Western Power has charted the transition and elevation of IT into a more strategic and business-aligned function that has changed everything from structure to funding models and metrics.
(L)head of digital products at Western Power, Tracy Deveugle-Frink and (R) VP senior, research director at Forrester, Fred Giron.
Head of digital products Tracy Deveugle-Frink told Forrester's Technology & Innovation Summit APAC that IT had shifted its engagement model with the business from being project-based to product-focused.
"Evergreen" product teams have been set up to support different parts of the Western Power organisation that the technology function “most readily serves”.
“We have an asset management series of products; a customer-based series of products; core corporate services, like HR, payroll, finance; and then one [evergreen product team for] operations, team, field and network.
“That's how we structure ourselves: we put all the same people together and we align them to the business's goals."
Deveugle-Frink said that an "MVP" of this product-focused operating model was stood up in about 18 months and evolved from there.
She said that "the definition of success from the beginning was just getting a set of technology people close enough to our business to develop that business intimacy."
The product-based teams of technologists, and the business areas they served, had become "married to each other", working closely on delivering outcomes.
"We're both jointly accountable, because business can't deliver without us, and we can't deliver without the business," she said.
"We're married, we're jointly committed to this together, and we're jointly accountable."
Deveugle-Frink said the model had also flowed through to vendor partner relationships.
Whereas previous engagements tended to be fixed-cost outsourcing of packages of work, now Western Power is leveraging partners for "capability augmentation" - hiring a developer or a change manager, for example, and integrating them fully into the product team structure.
"The next step is about how do we think about scaling that out so that instead of buying one developer or one change manager, how do we think about procuring whole service capabilities?" she said.
The restructuring of how technology services the business has also had an impact on funding models and measurement.
"How to get the funding [model] to match the speed at which the teams are working has been an interesting challenge," Deveugle-Frink said.
The organisation has looked to solve this through a vehicle called an "investment case", which lays out the reasons to invest in technology, the outcome being sought, and what would be a prudent level of investment to achieve that outcome.
This is the main way that technology now interacts with the finance function to gain funding for work, and to then be measured on what gets delivered.
Deveugle-Frink said that the changes supported the overall direction of Western Power better.
The utility is seeing changes in the way electricity is generated and distributed, with the two-sided energy market making grid management much more complex.
Grids are “much more complicated things to manage and the technology requirement to monitor them and ensure they're being safe has been astronomical as a result of that," she said.
The regulatory environment is also adding complexity, and technology has a role to play in meeting this need, as well as the broader needs of the organisation around decarbonisation.
“It's been quite a dynamic environment for an industry that hasn't had a huge amount of disruption in its history," Deveugle-Frink added.
