Until fairly recently, you wouldn't have expected to find individuals from Boeing's IT organization and its various automation engineering groups working closely together to pilot new technologies on the plant floor.

"In the past, manufacturing did its own thing, and IT did its own thing," says Richard Paine, an advanced computing technologist at the $61 billion aerospace and defense giant. "There wasn't open hostility between the organizations, but they tended to go their own ways."

Chinks in the virtual wall separating IT and manufacturing at Boeing began to appear a couple of years ago, however, when the Commercial Airplane group stated its strategic intention to deploy secure wireless networking as a way to bring flexibility to the plant floor. Paine, who had been working on wireless and radio frequency technologies as part of Boeing's Phantom Works research and development (R&D) organization, took the Commercial Airplane group's statement as a green light. He helped put together a Secure Mobile Architecture Team made up of representatives from Phantom Works, IT, and manufacturing. And the team began to explore, among other things, how Boeing could use existing 802.11 (WiFi) wireless local area networks, which IT had deployed to support general computing applications, for secure mobile communications on the plant floor.

The group is creating an architecture — dubbed ScadaNet — in which every packet moving over the wireless network is cryptographically identified, and devices connecting to the network are authenticated via SIM chips. Now, programs such as those for Boeing's 777 airliner are beginning to use the technology to enable wireless robots and machines to move large airliner subassemblies, dramatically increasing manufacturing speed and flexibility.

"There's always been a bit of competition between manufacturing and IT, and that was perpetuated because everything wasn't network-connected. Or they weren't using common networks," Paine says. "Now there's much more collaboration and communication between the two sides, and technologies like wireless are forcing that."

Boeing certainly isn't the only manufacturing company where an unofficial yet sturdy wall has separated IT and plant floor automation teams. Overseeing parallel but separate technology infrastructures, IT and automation teams at many companies have long maintained an arm's-length working relationship, one sometimes tinged with mistrust. Many in IT, experts say, believe automation groups lack the disciplined process orientation and enterprise-wide perspective needed to deploy scalable, secure information systems. And many who manage manufacturing technology think IT lacks an understanding of the intense, real-time responsiveness and reliability required of systems supporting critical manufacturing processes.

"Historically there's been a very rigorous, specific separation of the control architecture and the enterprise architecture at most companies," says Harris Kagan, director of wireless programs at Invensys. "And that situation has led to a separation of church and state, with firewalls and demilitarized zones dividing IT and automation people and processes."

At companies like Boeing, however, that is beginning to change. And, in many cases, the migration of standards-based technologies from the IT world onto the plant floor is a catalyst for that change. Specifically, the arrival of wireless networks in the manufacturing environment is forcing IT and automation teams to break down the walls that separate them and to find ways to collaborate. "Over the years, IT and manufacturing have spent a lot of time spitting at one another. But now we have wireless, and the radio waves go where they want," Kagan says. "And it has to be managed."

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