Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | 3RD - 9TH APRIL 2020 | 17 Operations & Assets limit exposure of these and keep a high per- ceived value for their area of the business." Dobson also acknowledges the fear of exposure as a brake on adoption of open data principles and is sympathetic to secu- rity and compliance concerns. But he urges companies not to take a black and white view of their ability to adopt open data principles. "Privacy is a big issue," he acknowl- edges, "but it doesn't mean you can't share anything. It means you can't share the most granular data. That's going to be a big con- cern, and commercial interest is going to be important as well. "We're not looking to undermine com- mercial business models but there's room for commercial organisations to share more data that shows what value they can provide to the system." Addressing the problem of organisations – or parts of organisations – working in silos, Dobson adds: "Everyone is incentivised to optimise their bit of the system rather than to make sure the whole system works well together. People collecting data might not have any interest – commercial or otherwise – in sharing that data, but they probably do have an interest in getting hold of someone else's data. "Taking that to its logical conclusion, if everyone was able to share more e‚ ectively, and make their data more available, the whole system would beneƒ t by driving e„ - ciency through that." These are arguments that apply just as much to intra-organisa- tional reasons for open data, as they do to whole industry and inter-industry data shar- ing, Dobson emphasises. Cian McLeavey-Reville, innovation strat- egy manager at National Grid ESO, agrees that the principle of asking companies within the sector to start from a presumption of openness is the right direction of travel. He comments: "There will inevitably be cases where fully open data will not be appropriate, for example when it would sac- riƒ ce system security, or impact consumers. However, we agree that this principle should be adopted and it is how we treat all data and results from our innovation projects – we publish as much as possible so the rest of the energy system can beneƒ t from our learnings." Shining a light on other key barriers to data democratisation identiƒ ed in the Util- ity Week survey, McLeavey Revel lands on standardisation as a key step for the realisa- tion of open data beneƒ ts. Almost a ƒ ' h of respondents say that in" exible industry IT systems are stop- ping them from opening up access to data within their organisation or more broadly. Meanwhile, problems caused by poorly cat- egorised and labelled data irked around 15 per cent. These ƒ ndings resonate with the conver- sation at a recent Utility Week meeting of technology and innovation leaders in the UK water sector. Participants there eagerly eyed the potential for open data to step up to some extremely demanding performance requirements in the water sector's new AMP period, as well as making good on key public interest commitments from the sector, such as delivering net zero by 2030, slashing leak- age and pollution incidents and driving up water e„ ciency. The same group agreed, however, that the lack of common data labelling protocols across the sector or in bordering sectors, combined with some quite rigid requirements for data entry into existing IT and operational technology platforms, means opening up access to data sets can be a mineƒ eld and a big drain on resource in data teams. Building on this picture, McLeavey-Reville says: "To maximise the value from energy system data, it should be accessible by sys- tem and network operators, generators, sup- pliers, aggregators and other market actors. "Each of these actors is both a data owner and user, yet o' en uses very di‚ erent data structures, protocols and interfaces. There is a vast di‚ erence in the quality of data across the industry. In the case of incumbents, there is a particular problem of legacy systems that want data in a speciƒ c and o' en outdated format. This all creates challenges for inter- operability, collaboration and innovation, and results in signiƒ cant ine„ ciency in data cleaning and formatting. We need to adopt a pragmatic standardisation approach across the industry." Talend's Sean Crouch agrees, but adds that technologies are readily available today that can alleviate challenges posed by vari- able data quality. He says these sorts of prod- ucts can "remove the technology barriers by providing a data governance toolset that allows companies to understand the lineage of the data, and track who is consuming the data, while embedding data quality at every stage of the journey to ensure that trust is paramount." But however it is achieved, better stand- ardisation in industry data taxonomy is certainly crucial if companies are to success- fully tackle some of the biggest challenges facing utilities, including consumer vulner- ability. This is according to Duncan McCom- bie, chief executive of Yes Energy solution and also chairman of Western Power Distri- bution's Customer Engagement Group. continued overleaf Brought to you in association with Q10: WOULD YOU SAY THAT DATA SCIENCE AND ANALYSIS RESOURCE IN YOUR ORGANISATION IS FULLY FOCUSED ON BUSINESS NEEDS? Yes, all data science and… Yes, no but there is a good… No, business need is not… 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

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