All over the world, water utilities have to face daily multiple difficulties in order to ensure water supply and sewer service to the citizens. Most of these problems are essentially related with technic and technology. Others with processes, organizations and the rest of the Industry’s implied actors. Others with regulatory issues and the administrative tangled mess around water. And so on… we could follow identifying more factors that, in one way or another, can represent a problem during the critical water supply process. I’ve done a special emphasis in how IT (Information Technology) can help water utilities to solve part of these problems in some of my past posts. I’ve dealt about a global vision to face the necessary transformation process in Water Industry that should provoke a dramatic change in actual panorama. But many times technology is the minor of our problems. Technology is just the way, not the purpose… Searching for an easy parallelism in Electricity Industry, everybody agrees that Smart Grid is a matter of ICT (Information, Communication and Technology). The tools and knowledge to build this ICT layer is available today. But it’s necessary more than this to make it real because one thing is creating a Smart Grid and a different one is using it. It’s a matter of volunteer, not technology. The role of a Smart Grid inside the Electricity Industry is as a business transformation catalyzer that affects the Energy supply entire chain, from long term plan to short term operation, arriving to the truly edge of this crucial transformation, the end consumer. Smart Grid generation and cultural change have to walk hand in hand. In Water Industry, challenges are tremendous: Water Crisis and Asset renovation era are just the tip of the iceberg. To face them conveniently while a necessary cultural change and available technology adoption are undertaken, previously we should overcome some basis problems. Next we present the 7 key problems that any Water Utility has to come through in order to define a successful transformation strategy: 1 – Service and operational KPIs are based on partial and non reliable information How can we improve when there’s no awareness of weakness? That’s what happens in most Water Utilities. Everyone knows that there are things that do not work properly … but nobody knows. On the one hand there’s no previous business processes analysis that helps companies to design easy and simple pain points monitoring mechanisms. Furthermore, the mobile or not IT systems that supposedly are the responsible for an easy and fast data entry, have been designed to reduce bureaucratic work instead of create a consistent knowledge base to learn and take better decisions. The result is dramatic. We’re generating non representative KPIs from invented data. We’re making tricks playing to the solitaire. 2 – Companies know how isn’t yet gathered in any digital format Petabytes and Petabytes of data is being generated around the world every day. The percentage of daily non registered data is infinitely superior. Same story in Water Utilities. There are thousands and thousands of transactions, operations, emails, conversations and other ways of valuable communication that is not collected or registered properly. It has been happened for years which, in absence of historical data, does not allow Water Utilities learn from experience. But perhaps most egregious is that basic operational information about processes, systems or field operations are still in people’s brains instead of digital data bases. The risk and cost for companies is too high. What can not be shared easily, don’t exist… 3 – Key transformational decisions are based exclusively on short term profitability parameters We can know that something we’re doing is wrong. We can have a clear awareness of it and sane intention to solve it. But when we realize that solution implies an organizational change with a more or less significant impact on the budget or business processes, thing changes. Justifying past decisions or investments causes that solutions evaluation to big underlying problems were measured by tangible profitability. Result: A lot of small actions with an evident impact on spending relegate real transformations at the end of the list. That is, it is preferred to treat the symptoms instead of ending with the disease. Thus it is very difficult to solve Water Utility real problems. 4 – Cost resulting from the high duplication rate of activities, projects, studies and tasks is really huge The world is full of professionals with a clear desire for improvement. Unfortunately, the fact that they do not have a single source of information easily accessible and shared in their companies makes many of them work in parallel on the same problems rather than sharing and collaboration. And it’s not a matter of will. It is a matter of coordination and put the right tools and organizational means to avoid sterile disputes between departments and lots of hours spent meaningless. Perhaps collaborating shortens the time needed between strategy and execution. Who knows… 5 – Power without control is useless Today there is not a single Utility in the world that is not thinking in predictive maintenance application in their operations. How can anybody consider such a thing when most of the thousands of blue collars who go out to perform asset maintenance tasks goes to change or repair something that is broken or don’t function properly? It’s the “Run to failure” old strategy. If no data is extracting from the assets and our blue collars spend a very few percentage of their time on preventive maintenance tasks, how can Utilities think of learning about an asset data that is not available? Is not it logical to obtain such data before considering extract knowledge from them? 6 – High level of specificity in municipal legislation hampers rapid adoption of technology Today is the time of IT platforms. It’s IaaS, PaaS and SaaS time. The fast and easy setup process have beaten the high customization projects we used to do in the past. Natural software market trend has led a proliferation of tools that reduce dramatically implementation and go to market times. These tools have promoted the standardization of company’s business processes while they covered most of the needs. But the complexity of Water Utilities organizational needs is still focused on the way each of them contract, bill and rate the water service. The reason in most of the cases for this mess is derived from the local government continuous changes. The result, heterogeneity is high and the casuistry becomes alarming. While some coordinated effort to minimize it is not addressed, the synergy in the sector to leverage the use of technology will remain low 7 – Past legacy is a heavy slab for Water Utilities Unchanged ways to operate applied for years. Spending and investment strategies based on asset rehabilitation and renew. Full opacity in the way to operate, invest and spend at the eyes of end customer. The water bill as the only communication channel. Reputation often questioned. All these subjects might well deserve a post their selves. The inertia of many years is hard to beat when Utilities have to face and deal with dramatic changes that in many cases mean a substantial transformation of the way of understanding the Water “business”. As I said at the beginning, there are many problems to overcome. The seven listed here can be considered the most pressing but there are many others. Next there’s a document that, in a way or another, try to summarize this post adding some more detail and few recommendations. I hope it will be useful for you. I keep trying to change the world. All the best… More about transformation in Water Industry at http://www.danicardelus.com/blog_transformacion/ ;