Developing a digital roadmap to meet the demands of 21st century water utilities

To ensure water utilities are both fit for the future and meeting the rapid pace of the digital age, they must reinvent themselves. New digital solutions that incorporate data, advanced analytics, and intelligent asset management are at the ready to improve visibility, control and performance of water infrastructure, and corresponding business models.

However, utilities of the future need to consider more than the deployment of new technologies. They must also rethink organisational structures, governance, work processes, culture, and mindset to adopt these new technologies.

To do this effectively, utilities must prepare a digital roadmap that unlocks new customer and stakeholder services and integrates into existing infrastructure. Ultimately, a digital roadmap can serve as the foundation for business and operational transformation and give a view of where digital transformation needs to be focused across the enterprise.

Asking the right questions

How do we approach the development of a digital roadmap? There are several questions and potential roadblocks that we need to consider when implementing new digital technologies and ways of working:

1. How can we improve customer service to align with changing customer and employee expectations?
2. How can we embed safety principles and practices throughout the entire asset lifecycle?
3. How do we make better decisions to support increasingly challenging business, environmental, and customer obligations?
4. How do we manage constant changes and upgrades to our digital landscape, which might become obsolete even as we are implementing them?
5. Where there are existing strategies, programs, and projects, how do we ensure we take a comprehensive and holistic approach that benefits the enterprise overall rather than individual groups only?

While these questions may seem overwhelming, commonalities can be found. These are all challenges that are frequently felt throughout the water industry, and other industries for that matter. And the response to each question is similar – we need to take a step back and prioritise the customer and employees.

Utilities have always focused on the protection of public health and providing safe, reliable services. Now, the scope must expand to include engaging and empowering customers, creating greater public value, protecting citizens from data breaches to extreme water events, building the future workforce, deploying smart infrastructure, and more. These components must be considered in the roadmap development process to deliver the enormous benefits to water utilities.

For example, are you addressing the big picture or an individual challenge by implementing a point solution? Are you creating more silos between departments or teams? Are your plans future-focused while you implement solutions today? If you have answered each of these questions with your community and the entire ecosystem in mind, you’re in a good place to start creating a digital roadmap.

How do we build a robust digital roadmap?

Utilities and businesses often capture data to fulfill a short-term need, or because it is convenient in work processes. As we continue to digitise our businesses, we are also becoming increasingly aware of the importance of data.

However, what happens once the data is collected? Do we have the means to operationalise the data? Without a purpose, all useful insights will remain unactionable. At GHD Digital, we focus on optimisation, insights, and connectivity when developing solutions:

1. Get Connected: First, you need to gather and harvest your data. This might be through sensors for data collection for key performance indicators (KPIs), unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for pipeline monitoring, data from SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) and distributed control systems (DCS), and more.
2. Get Insights: Next, you must turn that data into useful information. This might be through data visualisation, location intelligence, automated KPI reports, leak detection, and more.
3. Get Optimised: Finally, all the collected data must be turned into action. You could operationalise your data by predictive maintenance to avoid unplanned downtime, advanced analytics for energy cost or customer supply/demand, and asset and network management, for example.

Above all, we must consider the end user’s perspective. Where are you getting all your inputs and where exactly will the output go? What will be the outcome and is the outcome in line with the goal you initially developed?

If you consider your data flow, from the onset of having data to the destination of gaining wisdom from your data, you are quite literally connecting the dots. There’s data to collect across your operations and throughout the entire water cycle. If you do not have a plan and look at your end goal, you will end up spending a significant amount of time and money without realising the full benefit of your effort.

Last but not least, remember to bring your organisation along on the journey when building your digital roadmap. Engage leaders and stakeholders from across the organisation, in addition to IT (Information Technology), and communicate early and often so the vision and roadmap for digital is understood and adopted.

Benefits grounded in reality

Simply put: digital transformation is upon the water industry. Also, it is increasingly important to be aware of the solutions that can create new and innovative opportunities for utilities. At the same time, while we all understand the immediate allure of digitisation, we must remember to take steps that make the most sense for our own operations.

We first need a proper vision and mindset coupled with data and implementation to be successful in building a digital roadmap. Next, we need to lead the conversation on ‘the why’ of shifting to digital solutions instead of digital solutions for the sake of it.

Instead of proceeding with business as usual, we can implement holistic solutions from the ground up, as opposed to introducing simple point solutions. An effective roadmap can play a critical role in continuous future-proofing and informed decision making.

After all, humans are ultimately making the decisions to respond to the challenges digitisation can solve, not the other way around. Once we have successfully developed a digital roadmap and implemented the most logical and appropriate solutions, our communities and stakeholders will be the ones to benefit.