2. Product and platform agile operating models combined with lean management principles. More legacy companies, from automotive to energy, are realizing that they need to adopt a new agile operating model and product development culture. For a successful utility platform to be built, a fundamental change needs to happen across the enterprise from the frontline, back office, the executives, and the board room. IT and business siloes need to be completely broken down into sustained, impact-oriented product teams, with platforms carefully separated into systems of record versus product that represent systems of insight and engagement. Correspondingly, the product manager’s or product owner’s role will become more important. A large utility will likely need to hire or train more than 30 product managers—a quick search online across major utilities indicates the current dearth of product- manager or product-owner roles. Beyond digital products and platforms, the rest of the utility organization needs to accelerate more than 30 years of lean management system into three to five years. Here’s the opportunity for utilities to move waste and variability, improve frontline problem solving and accountability, enable performance dialogues, and operate a utility with a cohesive operating system—all enabled by lean management system thinking. The combination of lean plus digital is critical: research shows that the hardest part of digital transformations is not talent, technology, or data (although those are difficult enough) but driving operating-model changes that ultimately ensure that the intended business outcomes are achieved. To enable this new operating model, winners will hire more employees like agile coaches, ML engineers, or full-stack developers—people who are in great demand globally. Utilities need to attract this talent by creating compelling
be applied to additional core systems (such as planning, scheduling, and outage) to bring new read or write capabilities to consuming apps and user- facing products. As the platform delivery initiatives scale and capabilities mature over time, efforts could be focused on the development of assets and capabilities to accelerate platform adoption for consuming use cases. For example, this could include software development kits (SDKs) for easy platform integration or reusable components for engagement-layers (including dashboard widgets, mobile and web libraries, forms, and more). Assets like these can accelerate development and help speed up the adoption of tools across business or customer workflows. More advanced acceleration use cases may include cross-platform services like event hooks or notification services. Within the data and analytics space, an open- source library of baseline analytics models could help kick start new teams or inspire new citizen- development experiments to unlock untapped value from existing data sources. Beyond IT: What also has to be true to transform the industry Building a comprehensive digital utility platform is much easier said than done. Taking key lessons learned from other sectors, we have uncovered six significant factors that could lead to success. 1. A strong CEO and executive team backed by a board willing to stay the course. While achieving a better product and service is likely a technical certainty, the path can be rocky. Data privacy, cybersecurity, model drift leading to adverse outcomes, critical talent leaving, and many other issues can derail short-term efforts. Yet an organization with a strong CEO and high-performing executive team committed to the vision will likely overcome such obstacles. Technology talent, however, is vital for a successful team—utilities are often run by engineers, lawyers, and accountants without the necessary technical expertise to guide change.
Accelerating the journey to net zero
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