Within the water industry, we tend to speak a lot about technology. Our conversations often gravitate toward operational issues, engineering challenges, or financial constraints. As the industry modernizes, digital solutions, data, and innovation are coming to the forefront of the discussion.
One word you don’t hear too often is culture. We have a lot of conversations about what we do, but we need to have a more open dialogue about how and why we do it. Because the transition to digital is accelerating us toward a longstanding problem: a linear approach to water management.
Within utility settings, teams and digital offerings tend to be siloed. This isn’t necessarily by design or intent, it’s simply a reflection of how utilities have evolved to manage critical challenges with limited resources. Over time the technologies and tools built to serve utilities have been developed for and within those silos – each with a proprietary interface and logins, solving their respective use cases, and thus the value produced remains confined as a result.
So how do we change this? For digital to succeed as a core strategy, utilities need to foster an organization-wide digital culture.
We’re talking about shifting the way teams behave and ideally align as an organization. That requires a change in the siloed thinking that has informed those behaviors. For many utilities, modern culture is the manifestation of outdated practices, captured in the age-old sentiment of “that’s how we’ve always done it.”
Now it’s time to do things a little differently.
Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast
It’s not enough for a leader to want to transform their organization into a data-driven, digital-savvy utility.
Does the successful implementation of digital culture and strategy require strong leaders on a mission? Absolutely. Leaders need to focus on the future state of their organization and remain undeterred by those committed to the status quo.
But those leaders also don’t need to be confined to the C-Suite. Management’s job is to empower teams and individuals to embrace their vision and do their part to help manifest it. This is Change Management 101 – be active and visible, build a coalition of support, and communicate.
Because, to quote the words of Peter Drucker, culture eats strategy for breakfast. It does not matter how strong a strategy is, it will fail without an organizational culture that encourages and empowers people to implement it.
Embracing a digital culture means looking at digital challenges and solutions from both a top-down and a bottom-up approach. In isolation, a bottom-up approach leads to individual solutions with siloed applications and use cases. These serve their end users and use cases well but fall short of what’s possible across the organization.
Organizational silos are not going away any time soon. But if we can connect the dots and democratize the value generated in siloed digital applications then the network effect of bringing these disparate systems together into a cohesive whole can have a profoundly positive effect on a utility’s operational efficiency, resilience, and costs – all while fomenting and bolstering its culture.
The top-down mission is to see the forest for the trees – and begin to extract and connect existing silos across the urban water cycle so that the systems serve the greater good of the entire utility, often beyond their original scope. This is not just a technology challenge – we cannot stress this enough.
Yes, it is the leadership’s job to balance data accessibility with cyber security, procure the right platforms, and ensure that they are designing a robust architecture. But it doesn’t stop there. They also need to empower cross-functional and system-wide understanding and collaboration.
We have already seen fiefdoms dissolving through the advent of systemwide decision support platforms. Teams that were at odds suddenly develop empathy for each other as their digital platforms increasingly uncover and unlock new connective tissue. As digital platforms provide transparency, they become the sole source of truth. This empowers teams to understand and actively leverage each other’s value.
When we connect the dots across silos, a whole new world of collaboration emerges. This takes time, effort, and relentless commitment by leadership. But it is ultimately worthwhile.
Breaking Open the Black Box
If you want to judge the worth of this culture-shifting approach, ask those who have already done the hard work, like Oluwole “OJ” McFoy, General Manager of Buffalo Sewer Authority (BSA) and incoming NACWA President.
BSA
began building its dynamically optimized sewer system before really turning on the lights with a real-time sensor network and digital tools. However, it also kept its real-time control strategy, technology, and algorithms away from its operators,
who saw the whole program as a black box. And it had limited results. When BSA evolved the approach to focus on people, daylighted the strategy, and embraced a culture of digital and innovation, the project flourished. Now, operators are engaged at
every turn. As McFoy puts it:
“My biggest piece of advice is to integrate people from the beginning. When people help shape the process, they take ownership. The way we deliver our projects now is completely different from seven or eight years ago. Everybody is at the table. Our technology is no longer a black box.”
People support what they create. They also gravitate towards innovative cultures. Ask someone like Matt VanDoren who joined the Metropolitan Sewer District of Greater Cincinnati (MSD) in part because he saw the value of the culture that its team built over a decade. When the utility wanted to optimize its collection system, it focused on turning on the lights for operators and bringing several elements together – including combined sewer overflow (CSO) monitoring data, flow monitors, rain and stream gages, and real-time control facilities. As Reese Johnson, Compliance Services Division Superintendent at MSD put it; “the insights were mind-blowing.”
MSD has reduced sewer overflow volumes by 247 million gallons, around 2 percent of the total volume of water it treats annually, and saved US$38 million in the process. It hasn’t stopped there and continues to innovate and evolve its systemwide decision support systems. These are just two examples. We are still in the foothills of what we can achieve with digital, and it’s important to remember that it’s possible to be iterative and piecemeal, advancing slowly but intentionally, with people at the center. Because of the strong work and hard-fought battles of utilities moving boldly into this space in recent years, organizations just getting started can follow in the footsteps of the pioneers and move more quickly toward wholesale adoption.
As outlined in our recent paper, Ripple Effect: A Movement Towards Digital Transformation, utilities who are setting the pace in digital transformation are all taking one common approach to advance progress, and that’s putting operators in the driver’s seat and building a culture of innovation with their operators, for their operators.
MSD has reduced sewer overflow volumes by 247 million gallons, around 2 percent of the total volume of water it treats annually, and saved US$38 million in the process. It hasn’t stopped there and continues to innovate and evolve its systemwide decision support systems.