Data Challenges in the Utilities Industry

The utilities industry, under constant pressure to provide high-quality services without delays and failures at an affordable price, is being pushed to the digital age and rapidly adapting to an increasing demand for information usability and changing the industry perspective on data.

Shifting to a “data as an asset” mindset is imperative to leverage their data to generate valuable business insights, enabling:

• A full view of their customers,
• A full view of their network,
• Understanding consumption and behavior models,
• Developing creative product bundles and pricing models,

The need for trusted high-quality data is greater than ever before.

A successful business strategy must leverage high quality information to take advantage of their data to improve service, utilization, and customer experience, reduce costs, and increase productivity.

The fast development of new technologies creates new opportunities and new challenges every day:

• The increasing number of data sources and multiple customer touch points within the organization turns having correct contact records (inaccurate and duplicate data) a huge challenge with a direct impact on the business lines.
• A growing regulatory framework, including the industry’s regulators and data privacy laws, creating the need to assign more and more resource to compliance, to assure the organization is adhering to all the regulations and to avoid getting hit with penalties.
• The need to follow the current digital tendencies, reaching the existing or potential customers with the right messages.

The use of real-time and predictive analytics and data science and big data solutions may help organizations to manage and effectively use their resources, but only with a strong data foundation, enabling that all these resources can produce valuable results.

Utilities need to manage the data quality of key enterprise data assets, and this can only be sustained having a comprehensive approach to managing data quality, covering all critical data across the organization, end-to-end, to enable delivering meaningful value to the business.