Q&A: Severn Trent Water CIO Myron Hrycyk

Hyrcyk: I have to be more efficient with less

Research firm Gartner this week predicted [19/01/10] that IT budgets available to CIOs will remain flat in 2010, a trend confirmed by Severn Trent Water CIO Myron Hrycyk. He tells Computing about the budgetary restraints within his own organisation and discusses how the utility company is focussed on technology investments designed to drive down operating costs.

Computing: What sort of IT budget do you have currently?
Hrykcyk: Like CIOs in other sectors, I have to be more efficient with less, and I am seeing my budgets at best stay the same, but they are more likely to be squeezed down. The regulator, Ofwat, has driven down what we can charge customers via utility bills, so we have less money in the operational expenditure pot, and capital expenditure must be more efficient.

As we go into the next five-year planning cycle there will be some IT investment but knowing what you need to invest five years in advance is difficult. We are effectively working with the regulator to make things more efficient for the customer’s benefit.

C: How do those budgetary constraints affect ongoing investment in specific IT projects?
H: Clearly Severn Trent has to be careful about where it invests. Over the last couple of years we have been reshaping our business strategy and part of that means introducing more mobility into the workspace, and providing better remote access. We have consolidated a number of sites into one location in Coventry, for example, which requires desk sharing and mobility in and around that site.

At the same time we have a mobile workforce of around 1,500 field engineers out repairing leaks, fitting meters and that sort of thing, and have implemented new technology intended to make those processes more efficient. We recently signed up to a mobility service based in iPassConnect and managed by Azzurri Communications which ties into Trent Water’s back office SAP CRM platform. This allows us to set targets for turning engineer jobs round more quickly using more [reliable mobile] bandwidth, as well as route jobs to them more efficiently, and provide them with the right data so they get the job right first time.

C: What other systems and services is Severn Trent investing in?
We are about two years into a wider technology transformation that has two or three different strands. We are moving to a large SAP back-office deployment, the first phase of which started in December last year [2009], which includes asset and investment management projects. We want to push that data out of the back office and onto SAP mobile solutions, for which we are using a workforce scheduling application called ClickSchedule which also has routing, maps, and geographical data with SAP mobile at the front end.

We are primarily using laptops [at the client end], investing in another 400 and reusing existing kit. We do use smartphones but they do not have the user interface for our particular workforce – three guys in a van need a reasonable-sized screen to look at maps, record data and move graphics around.

C: Have you managed to identify clear returns on investment from improved remote access and mobility?
H: There are significant business savings in terms of maximising the workforce and getting more work out of them. There are also savings from routing vehicles more efficiently, which reduces our carbon footprint, plus the fact that getting the job right first time means no repeat visits.

C: How will Severn Trent handle employee desk sharing at central locations?
We are also planning to deploy Microsoft virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) so that people can desk share more easily and use any thin client to get access to their computer. We have piloted it [desktop virtualisation] in one area of the finance department already, with SAP deployed over virtual desktops running on a native version of Windows, and it has proved very successful. The plan is to eventually roll out a virtual PC platform for all office-based workers.

C: Is Severn Trent’s IT estate managed by an in-house team or outsourced?
H: Depending on the amount of direct contractors being used at any one time, we have anything between three to four hundred people in the IT department. We have partnered with companies like Azzurri for mobility, but also Computacenter for desktop virtualisation, IBM as a system integrator for SAP, and Wipro for hosting the SAP platform. We are becoming more progressive in the way we work with third parties.