CIO Straight Talk - Issue 11 - 71

differentiate Synergy from its rivals, while making
the company a great place for my team to come
to work every day.
Synergy has been through some significant
changes since its formation in 2006, most
notably the government-instigated merger with
Verve Energy in 2014. A lot of the structure and
the way ICT worked was a relic from before
this time and not serving the business to its full
potential.
The traditional structure aligned ICT with each
of our four business units: electricity generation
(which had been Verve Energy's business);
retail electricity service for our roughly 1 million
customers (which had been Synergy's business);
wholesale energy trading; and shared corporate
services. Each unit looked after its own ICT
interests, resulting in a duplication of activities
and other inefficiencies.
Another problem: the application development
teams were shackled to a waterfall approach
to delivery, which was at odds with what our
business units repeatedly said they needed
- "quick to deliver" and "quick to market" - if
they wanted to enliven and deepen customer
engagement.
So we dismantled the ICT structure that
mirrored the business units, replacing it
with an operating model built around five
teams (or "families," as we call them).
These are organized around ICT's fundamental
areas of activity: architecture; customer
(external customer-facing systems, such as
CRM, websites, trading, and robotics);
analytics (business intelligence and advanced
analytics reporting); core systems (internal
foundation ERP systems, including finance,
logistics and plant maintenance); and ICT
operations (infrastructure, applications and
production support).
We rolled out the Agile methodology across
all teams - even in the day-to-day operations
area, which wasn't initially an obvious or
easy fit. But my team members are starting
to reap the benefits of Agile, with greater
role clarity and new opportunities for
many of them. More important, the business

units we serve are reporting high
satisfaction with the new model, because
it is delivering what they need in order to
offer what Synergy's customers want.

GOING ROBOTIC
As part of the transformation, we began
using robotics process automation, or RPA,
to automate a lot of our repetitive processes.
This returned positive results much faster than
expected and has worked out extremely well:
in the first nine months of the RPA program, we
focused on SAP billing exceptions. Rather than
having our outsourcer process them, we were
able to run the robots every day to reprocess
each exception. That's been our biggest win
in the shortest time frame: in nine months, we
saved about a million dollars.

IN THE FIRST NINE MONTHS OF
THE RPA [ROBOTICS PROCESS
AUTOMATION] PROGRAM, WE
FOCUSED ON SAP EXCEPTIONS.
THAT'S BEEN OUR BIGGEST WIN
IN THE SHORTEST TIME FRAME: IN
NINE MONTHS, WE SAVED ABOUT
A MILLION DOLLARS.

Now, we are looking for new use cases, such
as in-service and password resets. We're also
looking for opportunities for chat bots that use
machine learning to find repetitive processes.
And we are analyzing memory to look for
patterns. If an activity is repeated, I think there's
an opportunity to adapt the robots to handle
that process.
Other improvements, such as the migration
of our applications to the cloud, have
happened more passively. Vendors for some
of our applications, such as SalesForce and
Microsoft Office 365, have encouraged us to
migrate to the cloud, which we have done
and we are okay with that. The only big one
left is SAP's ERP system, and we still need to
develop a strategy for when and how we're
going to do it.
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CIO Straight Talk - Issue 11

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