Situation
Our Client, a public utility supplying one of the most populated Swiss cantons with energy, water, environmental services and telecommunications, wanted to prepare for success in the digital age. Two incentives pushed for this digital transformation: electricity market opening for private clients, and increasing expectation of B2B clients to be served digitally. The challenge was to transform the organization in the context of a deeply-rooted public service culture, nascent digital sensitivity, and quite rigid corporate structure. A situation already experienced by some European competitors. Open Web Technology was approached to define a digital strategic vision for B2B and B2C clients, propose an actionable roadmap of initiatives and align organization for digital readiness.
Approach
Open Web Technology quickly diagnosed two areas of improvement:
Being customer-centric, a key to deliver outstanding digital experiences
Open Web Technology conducted workshops to introduce a “client-centric” mind-set inside the organization. Clients' business teams progressively realized that digital services could be key differentiators for B2C clients in a context of market opening, and key drivers of B2B client retention in an already competitive market.
Our benchmark analysis inspired our Client, giving a glimpse of best-practices in the European energy market. We ended-up with more than 25 ideas, and a 3-year roadmap to initiate the digital transformation of B2B & B2C clients' interactions.
Applying a best-practice governance model to gain in agility
We challenged the existing governance model to make it agiler, a pre-requisite to delivering an outstanding digital experience via continuous improvement. The best-practice model we proposed was hardly accepted at the beginning, but meetings with Clients' IT teams convinced them that a transformation was needed.
Our Client's C-level executives agreed with the urgency to set up a different organizational model for Digital and are crafting the details to implement our recommendations both on the IT and business side.
