Expectations of digitalization from the perspective of an energy company’s employees
As an external project manager, I supported the IT department of an energy company in developing a digitalization strategy from an IT perspective. Although an overarching digitalization strategy exists, it focuses on new business areas. It was coherent and read well.
However, more than 90% of sales were still generated by the core business. There was latent dissatisfaction among employees in the core business, as they felt excluded from the digitalization strategy. Only the new business areas are hip, only there are cool projects. The challenges in the existing business and especially in the operation of power plants and electricity grids are underestimated. After all, today every household can generate and feed in its own energy. Complexity would increase more and more, the loads would be very volatile due to renewable energy and the safety requirements would be extremely high and would inhibit innovation.
We invited all areas of the project team to take part in structured interviews. We took on board all expectations without making any judgments. We simply tried to find out as much as possible about the reasons and needs behind the expectations. It was only through a structured summary and a comparison of expectations in a joint workshop that we were able to begin to understand the dimensions and dependencies that we would be dealing with.
Digitization really does affect everyone. And just because fancy apps from start-ups simply make more of an impression than maintaining an old legacy system (“outdated” computer software and hardware that is still in use) doesn’t mean that digital transformation shouldn’t be pursued in the same way. So always take the opportunity to talk to everyone who is affected before making plans and decisions. Always find out the expectations and needs and do not evaluate them before you have an overall picture.
