We Dig In With You

I have spent thirty-five years in industrial automation, and I have held nearly every position in the chain.

I started on the end user side, where the control system was not a deliverable. It was the thing that had to make product every minute of every day. It was the money maker. When it stopped, everybody knew, and nobody cared whose fault it was until later.

Then years as a systems integrator. I helped firms grow and watched them get sold. I bid work I knew was under scoped, because bidding it honestly meant not winning it. I watched panel specifications get value-engineered into something I would not put my name on, and I issued the change order afterward.

Then engineer of record, inside firms whose only clients were water utilities. I produced the designs and the specifications, then managed the construction teams trying to navigate what the rules forced me to write. That chair carries an authority most people outside it do not know exists. You review change orders and recommend resolutions on the owner’s behalf. I approved change orders I knew were wrong for the utility over the twenty-year life of the plant. They met the contract. That was the test I was handed.

I have also worked inside an electrical contractor, which is where a schematic stops being a drawing and becomes conduit, wire, and terminations somebody has to land. Nothing teaches you the difference between a design and a buildable design faster than that.

I hold a Professional Engineer license in Control Systems Engineering. At one point I held it in twenty-five states. I am a Certified Automation Professional and an ISA Senior Member.

Every one of those seats came with a monthly number. Payroll, rent, insurance, utilization targets, a bench to keep busy. None of that is corruption. It is arithmetic, and it applies to good firms and bad ones equally.

But arithmetic shapes advice. When the number is large enough, the honest recommendation and the profitable recommendation stop being the same recommendation, and the gap is where clients get hurt.

I am a sole consultant now. I can put a client’s well-being ahead of a balance sheet and a monthly profit target. I like it here.

We are an operational technology and industrial controls engineering firm working primarily with water and wastewater utilities. The same engineers who work inside these control systems are the ones who secure them. Not information security generalists writing from the outside.

That means we are operations-first rather than security-first. The job is keeping the physical process running reliably and affordably, with cybersecurity treated as part of good operations rather than a separate checkbox bolted on beside it.

That lens changes the economics more than people expect. Guided well, the measures that close a cyber gap are the same ones that eliminate unplanned downtime. Accurate asset inventory. Current documentation. Tested backups. Disciplined change control. A maintenance team with the capacity to do preventive work. Every one of those extends the life of aging equipment and retires a manual workaround somebody is already living with.

Often the fix is not a purchase at all. It is reconfiguring or extending what the utility already owns.

Mostly the gap between how control systems are supposed to be procured, designed, and maintained, and how that actually happens in a public utility.

Some of it will be uncomfortable, including for my own profession. I have written a fair amount already about why the automation field has a demand problem rather than a supply problem, and about what happens to a plant when the only person who understands it retires. Those threads are going to continue.

Expect specifications, procurement mechanics, documentation, staffing, and the occasional argument I will lose.

And expect me to be direct about it. Thirty-five years in, the diplomatic version of most of these conversations has already been tried.