Introduction

Last year Matthew gave a fun and insightful presentation on “Slash the Industry 4 0 Gordian Knot – Simplify Digital Transformation with Programmable Communication.”

Matthew showed how Unified Name Space, MQTT, VCON, are critical components of modern manufacturing and process industry operations.

vCon made the list as on the factory floor or in the field there are many conversations, and those conversations are lost. vCon enables the conversations to be remembered, and the chain of conversations that led to a decision on the production line is now transparent. Human to human interaction is part of the OT (Operations Technology) loop but until now has been handled separately from the supervisory and process control data stream.

Matthew shared a vision on how Telecoms, Operations Technology, and Information Technology can work together thanks to IETF standards like VCON and SCITT. This session will add flesh on the bones of the ideas shared last year and look at the future of OT & IT convergence.

Matthew is supported by Thomas McCarthy-Howe, CTO Vconic, aka the vConFather. And Karel Borgois, CEO Voxist, who is solving the tacit knowledge problem for many organizations.

A Confluence of Technologies, and an exciting 2026

Matthew shares his excitement that we are experiencing the confluence of a number of technologies, VCON, UNS, AI (speech recognition, natural language processing) that have broad impacts across multiple industries.

We’ve done a great job digitizing and automating devices in industrial processes, in the race to OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness). However, the missing link is capturing the human element, the conversations and decisions made because of the dashboards or events (e.g. when something breaks and a conversation with the vendor helps resolve the event).

“We’ve optimized Machines, but not human knowledge flow.”

An Emerging Problem

We are racing towards a dangerous situation, where we do not understand why a process exists, nor can we prove its compliance. Matthew highlights critical gaps created by:

• The ‘great retirement’, in part because layoffs are now fashionable to prove the successful adoption of AI. Most of the actual processes are undocumented.
• The need for evidence based compliance to regulations, such as Cyber Resilience Act and IEC62442 (series of standards that define requirements and processes for implementing and maintaining electronically secure industrial automation and control systems (IACS). These standards set best practices for security and provide a way to assess the level of security performance. Their approach to the cybersecurity challenge is a holistic one, bridging the gap between operations and information technology as well as between process safety and cybersecurity.)
• A push to automate with AI, without documentation of the existing operational context, that is, an explanation of why a process is done in a particular way.

I sometimes wonder if we’re heading to a future like the movie Idiocracy. Set five hundred years into the future, with a dystopian anti-intellectual society.

“You can not defend, sustain, or modernize something you no longer understand.”

I see it in the programmable telecom industry today, consultants generate incorrect analysis as they have limited understand on the current state of CPaaS (Communication Platform as a .Service). My cynical view is they generate the analysis paid for by a sponsor that keeps that sponsor in a job, while destroying value of in industry. Just look at the pollution of the PSTN as a direct objective example. But back to the topic at hand…

Capturing Conversations

Matthew provides examples of all the conversations happening in a factory, yet they are mostly ephemeral. Matthew provides an example from over 5 years ago, a refinery, were WhatsApp had replaced TETRA. TErrestrial Trunked RAdio, a standard for mission-critical radio communications used by public safety, transport, and utility services worldwide, developed by ETSI.

Going beyond one enterprises domain means open platforms like WhatsApp are more common. It’s the common platform I use with most of my clients for real-time communications as we all have it. And none of the data shared in these open platforms is captured in Data Historians, Maintenance Management Systems, Manufacturing Execution Systems, And none of it is contained within the Unified Namespace. Coined by Walker Reynolds, “a real-time single source of truth for data in an industrial or manufacturing environment, semantically organized like the business and built to be open (not dependent on any one product).”

“We end up with data without meaning, events without explanation, and alarms without context.”

Matthew introduces vCon, in front of its creator, Thomas. And highlights important aspects: its not call recording, it’s not surveillance, it’s not monitoring people. vCon transforms unstructured conversations into contextualized, queryable, and governed operational knowledge. Specifically, a vCon can explain, who was involved (roles), what was discussed, when it happened, what asset/topic it was related to, and under what governance rules does this fall.

The great thing about vCon is it’s not a protocol, the IETF creates a standard focused on rough consensus, working code, maximizing interworking and interoperability. Its served the Internet well, and could serve industrial automation equally as well.

Matthew explains what vCon delivers, see image below. Conversations can be linked to operational events, with access control, and in compliance to regulations requiring evidence. Using NLP (Natural Language Processing) the conversation can be linked to not just the current alarm, but previous alarms for that equipment, historic situational awareness.

Karel has been doing this for example in the healthcare industry. He explains how he’s built a system that enables their customers to move away from human intervention in interviews, to using AI to work out what is missing, and ask the experts questions to fill the gaps. Its enriched knowledge, that scales towards being as complete as possible.

Breaking the Data Silos

Going beyond situational awareness, and for Thomas and I the cornerstone of why VCON is so powerful. It breaks down data silos across information technology, operations technology and telecommunications.

Thomas highlight Matthew’s presentation is a great example of breaking down the silos, and letting the data travel to the factory floor. A contact center lacks domain specific knowledge, but the tools can be used by companies that build UNS.

Matthew shows how VCON can be integrated into UNS. Today we have plant/area/line/cell/sensor/temperature as a typical value of a sensor reading on a production line. Here is an example of how to add VCON, plant/area/line/maintenance/vcon/start, for a conversation about an out of bounds sensor reading, because someone left the door open.

For the first time conversations / human content is included in UNS. Co-pilots can subscribe to this context, and understand the reading is because someone left the door open. Hence we have a single source of truth that is context complete because the human aspect is captured.

Unified Namespace was Coined by Walker Reynolds, “a real-time single source of truth for data in an industrial or manufacturing environment, semantically organized like the business and built to be open (not dependent on any one product).” Its approach is similar to VCON.

Aligning VCON and Cyber Security

Matthew then explains the alignment of VCON and Cyber Security, e.g. Cyber Resilience Act and IEC 62442 (series of standards that define requirements and processes for implementing and maintaining electronically secure industrial automation and control systems (IACS).

Most cyber security incidents are caused by misunderstandings, undocumented decisions, informal work-arounds, unshared advice from third parties. Hence why IEC 62442 expects documented decisions. That is turning ungoverned human risk (all those conversations) into documented evidence and incident reporting. A VCON inherits the security zone of the associated asset.

VCON is a tool for memory not monitoring. Its human-first governance, consent based capture, role based access control, and time based retention and redaction. VCONs are institutional memory (something we’ve heard often from Matthew), they enable decision traceability, amplify safety and quality, and enable sustainable modernization. A term Matthew used is evergreen.

Matthew gives a great example of an alarm, a conversation, and a work order update. The AI now knows, what changed between the alarm and the fix. who made the decision and why, and has this happened before?

Matthew then shared how:

• Semantic search can find ‘the why’ behind any event;
• AI can automate root cause analysis to generate trouble shooting guides;
• Turn expert dialogues into evergreen training assets.

To sell this the benefits need to be compelling

• Faster trouble shooting;
• Lower repeat faults;
• Faster onboarding;
• Improved audit and compliance metrics;
• Reduced modernization risk.

Matthew then sets out a 12 week pilot plan for high reliability industries, that are in the process of preparing for UNS, that are facing workforce losses, yet need to comply with NIS2/IEC62442. And it’s all based on open source (VCON and UNS).

Well done Matthew on an excellent explanation of the role VCON play with UNS for manufacturing / process industries. Best wishes for the New Year!