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Digital Use Case Library: Electric Utilities

Identifying the potential digital use cases to transform your organization.

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When planning a digital transformation effort, the ideation process can seem daunting. Many organizations don’t know where to start or which value levers to pull. It is critical that the organization:

  • Choose the appropriate set of value levers.
  • Determine whether those value levers and initiatives can meet an organization’s strategic goals.


Our Advice

Critical Insight

Digital initiatives can drive significant value for organizations, but the challenge lies in identifying the appropriate ones for your specific context and capabilities. Choosing the wrong set of initiatives can result in:

  • Initiatives that don’t add significant value for the organization.
  • Delayed and over-budget initiatives.

Identifying industry-leading best practices mapped to the six sources of value can be helpful in driving ideation sessions.

Impact and Result

Pull inspiration from a curated collection of best-in-class digital use cases to drive the initiative ideation process.

  • While implementation details will differ, overall concepts can often be helpful in designing transformation roadmaps.
  • Our analysis offers additional guidance on ROI guidelines, primary sources of value, and more.

Pulling best practices from anonymized use cases increases the odds of successful value capture.


Digital Use Case Library: Electric Utilities Research & Tools

1. Digital Use Case Library Electric: Utilities Storyboard – Identify the top digital use cases across the Electric Utilities industry.

Leverage a robust set of digital use cases to identify potential initiatives that can drive value creation. Use cases cover a range of technologies and capabilities and include insight into sources of value and implementation feasibility.

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Digital Use Case Library Electric Utilities

Digital Use Case Library Electric Utilities

Identifying potential digital use cases to transform your organization.

1. Introduction to digital transformation

What is digital transformation?

An at-scale change program – planned and executed over a finite time period – with the aspiration of creating material, sustainable improvement in the performance of an organization, by deploying a programmatic approach to digital technology adoption and innovation.

Digital transformation can unlock significant value, but getting it right is tough

Digital transformation can unlock significant profits…

…and will be the largest driver of economic growth;

however, most companies fail to achieve their objectives.

26% 70% 84%

…is the average increase in profitability for companies that prioritize digital transformation compared to their industry competitors (MIT).

…of new value created in the economy over the next decade will be based on digitally enabled platform business models (World Economic Forum) .

…of companies that have undertaken initiatives have “failed” – they haven’t seen sustained and material performance improvement (Forbes).

Info-Tech has a comprehensive approach to help you beat the odds and deliver against your digital transformation aspirations

Digital journey framework

Digital Strategy (input to journey)
A company’s articulation and approach to using data and technology to support overarching corporate strategy (e.g. portion of corporate strategy enabled by digital investments)

Starting Benefitting

Establish your digital North Star
Set aspiration: Vision setting with key business unit (BU) stakeholders to discuss and align on digital aspiration (e.g. Big-T vs Mini-T, self-funded and slow-burn vs. investments)

Quantify the value of digital use cases
Assess opportunity:
Comprehensive E2E understanding of the digital opportunity across BUs/functions (e.g. data analysis, process walks, and interviews)

Create the digital roadmap
Design and plan:
Bottom-up initiative design and holistic initiative roadmap planning (e.g. opportunity to initiatives, financials, phasing, design principles)

Deliver digital use cases and realize impact
Execute:
Detailed initiative builds and implementation; execution with rigor and transparency (e.g. process optimization then automation, test, measure, scale)

Create the infrastructure to drive and sustain change
Enable: Set up the transformation infrastructure, operating model, and culture to drive value capture and sustain change.

Digital journey asset catalog

This piece of research is part of Info-Tech’s digital journey asset catalog. The topics addressed within this document are most applicable to activities in phases 2 and 3 of the digital journey framework. Visit the Digital Transformation Research Center to find the full catalog of available materials.

Digital Transformation Research Center

Info-Tech’s approach and team can help irrespective of where you are in your transformation journey

Starting

Benefiting

Where are you in the journey?

Establish your digital North Star

Quantify the value of digital use cases

Create the digital roadmap

Deliver digital use cases and realize impact

Create the infrastructure to drive and sustain change

Set aspiration: Vision setting with key BU stakeholders to discuss and align on digital aspiration (e.g. Big-T vs Mini-T, self-funded and slow burn vs. investments)

Assess opportunity: Comprehensive E2E understanding of the digital opportunity across BU/functions (e.g. data analysis, process walks and interviews)

Design and plan: Bottom-up initiative design and planning (e.g. opportunity to initiatives, financials, phasing, design principles)

Execute: Detailed initiative builds, and implementation; execution with rigor and transparency (e.g. process optimization then automation, test, measure, scale)

Enable: Set up the transformation infrastructure, operating model, and culture to drive value capture and sustain change.

Examples of how Info-Tech can help

Digital North Star placemat

(e.g. industry trends, top-down opportunity, high-level planning)

Digital maturity assessments

(e.g. current state digital adoption & transformation readiness)

Opportunity assessments

(e.g. BUs/function value creation diagnostics, opportunity levers)

Initiative bottom-up design

(e.g. initiative ideation and business case creation, workplan, investments)

Holistic initiative planning

(e.g. phasing, interdependencies, investments)

Initiative build

(e.g. zero-based process redesign with technology)

Initiative implementation

(e.g. testing & pilot, scale-up roadmap, performance tracking)

Value assurance assessment

(e.g. course correcting & accelerating initiatives underway)

Transformation infrastructure

(e.g. transformation program design, transformation office)

IT modernization

(e.g. technology infrastructure required to execute digital levers)

Change management

(e.g. org-wide change program and stories, comms, governance)

Performance management

(e.g. KPIs – leading and lagging, people mgmt. for continuous imp.)

Workforce management

(e.g. upskilling, right people, right place, right time)

The following content will provide an overview of digital use cases in utilities. This will support opportunity assessments across the organization’s value chain. Note: This does not provide the value/ROI specific to your organization. To do that, detailed current state assessments and opportunity assessments need to be executed.

Details to follow

2. Digital use case library executive summary

Analyst Perspective

Acceleration to Your Digital North Star

Jing WuRay Chase

Electric utilities are undergoing an unprecedented rate of change and disruption. During the energy transition era, it is imperative for utilities to develop a digital strategy and establish a digital North Star to guide their transformation journey.

With that aspiration in place, utility business and technology leaders must work together to map out tactical and actionable plans to support the organization’s strategic goals. An effective digital transformation plan executed in the next one to two years can define the next one to two decades.

Electric utilities must balance the need for digital technology investment while keeping the service affordable. At Info-Tech, our goal is to help utility leaders accelerate the identification and development of tactical digital transformation initiatives to enable you to reach your digital North Star.

Jing Wu
Principal Research Director

Utilities, Industry Research
Info-Tech Research Group

Ray Chase
Associate

Digital Transformation Consulting
Info-Tech Research Group

Introduction

Document purpose:

  1. Present Info-Tech’s digital use case structure organized around technologies, capabilities, and industries/functions.
  2. Highlight a selection of the top digital use cases in the industry that can be developed into actionable initiatives to capture value in a digital transformation.

Introduce Info-Tech’s full library that can be mined for additional use cases.

This document is NOT:

  • A comprehensive list of every possible digital use case within an industry.
  • A guarantee of the value from particular use cases for individual organizations.
  • A guide to perform a top-down assessment of value from digital use cases or to develop use cases into initiatives.

Outcome

Understand the top digital use cases to drive value in the electric utilities industry.

Applicable Info-Tech support models for this content

DIY Toolkit

Consulting

“Our team has already made this critical project a priority and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”

“Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take on this project. We need assistance through the
entirety of this project.”

Digital Use Case Library: Electric Utilities preview picture

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

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Authors

Jing Wu

Ray Chase

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