| | DEC - JAN8IN MY OPINIONThe history of Italgas begins almost two centuries ago, long before the unification of Italy in 1861, and is the history of the largest natural gas distribution company in Italy and the third in Europe, with its 73,000 km of network, 9 billion cubic meters of gas distributed to about 8 million customers thanks to the daily commitment of more than 4,000 employees.We began our digital journey more or less three years ago: a path that has contributed to a quantum leap in technological innovation, which has drastically changed the face of the company and dictated the lines of development for the entire sector. At Italgas, digital transformation has been seen as one of the main facilitators of the energy transition; a key factor that has involved assets, processes, workforce, and technical innovation, with the goal of reducing costs and increasing efficiency and reliability. In concomitance with this process, a people reskilling plan was launched in order to create the best conditions for effective reception of the new operating modes.So far, the journey Italgas made can be summarized into three steps:· The trigger for the journey to start;· Foundations building - enabling the capability transformation to start;· Agile & fail-fast way of working set up -to transform capabilities on core\priority areas.The triggerThe trigger for the journey to start was the regulator's request to the largest gas distribution companies to start replacing old metres with smart ones, back in 2016. Doing so, we decided not to limit to the meters, but to create an entirely digital and intelligent network, identifying a long list of equipment on our network to be replaced by digital ones, offering the possibility to be remotely controlled, to receive instructions from our control rooms and send on a real-time basis data. We kicked off the IoT-zation of the network and the Digital Transformation journey in this way Foundations buildingSince the beginning of our journey, the Internet of Things has progressed on a large scale offering significant advantages to a series of processes related to the management of our network, through the remote control of our electronic meters and every other single component of our network (Pressure Reduction Station, Odorization Unit, etc.).While IoT-izing our network, IT Infrastructure move to the cloud took place, setting up foundations for the following steps of the journey. One of the first benefits of cloud transition has been the setup of a centralized cloud-native data platform, enabling business lines to generate insights leveraging a better, deeper, and much-integrated view on business data points as well as the real-time data streams coming from IoT. When all the foundational work-streams were coming to conclusion, the company realized there was another challenge to win in order to extract value at scale from digital transformation: the way of working, meaning by that processes, approaches, & skills defining "how we do things".Agile & fail-fast way of working setupBy November 2018, The Digital Factory has been set up in Italgas as the transformation accelerator. In the Digital Factory, we create innovative solutions, leveraging process digitalization, and new technologies applying the agile way of working: MVPs instead of finished products, good and on time vs perfect and late,sprints vs major releases, cross functional teams& org de-layering vs complex & siloed hierarchies. But also, an injection of new skills and roles, such as solution architects, UX designers, AGILE & FAIL-FAST WAY OF WORKING SET UPBy Marco Barra Caracciolo, CIO, ItalgasMarco Barra Caracciolo
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