- Commodity Management & Trading
- Customer & Marketing Strategy
- Digital Engineering
- Station Studio
- Supply Chain & Industry 5.0
- Sustainability
IT/OT convergence in mining operations
The mining industry has always operated across functional boundaries — mine, plant, maintenance, logistics, port — each with its own technology, its own data model, and its own decision logic. That fragmentation was manageable when optimization happened within each domain. It is no longer manageable when the value to be captured requires decisions that span all domains simultaneously: a dispatch adjustment that accounts for crusher availability, ore quality in the stockpile, port schedule, and energy cost — all in real time. The NTT DATA and MIT Technology Review study on mining autonomy in Latin America (2025) confirmed that 72% of AI and autonomy projects deliver only partial results. A significant share of that failure originates not in the AI layer but beneath it: fragmented data, siloed networks, incompatible systems, and governance that cannot move at the speed the operation demands.
This whitepaper is the cross-cutting enabler of NTT DATA’s Mining Autonomy Operating Model. IT/OT convergence is not a technology project — it is the enterprise capability that makes the other three pillars possible at scale. Authored by Nelson Wilson, NTT DATA’s Partner and IBIOL Head of Natural Resources, this document presents the architectural principles, governance model, and five-phase implementation roadmap for building a common operating platform that can carry the autonomous mine from pilot to production — from the sensor at the face to the decision at the boardroom, as a single integrated system.
NTT DATA Insights
