Part 1 - How Tata Steel Turned Margin Pressure Into a Lighthouse Transformation

Governance & The One IT Shift

Margin pressure didn’t break Tata Steel. It challenged them to reinvent how manufacturing is run. This is a three post series on how Tata Steel converted crisis into opportunity, even when others succumbed !!!

A decade ago, Tata Steel faced a “perfect storm”: global overcapacity, shrinking margins, ageing assets and data scattered across 30+ systems. IT, Automation and Digital ran as separate functions and decisions relied on instinct rather than insight.

The leadership decided to treat this as an organisational and governance challenge just as much as a technological one.

This is what they did 

Unified Governance - “One IT”. They collapsed silos between IT and OT, ended shadow systems and created a Digital Value Acceleration Team that funded only those use cases with direct business impact. Governance became the engine of execution.

Infrastructure First. They didn’t attempt AI on fragile foundations. Plant fibre was upgraded from ~100 Mbps to multi-Gbps and edge servers ensured reliability. They invested in real-time infrastructure to generate real-time manufacturing intelligence.

From Experiments to Products. They focused on high value problems to start with - blast furnace efficiency, bearing failures, yield variability and treated digital solutions as products that must scale, not experiments that fade.

The Outcome - This operating discipline is what ultimately earned Tata Steel its WEF Lighthouse status. Not isolated “AI wins,” but a holistic transformation of governance, infrastructure and execution.

Why this matters

Digital transformation succeeds when leadership decisions, operating models, and technology foundations move in sync. Tata Steel didn’t “do AI”; they rebuilt the system that makes AI meaningful.

Next: How Tata Steel turned complexity into clarity through their Bronze–Silver–Gold data architecture.