Been there, doing that
Having worked as an industrial Sr Controls design and debug Engineer for almost 21 years and now being in Government IT for over 10 years I see the building blocks of this being put in place right now. We are seeing increasingly complex controls systems being put in place to control our infrastructure systems like water supply, wastewater treatment, emergency communications, transportation and security and the employees in most of these physical plants are at best computer illiterate having had no need for these skills in the past. So when the contractors are all done installing, debugging and proving the new systems they pull up stakes and move on to the next contract and in doing so the plant operators are left looking at complex systems through a screen of icons that are ether green, yellow or red not understanding what each of those things are in physical reality. This situation leads to these systems REQUIRING communications back to the installation contractors so they can jump in and ether correct the situation or help the operators understand what is happening. I fight on every project coming the door to try to instill some sort of security awareness to the conversation during budgeting, design and installation but in the end budget money is used for things like more police or firemen instead of operator training or including firewalls or monitoring devices to actualy watch these new systems in the budget. Thus when the new systems are up and running we see things like a charter cable modem installed in a wastewater treatment plant to circumvent IT because " we are making it to difficult for the operators and contractors to save money" by doing remote support when problems arise. we are told the operators will only hook up the "modem" when they need assistance and will physically unhook the "modem" when they are finished.
THIS IS REAL LIFE IN MY TRENCH!
