What TVs and operational technology have in common

By Michel Finzi

Look around your living room. How many TV remotes do you have lying around? If you’re anything like me, the answer is likely: way too many. The television in my living room is old and it requires about five separate remotes to function. There’s the Amazon firestick, the old TV remote that toggles between different HDMI inputs, and one or two for my kids’ gaming systems. The remote-to-TV ratio is way out of whack.

I also have one universal remote that promises to simplify my life, but often falls short. It constantly has to be restarted to function properly, which is largely a fault of incompatibility with the old TV.

Recently, I was watching football and inadvertently leaned on my remote. All of a sudden, CSI Miami was blaring through my TV. My universal remote was nowhere to be found. Without it, it took me five minutes—and three different remotes—to navigate back to the Giants game and away from the courtroom interrogation. In the process, I missed a game-changing play for my team.

Sound familiar? This experience is not unique to wrangling TV remotes. In fact, I frequently hear COOs at top asset management firms express a very similar pain point with their operational technology systems. Managing all of their disparate systems is burdensome, time-intensive and inefficient. Not to mention headache-inducing, much like my battle with remotes.

For me, the solution was buying a new TV, one that is compatible with a fully functional and reliable universal remote. The difference has been like night and day: I’m never going back. The solution for asset managers is similar: bite the bullet to finally retire legacy technology and replace it with one, consolidated and modern system that can deliver a “unified nirvana.”

Asset managers are on a mission to reduce the number of systems their teams rely on in order to simplify unnecessary operational complexity. While vendor consolidation is a component of asset managers’ push for system reduction, the motivation is a lot bigger than that. The conversation is no longer about reducing their systems by 50 percent. Instead, COOs are asking: Is there a better way?

What asset managers need is akin to a universal TV remote: one single, trusted entity that isn’t easily messed up by pressing the wrong button. They need one universal system to make their lives easier.

At Enfusion, we’ve built a system that delivers that unified experience and grants asset managers the freedom and flexibility to have a one-stop shop to access and interact with the vast universe of their data.

Key benefits and functionalities of a “universal remote” for operational technology, or a unified platform, include:

Another benefit of this “universal remote” approach to operations systems is that vendor management essentially disappears. With just one system to manage, the process becomes much more seamless and there’s no need to worry about different systems and separate IT teams. Once asset managers experience the “unified nirvana” of one operational system, they will never revert back to the chaos of a multiple-system existence. And I, for one, will never let my universal remote out of sight again!