The average age of our systems is 10 years old, advancements in technology since then have:
- Increased capabilities of systems
- Changed expectations of employees and customers
- Led to new security requirements
DATA AND DIGITALISATION TRANSFORMATION
Enabled by a data and digitalisation transformation, which is why we’re investing £107m in this area
The motivations for transformation come from a positive place, we want our employees to:
- Spend less time on transactional work
- Enable more decision making and strategic work
- Helping people to be more engaged
- Drive energy efficiency to enable to support pathways to net zero carbon footprint
It’s part of our ED2 Plan
- Data and digitalisation capabilities are essential to deliver the outcomes in our ED2 plan.
- The implementation of the products as part of the business transformation programme will deliver an upgrade to our capabilities
- This will be partnered with Celonis process mapping and Robotics Process Automation (RPA), alongside an integrated analytics suite.
So this is where it gets a bit technical with our 3 main areas…..
Enhanced network management to give us the ability to better manage our entire network, including LV and distributed energy resources, something that we can’t do today.
- Deliverable: An advanced, next generation, network management system with the ability to manage DERs, interface with and ingest more data sources, and synchronise our network model across design and asset management systems.
- Benefit: Enabling us to manage flexibility through a central, efficient, control point.
Open data taking the investment in data acquisition, storage and analysis and creating products and services to share with stakeholders.
- Deliverable: Data portals, system to system automations and web based analytics to provide data in multiple formats to a wide audience. We don’t just share raw data, we will share our analysis and conclusions too.
- Benefit: This could enable to new market entrants, inform the whole energy system and empower consumers to take decisions about their own energy consumption.
Advanced Analytics to handle and utilise the increased data that the monitoring has given us.
- Deliverable: Collect, store and analyse data in cloud-based solutions, allowing us to tap into AI, ML and automation at pace with our maturity, scaling as required.
- Benefit: We now need a method of dealing with increased data volumes in the most automated and efficient way possible. We want to avoid armies of data analysts. This is enterprise grade, replacing the fragmented and project orientated deployment of current analytics capabilities.
Unleashing the potential of...Data and Digitalisation
Changing customer needs and the decarbonisation challenge require an increasingly decentralised and digitalised energy system. That includes the value in sharing data openly both within the sector and with wider stakeholders. These, along with stakeholder feedback, are the key factors that have shaped our vision for data and digitalisation.
We are planning to deliver an increased level of digitalisation of our network in both scale and sophistication. In some cases, that will call for a widespread roll-out of technology applications that we might already be experienced with.
Our data and digitalisation plan accounts for all the technology investments required to support decarbonisation and deliver the customer outcomes in the rest of our business plan. In total, we plan to spend £223.2m (£106.9m of capex and £116.3m of opex) on data and digitalisation initiatives in the 2023-28 period, an annual increase of 20%, made up entirely of new investments to support decarbonisation.
Data and Digitalisation capabilities are essential to deliver our strategic outcomes. Our on-going stakeholder engagement has helped to identify initiatives, which we have grouped into 10 focus areas. These underpin both our decarbonisation outcomes and the improvements we are committing to across the rest of our plan. In 2023-28 we will:
— DD1) provide high-quality open data to a wide audience so that stakeholders are empowered to become active participants in a deep and liquid energy market;
— DD2) upgrade technology and tooling to improve network management, planning and investment to increase efficiencies in operating the power network;
— DD3) introduce data and applications at the point of need in order to improve colleague efficiency and effectiveness;
— DD4) continue to invest in advanced cyber controls and tools to maintain a robust cyber-security posture, aligned to the threats emerging from increased digitalisation;
— DD5) modernise the back-office environment to reduce risk, secure information and improve colleague experience;
— DD6) introduce improved field-force, work and asset management processes to improve operational performance;
— DD7) deploy robotics and automation to reduce the cost of low-value, high-volume tasks and improve customer and colleague experience;
— DD8) implement self-serve, personalised web technologies to be ready for greater customer demand, providing insight and interaction portals to improve customer experience and reducing cost to serve;
— DD9) enable advanced analytics and real-time visibility of our assets to improve the operation of the power network; and
— DD10) provide future-proofed, agile solutions in order to be flexible enough to adapt to the change in the energy sector. We will update our digitalisation action plan on a six-monthly cycle to show our progress and to further engage with our stakeholder to develop our approach.