The inaugural series of the podcast, Movate Talks – Business Insights Unplugged, features a key technology leader from the Northumbrian Water Group plc (NWG) who joined us for a discussion on the topic: future of water: technology, sustainability, and innovation.
According to their website, Northumbrian Water (NW) and Essex & Suffolk Water (ESW) are both part of Northumbrian Water Limited, a company registered in England and Wales, which is a member of Northumbrian Water Group.
And the vision they came up close to 5 years ago? “To be the most digitally enabled water services provider in the world” by tapping technology for elevating CX and operational efficiencies.
As the CIO, Nigel Watson is avid about ensuring that innovation and sustainability are at the forefront of the mission. Having worked in various sectors, including financial services and telecoms, he now leads innovation at NWG. Nigel inspires groundbreaking ideas, embraces cutting-edge tech and cares about the community.
Now in his 60’s, Nigel reflects on the autumn years of his life and shared how he started his career after leaving school when he was just 17. With almost a decade at NWG (as on publishing this blog), Nigel touches upon NWL innovation festival, climate change, AI, digital twins, smart networks and more.
Here are the excerpts from his conversation with Saurabh Sehgal, Associate Vice President, Movate.
Transforming CX meant significant investments in digital tech and heavy lifting that was needed to drive change in the organization. With a solid architecture and integrated services in the cloud, the team looked at AI, user experience, ML, smart networks, and digital twins. Transforming to be the most digitally enabled clean water services provider meant also being the fastest learning company with the pressing need to be resilient against the impact of climate change.
Redefining innovation as a process of extracting value from new ideas—It’s about the ‘speed to value’ factor. With a success rate of 4 out of 10, the business has 3 change levers: large transformation programs that run to 3-4+ years, product management (or continuous improvement), and the third being simply innovation or something that’s first-of-a-kind in the industry. Ideation to value realization takes about 3-4 years and the team has worked hard to embed it in the organization, where it has now become second nature.
Nigel shared how the annual NWL Innovation Festival produced some fascinating work and projects such as the “River Deep Mountain AI.” This is one initiative for driving innovation and spearheading efforts within the industry. Bringing in a popular approach called ‘design thinking’ and with inspiration from the book, Sprint, by Jake Knapp, the team studied how people and industries innovate, the processes involved therein and brought them to the table at NWG.
The team started running sprints. Starting with as simple as the billing processes, the team launched data hack, migrated 10-years of data to the cloud, organized an event involving data scientists. A mish mash of ideas and programs in a typical British Summer Festival did the trick. Close to 50-60+, ideas are generated in the pipeline, which is a big deal for the water utilities sector.
“A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind.” – Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
As the employees bring their full selves to work and own it, the festival is a wonderful sort of coming together of clever human beings who want to be part of solving something big and difficult. Nigel recounts telling his younger counterparts the power of the half-baked idea. “You’ve got the thoughts of many people, it’s always going to be more powerful than the thoughts of just one,” he quips.
“I attended NWG Innovation Festival 2024 and I must say, it was truly inspiring. The festival continues to grow each year, but what remains constant is the unwavering commitment to innovation, customer satisfaction, and environmental stewardship. Kudos to the team for organizing such a remarkable event and to all the participants and attendees for contributing fresh ideas. Looking forward to the incredible innovations that emerge from this year’s sprints.”
– Saurabh Sehgal, Associate Vice President, Movate.
Climate change andAI have been 2 significant disruptors. While some opine that AI could likely pose an existential threat, Nigel shares the view that climate change is likely to be a bigger threat. With discussion on the Paris accord and the race to net zero emissions, the bit that doesn’t often get talked about is how organizations can become resilient in the face of climate change. The subtle impacts are felt in business every day.
With severe storms and extreme weather conditions because of climate change, NWG is a big believer in smart networks and digital twins as sensors and IoT become economically feasible to implement. The tech is being deployed in real-time for the smart sewer system with level and 750+ flow sensors. Nigel says data quality is a priority as less data, but high-quality calibrated data is a better alternative than installing way too many sensors that collect massive amounts of data. The digital twin collects data every 5 minutes from the network with updates on the capacity levels and other information. Technology helps in controlling the water flow, hyperlocal rainfall forecast, and reducing the number of spills in a cost-effective way. The smart network generates massive amounts of data that no human could possibly process it all and hence digital twins are key to NWG projects. Overseeing the impact of AI and data is significant.
NWG’s guiding principle is “human in the loop” for deploying responsible AI. Being part of the critical customer service sector, NWG runs a 17-point checklist to ensure the sensors are functioning well and providing quality data as they are battery-operated amidst harsh climatic conditions.
High quality data is a strategic imperative for enterprises aiming to tap the full power of AI and hence they need to invest in robust data quality practices. GIGO (Garbage in, garbage out) concept perfectly illustrates the ‘table stakes’ of good quality data to train models—crucial for AI system’s reliability and effectiveness.
AI helps in NWG’s proposed connected construction site; it will help in streaming data on work progress and verify construction quality, for example, checking the quality of concrete for laying the site foundation before moving to the next phase of construction.
The podcast concluded with Nigel’s final remarks on how smart sewer systems continue to learn/adapt with AI as they spot fluctuations in climatic conditions.
Listen or subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. Share your thoughts on the podcast and your views on the impact of climate change and AI in the comments section.