“We are improving the quality of our problems.”
Richard Murray, Data & AI Manager
SmartestEnergy Australia
On May 2, we held a boardroom breakfast with guests from across the energy industry. We joined together to hear how Mark Bonney, VP IT, Change & Data, and Richard Murray, Data & AI Manager, from SmartestEnergy Australia have worked with their Citizen Developers to take smart business ideas to full production grade platforms as part of SmartestEnergy’s journey into the Australian retailer energy market.
Setting the scene
Mark and Richard started with the goal of engaging SmartestEnergy’s capable businesspeople, who were actively developing data centric solutions to meet critical business needs. They saw these teams and their ad-hoc solutions as a rich source for accelerating specifications when building new data capabilities and platforms for the business.
From day one, they set up their IT function to empower, enable and support these teams.
When Mark joined SmartestEnergy Australia, they had already set up a base Azure Synapse data platform, but no one was using it – people were all still working on an Azure SQL Server, building ad-hoc solutions with no central coordination or consultation with other potential key stakeholders and users.
SmartestEnergy Australia
- Was a 3-year-old business with 60 people.
- Had capable individuals (“Citizen Developers”) solving critical, time sensitive problems with data. They couldn’t wait for IT to go into project mode to set these things up.
- Had a tiny IT team of two people at the time.
- Had two systems, one tactical and messy, one brand new and largely unused platform.
- Had a fast and loose policy around allowing people to develop what they needed, when they needed it.
- Had limited central direction and oversight.
Establishing best practice frameworks
How did the team establish a best practice framework within the business?
- They pitched a service to the business leaders that focused on empowering people to build their own solutions. SmartestEnergy Australia wants tech savvy people who want to solve problems working in the business, but don’t want these critical people spending their time running models and fixing things when they break- that is where IT should take over and productionise the tool. SmartestEnergy’s business leaders bought into this concept.
- SmartestEnergy Australia brought in Ignite to help them define an operating model.
- Ignite gave SmartestEnergy Australia an objective insight into how people across the business wanted to work and helped them to start to win the hearts and minds of their Citizen Developers.
- Ignite helped SmartestEnergy Australia to define where they wanted to go as a business and where they wanted data to go.
- Ignite had skills that SmartestEnergy Australia did not have in-house – specifically in the architecture and data modelling areas.
What did Mark and Richard establish?
- IT has custodianship of the operational data models, and the business teams have ownership of them. This is part of their data governance framework.
- An operational data capability as well as a warehouse. They have industrialised the operational data models and built a safe place where Citizen Developers can get their ’hands dirty’ and build analytical capability without impacting operational data.
- Set up quality data sets, all defined so these great people can focus on building the models and doing the maths.
- Established a ‘speed to insights’ culture – where the Citizen Developers don’t have to create boilerplate code, data pipes and foundational elements, they can trust this data (set up, managed, and owned by IT), instead they can focus on analysis and defining new products and insights.
- Created a culture where Citizen Developers know that when their prototype is mature, they can hand it over to IT and enjoy significant efficiency gains.
- Set up a Tech Forum between the IT team and Citizen Developers, which meets monthly to engage and share insights and work together.
- A culture that understands that data is not just about reporting – it includes the ability to craft tools and models at speed. This is where the team works with their Citizen Developers to bring their models across and optimise them. In some cases, they have gone from queries that took hours to run, to sub-minute times.
- Snapshotting everything – so Citizen Developers can “time travel” back to any point in the past and to understand the state of the world at that time and see how it has changed.
“We still have a long way to go – people are still on the journey but we have reached an inflection point where there is trust in the quality of the data and a safe space to build rapid prototypes. We are improving the quality of our problems.”
Tips from Mark and Richard:
How do you move people away from the comfortable environment that they are used to?
- People won’t want to work in a new environment on their own – they need continuous encouragement and support to get comfortable.
- We focused on winning the hearts and minds – it was all about helping people to understand the benefits and increase trust in the data.
- Make prototyping as low risk and low friction as possible – remove the need for boilerplate code and data validity checks by citizen developers. They should be able to just know that the data is correct, what it means, and where to find it.
- To empower citizen developers to self-serve data from the warehouse requires a trifecta of support assets – business definitions, documentation, and a data catalogue (for example MS Purview).
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