Uniper CIO Damian Bunyan on digital strategy

Uniper has the distinction among energy companies of being one of the youngest. Formed just 2 years ago by the separation from E.ON. Uniper today has some 12,000 employees. From its headquarters in Düsseldorf, Germany, Uniper runs four main business lines: power generation (including hydroelectric, gas, coal and nuclear); energy sales and trading; energy storage; and energy services.

Uniper’s first focus has been to enhance the efficiency of its operations. In doing this, the company will provide itself the platform to expand its activities in different directions.

CIO Damian Bunyan has been with Uniper since its formation and was previously an IT executive with E.ON.

What’s Uniper’s digital strategy, and how important is digital to the company’s overall mission?

In a European context where you’re trying to become more energy-efficient and more environmentally friendly, a number of the things that drive my business’s profitability today will simply not exist in the future. So thinking about what business we’re in, what model is it, and which customers we want to serve and how — all that is mission-critical.

So as CIO I’m asking, what can I do via digitalization to create a business for the future? To answer, we’re going through a process right now of defining our digital strategy. We call it Digital 2025 because 2025 is close enough in time to be real, but also far enough out to make you think differently.

With that definition still in the works, what are your more immediate priorities?

IT basics. While lots of people are thinking about what they could do with blockchain, machine learning, analytics, algorithms, etc., if your basic IT isn’t set up well, you’re always going to have problems. So that’s forcing me as CIO to invest quite a lot in the basics. Although a number of those things don’t necessarily have a business case, I still have to do them, because it creates a stable platform on which to build all of these digital offerings.

So I’m spending a lot of my time moving to the cloud, exiting data centers, implementing software-defined networks, getting identity management right, and introducing a brand-new Windows 10 working environment. A lot of my competitors haven’t been doing those kinds of things because they couldn’t justify the business case.

Is digital at Uniper viewed mainly as an IT project or a business project?

You’ve used a phrase I don’t like or accept. I refuse to recognize a demarcation between what people call IT and what people call the business. If electricity didn’t work, society would break down. And if IT doesn’t work, Uniper breaks down.

Just over a year ago, we ran a digital session for our most senior leaders, where we educated ourselves and we dreamt about what digital could mean for the organization. That was a good start. More recently, we worked with DXC to run a series of workshops that revolved around our core business activities. But this time, instead of inviting the most senior executives, we invited those people who we felt had an affinity for the subject. Some were young, some were older; some were senior, others not. We now have a digital-vision document with 55 authors contributing on behalf of their different bits of the business.

Uniper has said it will digitalize customer interfaces to make interactions easier. What does this involve?

We have two distinct kinds of customers. Firstly, about a thousand very large organizations that buy power and or gas from us. And secondly, people who run their own energy infrastructures. For both, technology allows us to interact with them much more effectively.

For the first group, we’re creating tools that will help those large customers manage their risk in a much more intelligent way. Sometimes they buy more energy than they need, and sometimes they sell more than they have. It’s a big risk management issue.

For the second group, we’re developing predictive maintenance. That could mean software that helps them run their maintenance in a more predictive manner, a remote engineer who is analyzing their data and giving advice, or even a service where we run the asset for them.

Does that predictive maintenance involve artificial intelligence or machine learning?

Very much so. For example, take a power station that has a very big turbine, and you have real-time sensors locked on to that turbine. That way, you have a history that shows what was happening before that turbine started to malfunction. Then you can take that real-time information, put it into an analytics device, and start telling with quite a high degree of accuracy which of the turbine’s parts might need attention within the next few days or few weeks. You can run the asset more effectively, which for power generation is a big issue. And you can optimize your capital expenditure.

Yet all this sounds expensive. What’s your approach to funding?

I don’t have enough money to do all of the IT projects I’d like to do. Still, I’m quite reluctant to associate digitalization with cost savings, because it stops people from engaging with me. I’d much rather link digitalization to effectiveness. For example, if you’re in accounts payable, I’d say, “Through digitization, I can help you pay a higher percentage of invoices on time and also spot the invoices that are incorrect.” This way, I have a powerful use case that engages people.

It’s no longer useful for me to know only that we’ve got 99.99 percent server availability. What I now need to know is how available our power stations are, how many customers we’ve invoiced on time. Once I’ve got those metrics, I can measure the effectiveness of our technology against business indicators. I can deliver any IT project. But I need the business to articulate what it really wants.

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