Sydney Water ​CIO Named Australia’s CIO ​of the Year

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Sydney Water ​CIO Named Australia’s CIO ​of the Year

Last week, Sydney Water’s chief information officer, George Hunt, was named CIO Australia’s CIO of the year, taking the  top spot in the annual CIO50 list.

By George Nutt

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Representative Image Source: Pixabay, labeled for reuse

Having landed in Australia in early 2016 to take a role at the utility, Hunt “hit reset” at the New South Wales owned statutory corporation, leading a major digital transformation towards becoming “the hyper-connected utility”. Hunt has called on fellow CIOs to “be courageous” within their organisations in order to “do the right thing”.

To that end, over the last year Hunt and his team created Spatial Hub, a tool that enables Sydney Water crews to visualise customer issues in real time.

The utility is also moving from a reactive or preventative approach to service resilience and asset maintenance to a predictive and responsive model.

 

It has rolled out a ‘Customer Hub’ which addresses issues before they impact consumers, including detecting sewer chokes, providing alerts on waste water flows, and proactive identification of leaks, bursts and water loss. Digital metering is used to pinpoint water leakage and pressure loss – providing near real time access to consumption information.

Some 5,000 customers have been proactively notified of issues, many before they noticed any disruption themselves.

“The vast majority of water companies are largely engineering and asset-centric organisations, that’s how they’ve grown up. They’re also very CapEx based…but actually we’re all striving to become customer-centric. And that’s a challenge for an asset-centric organisation,” he said.

“The reason we need to become customer-centric is because the expectations of our customers are being set by the retail sector, the banking sector – and there’s no tolerance for the utility sector not to be up there with them,” Hunt added.

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