fade, and the real questions usually only surface once your team is back in the field — the prospect pushing back, the plant manager who won’t engage, the conversation that stalled halfway through.
Optional, on-demand private advisory sessions let your team bring us those real situations. We work through them together — no slides, just the actual problem in front of you.
The Private Academy trains your team. IT/OT Compass is our ongoing advisory offer. They’re separate engagements, but many clients combine both: train the team, then bring us in as an ongoing sounding board as real projects unfold.
Prefer to start smaller?
If a full private engagement is more than you need right now, your team can join a public IT/OT Academy cohort instead: the same frameworks, delivered alongside practitioners, integrators and vendors from across the industry. It’s also a good way to test the fit before scoping something private.
Let’s talk!
Every private engagement is scoped individually. There’s no fixed price list, because no two teams need the same thing. Tell us what you’re facing, and we’ll put together a proposal.
Don’t just take our word for it!
We had the pleasure to welcome 100 students in our 4 public groups and more than 200 self-paced learners in our private Academies.
Their rating: ⭐ 9.0 out of 10 ⭐
We also asked about the most important benefits. Their answer:
Shared mental models,
Better communication across domains,
Better decision making,
Faster career growth,
Networking with likeminded people,
Increased confidence
I recently completed the IT/OT Academy, and it was an incredible experience. Collaborating with engineers and automation experts on real-world challenges game me fresh insights that directly shaped my recent talk on overcoming data silos and driving digital transformation. Big thanks to David and Willem for creating such a valuable space to learn and connect. Highly recommend!
I recently attended the ITOT.Academy cohort with David Ariens and Willem van Lammeren. I can highly recommend this to anyone wanting learn more about better collaboration between IT and OT teams in the Manufacturing space. Thank you for a great course and looking forward to new courses hopefully in the near future.
The Industrial Platform Capability Map referenced in the blog and put together by David Ariens and the team at The IT/OT Insider is a great framework for thinking about deploying an enterprise ready solution. [..] Trying to solve these one at a time may seen intuitive but leads to an unmanageable mess of software applications and custom code piecing together what should be an enterprise platform that scales.
What sets the ITOT.Academy apart is the way professionals from different industries and varying levels of maturity openly share their experiences, creating practical insights I can use in my own journey to drive IT/OT convergence.