Co-Authored by Janie Martinez Gonzalez & Evan O’Mahoney
At CPS Energy, our mission is to provide reliable, competitively priced energy, and sustainable services in a rapidly changing technological and regulatory environment. As the nation’s largest municipally owned electric and natural gas utility, we strive for cleaner energy generation, less disruption from outages, and more service options while providing actionable, accessible information for our customers.
Our current Vision 2027 strategy, "An Evolving Utility", focuses on strategic objectives to meet our mission through the lenses of equity and security, enabled technology, and innovation. The evolving energy landscape is changing rapidly, and we must embrace technology advancements as opportunities to manage extreme conditions such as weather and cyber threats.
Vision 2027 is a short-term plan of significant investment and action to lay the foundation to support the execution of long-term plans. One strategic effort is “Evolve,” our Digital Business Transformation Program that is reshaping our complex digital landscape. Evolve consists of multiple initiatives that will modernize the way we work, enhance our business processes, and optimize the way we use technology to support our employees, customers, and community.
The largest and most complex Evolve initiative is our Enterprise Resource Planning, or ERP, transformation. Many aspects of our business, from field and work management to financial and supply chain management, will benefit from new and improved tools and technologies. These technologies will future-proof CPS Energy to better serve the energy needs of our community.
With the selection of Oracle as our ERP platform, we are laying the foundation to improve our ability to optimize efficiencies and provide enhanced services to our customers. These include expanded self- service options, enhanced products and rate designs, and data driven insights into energy usage.
Deeply tied to our ERP transformation is our Data Strategy and Governance program. Recognizing that data has become a part of our critical infrastructure, we established a Data Governance Council consisting of 12 leaders who offer a diverse perspective representing many of CPS Energy’s business areas. Through the establishment of this Council and a multi-phased approach to data governance efforts, we are maturing our data strategy and shaping our data management practices to minimize risk and position CPS Energy for the successful implementation of our ERP.
The data strategy and governance program is foundational to ensure all our company’s data, including the data we migrate to the new Oracle ERP system, is of high quality. It will also be used to gain insights for our operations and the needs of our customers. These insights will allow us to make informed decisions faster so we can continue to meet the energy needs of our growing community.
Phase 1 of our Data Center Transformation program, a closely related Evolve initiative, modernized our two data centers with new infrastructure and introduced new cloud services to support our changing business needs with agility.
Now in Phase II of the Data Center Transformation, we are enhancing our technology solutions, leveraging our new cloud and data center platforms to deliver business value. Some examples of improvements include:
• Data security to protect critical information across applications and mobile devices.
• Resiliency and reliability to minimize single points of failure and ensure critical applications are always available.
• Increased efficiencies through new technology and processes available in our platforms to empower CPS Energy employee and customer productivity and decision-making.
• Analytics to provide a forward-looking, reliable infrastructure for data analytics, continuing our broader enterprise data strategy.
The Data Center Transformation also migrated hundreds of applications and thousands of servers, including our communication systems and many other technologies our employees use every day. We are now running on an enhanced IT infrastructure that improves reliability and resiliency and provides greater operational and financial flexibility.
As the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) increases across all industries, CPS Energy is developing a framework to safely and effectively explore the opportunities afforded by AI. This AI strategy addresses security, ethics, compliance, legal, and technology requirements, and other areas of support needed to implement and use AI throughout CPS Energy.
Newly deployed use cases for AI have been another area of focus, including our ability to leverage data in a predictive analytics model that allows us to invest in our underground cable infrastructure more proactively. We are also rolling out a simplified IT service request and incident ticket process that will include the option for self-service and quicker solutions.
We have made significant updates to the cpsenergy.com website, focusing on enhancing the digital experience of our residential customers and better enabling them to identify financial assistance programs for which they may qualify. We have also incorporated enhanced search functionality, designed online self-service tools, activated additional digital payment options, and made several other design enhancements.
As part of the website redesign effort, CPS Energy engaged with over 200 employees to provide feedback on our early design concepts to create the most efficient and effective experience possible. To ensure an optimal online experience for our customers, we also asked them to help us streamline how they access payment assistance on cpsenergy.com.
At CPS Energy, as we look ahead for the next 25 years, our Horizon 2050 strategic proposal establishes the framework for our overall strategy as an evolving utility in the nation’s fastest-growing city. It will help us stay ahead of challenges and meet our mission. Horizon 2050 outlines our goals for reliability, customer value, sustainable energy, financial strength, and teamwork. At the heart of this plan are our investments in digital transformation, which are essential for us to meet the dual challenges of unprecedented industry change and swift customer growth.
The continued digital business transformation under Evolve reaffirms our commitment to delivering valuable and quality services in a changing digital landscape. Our investments in technology are focused on enhancing the capabilities of our employees across the enterprise and securing a sustainable and resilient energy future for our community.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Janie Martinez Gonzalez is Chair of the Board of Trustees of CPS Energy and President and CEO of Webhead, a company that specializes in digital transformation. Evan O’Mahoney is Chief Information Officer of CPS Energy.