Digital technology has disrupted all industries in different ways and to varying degrees. The energy industry is continuing to see massive disruption to the way its core business of generating, distributing and retailing energy operates. The technology platforms that help support these core processes have certainly evolved - however they are following rather than driving the disruption. If you look at the significantly successful energy businesses you will notice a common element is they have highly effective customer centric technology platforms.
In the age of the App Store, customer expectations of service levels have accelerated enormously. Any business wanting to avoid competing on price needs to be making the frictionless customer experience a part of every offering taken to market. To create a sustainable competitive advantage, we all need to look to our customers for the answer 1. For example, many customers want control over their energy usage which is driving a wave of innovative offerings that combine in home devices, real time usage and local generation.
In the energy sector with regular regulatory & market rule changes, creating innovative solutions in parallel with operating your business as usual can seem like mission impossible. However carefully architected technology solutions which make use of modern integration (such as micro services, loose coupling etc) can provide the business with the agility required to react to customer, market and regulatory demands as they emerge without putting your core processes at risk.
At Transformable, we help energy businesses scale efficiently by creating a solution that ensures stability for the core operational requirements while allowing customer centred innovation to create sustainable competitive advantage. Without this too many fall into the trap of competing on price in a race to the bottom with no winners.
1. https://execed.economist.com/blog/industry-trends/why-customer-centricity-crucial-your-organisation