Whether your organization is challenged by the scale of new fiber deployments.

Hello everyone and welcome to today's web chat brought to you by T&D World, a publication focused on providing electric utility professionals with information on the latest technologies and solutions in the energy industry. Our event today is entitled Empowering a Modern Utility Workforce sponsored by IQGeo. I'm Brianna Sandridge, Senior Editor of Energy Tech and the host for today's web chat. It's a pleasure to be here with you all today. Now, before I introduce you to our speakers, let's start with our webinar. Let me go over a few housekeeping items to help you have the most seamless and participatory experience possible with our web chat platform. First, if you have any technical difficulties during today's session, let us know by using the questions window and our technical expert will help you out. We recommend that you disable any pop up blocking software or extensions in your browser, as these can cause issues with the webinar player. In addition, we welcome your questions during today's event. Our presenters from IQGeo will answer as many questions as possible as possible. During the Q&A session that will follow the main presentation. So please feel free to go ahead and send your questions in at any time. To do so simply type your questions into the questions window on the side of your screen and hit the submit button. Today's session is being recorded and will be available for free on the T&D World website within the next day or so. When the video is ready, you will receive an email containing a link to the full presentation. Now let's get to the real reason why we're here. Our speakers today are industry experts committed to the growth and resiliency of the utility industry. Troy Freisel Lewis is the product manager for workflows and utilities at IQGeo. In his role, Troy is instrumental in driving the development of innovative products that cater to the dynamic needs of utility networks across the grid lifecycle. Prior to joining IQGeo, he worked in power delivery at Florida Power & Light, where he gained a deep understanding of the complexities and operational challenges that utility industry faces. Troy is joined today by Matt Roberts, sales director for utilities at IQGeo. In his role, Matt is responsible for advancing the business development of IQGeo's adaptive grid solutions for electric utilities across North America. Matt graduated from the University of Georgia with a Bachelor of Business Administration and actively uses his expertise to help utilities optimize their operations and enhance their overall efficiency. Welcome guys and thanks for joining me today. Whoa. thing I continually hear is year over year, the thing that's going nowhere is the work, the work required to enhance, reinforce, connect assets. It's continually growing, but then you pair that with the tech stack that the utility is using to address that work. It just simply hasn't kept pace. And to dive into that a little bit, I typically seen, you know, we call it one of three, and maybe even a combination of all three things at a utility when it comes to tackling that work. So it's a spectrum. And on one end, I'm seeing a whole bunch of paper where, you know, the utility field workers day, it starts off with a cup of coffee next to the plotter and they're printing their maps out. They're getting their work orders. They're getting everything, everything in, in the, in the right spot. On the, on the second, the kind of the middle tier, I see somebody and it pains me a little bit, but they say boot up their, that old windows seven laptop that they have because their field viewer or their staking software is on that, that old piece of technology that, that hasn't, hasn't been touched in quite some time. And then on the, the other end, there's a number of utilities who they've taken major digitization efforts. But as part of doing that, they've gotten a lot of technical debt along the way. And what I mean by that is, is they said, you know, we want to digitize everything. So I'll talk to the field guy and I'll say, I'll, I'll kind of jokingly say, pull out your tablet, pull out your iPhone. And everybody's familiar with the apps folder within their phone or within their tablet. They'll open that up and I'll see 10 different apps and I'll go, all right, well, what's this one for? Well, that's for our poll inspections. That's for our new customer connections request. That's for, if we need to do veg management and they've digitized everything, but they've done it in this complex, complex web where it's just led to an enormous amount of technical debt that these guys have to go through to, to start doing their work. So I know Troy, you've, you've worked with the field, you've worked in the field at a utility. What have, what are you seeing? What have you experienced? Yeah, for sure, Matt. And I definitely echo a lot of that and can feel from a personal perspective, some of those sentiments that you shared. I think the other thing that you're seeing on the workforce side of the utility, beyond just the day to day, you know, starting up your computer and then going to grab a cup of coffee, coming back 30 minutes later and hoping it didn't crash on the way. These types of issues are leading to retention issues as well. We're facing kind of this unprecedented change in the utility market. There's never been more work to do to kind of keep up with all of these different initiatives and requirements that the utilities face. And if the tools that these utility companies, field workers, back office workers are still the tools that they've been using for the last 20 years, we're going to have a huge retention issue because the stuff that we've heard, the stuff that I've experienced is that today's modern workforce doesn't want to work with that type of technology day in and day out, right? They're going to start going off and finding more fun, more engaging and more fulfilling activities to do with their time. So I think we have a huge workforce retention and engagement issue on our hands to power the next generation of utility. So, you know, there is definitely huge improvements to be made. And I think there's a lot of resentment that's building on the kind of feeling of stuckness that, you know, this is always going to be like this. Like people can't even imagine that there could be a different way because they just feel so at the bottom of this legacy pit that they've been accustomed to for their entire lives or even just the time they spent in a utility. I also did a lot of recruitment efforts when I worked at the utility. So I managed about 10 to 15, give or take each year, capstone projects where we were trying to get university students in the door, get them excited about the prospect of working for utility, getting into the power industry. And it all sounds fun and games when you're working on robots and AI and ML and right, all these exciting things that new grads want to work on. And then like my personal experience, when you sit down day one thinking you're going to keep working on robots and AI and all this fun stuff. And then you're greeted with this like clunky old dinosaur that, you know, you're, this is your new life. This is what you're going to look at every day. This is what you're going to go cross-eyed doing. It's really frustrating and kind of a letdown and disappointment. So I think we owe it to the utility force, to the, you know, kind of massive uphill battle that we face as a industry to build the types of solutions that people enjoy, truly enjoy using on a daily basis so that we can fuel that cycle and bring more interest and excitement into the industry. Now, you guys were touching on the fact that older technology is really becoming a fork, coming to the forefront as an issue. Could you go a little bit more into detail about how you feel these are holding utilities back? Yeah. So to, to Troy's point it's, it's certainly holding back the utility in the sense of the workforce itself. So the workforce coming out of college, coming out of line school is, is used to being able to pick up an, pick up a food order off of Uber Eats, go on Instagram, live this digital life, but then they clock in and they, they log on to their, to their archaic, archaic system that they do the, do the work on. But even more than the, you know, the way the, the field guys and field women interact with the systems, the systems themselves are truly holding the utility back. So it's obviously, it's holding back the workers from being able to perform their work more optimally, even if it's, you know, switching between five different apps, going on that piece of paper, writing on it with, with their, their blue and black pens going out there. But I think something that's, you know, really overlooked is how those, how that older technology is affecting other downstream investments that the utilities already made. So for, for one is, you know, some utilities are throwing a whole bunch of DERs out there on the grid, the residents themselves are also putting in their own solar PV, but those legacy systems have no way to model them, no way to account for them. I had an interesting example with one utility where I was looking at their, their, their mapping system. And I go, what are all those, just those red octagons that you've got just surrounded? And they go, Oh, you know, that's our, that's just our homemade symbol for, for where batteries are. And I go, why do you, why are you not just, you know, making your own symbol, using a symbol for a battery? And they go, well, the certain software version that we're on, we can't do that. We'll have to call in the vendor. We don't, we don't want to do that. They're, they're encumbered by their technology stack, not being able to evolve with the field assets. And usually they're hit with that. Well, if you want that, you've got to, you've got to come up with an upgrade. You've got to do something, something above and beyond to get that with the software stack. So Troy, are you seeing anything, any other issues? Yeah, I think it's just that kind of iteration of how it's approached as well. You kind of mentioned that there's this possibility to do things differently. And with the, you know, thousands of different iterations of how you could go about a digitization or digitalization journey, I think the use cases that have the most pain in a company are the ones that were like, yes, that's the one we can chase with this new app that we're going to build. And all of this effort and buy-in gets in for this one use case, but we're slowly getting to this point in the, you know, the iteration of all this, that is it crazy to think that everything could be digital, that we could completely get rid of paper? I think that the old notion is that only these high impact tasks are the things that are going to hit the iPad or the Android tablet one day. But we're quickly realizing that, shouldn't that be the normal, right? Shouldn't it be the exception that something's done on paper? And as people come to realize that, there's so much both operational efficiencies that are unlocked that have never been able to be realized before. And there's also a lot more buy-in, like I mentioned from, you know, the last discussion that people actually want to show up and do their job. So it sounds like a lot of these problems seem to be centering around these legacy systems and these processes. So how can utilities make changes in that kind of environment? So everybody in every utility professional and executive wants that, that big bang project where, you know, we've got this long, or we've got this three-year roadmap and we've got this long, or we've got this long, or we've got this long, or we've got this long and we really see that as not the correct approach. We take the approach of, we've got to take simple, pragmatic steps and really just focus on the simplification. And probably the quickest in the area where there's the biggest, let's say, bang for your buck on any IT project, especially in this realm is mobilizing your GIS. So providing enterprise mobility to your entire fleet of your workers, but also your contractors, and then diving in, say, one use case at a time. So we've got a big pull inspection program. Let's bring that use case into the enterprise mobility before we go to the design phase, before we go to the as-built phase. Some of those use cases, obviously, you know, they kind of coincide with one another, but driving the utility to say, let's provide you a quick amount of value very quickly and then continually drip more value along the project's life cycle rather than, thanks for the contract in three years, you'll have X, Y, and Z. And by the way, those field guys, they're going to be totally shocked when their whole world changed from all these apps to this one app that they've got to learn and they do everything for it. So again, it all relies on simplicity, being iterative with the approach. And Matt, you brought up the mobility piece. I think that's a key. The old way of doing things in this kind of centralized, everything happens back in the office, you can't do anything but visually inspect or maybe take a picture or a note in the field, I think is fundamentally broken. The assets, the equipment, everything happens in the field, yet we expect that we have to take a truck roll or a trip back to the office to do anything about it. So I think that that model is broken. And with this concept of a distributed technology approach where the work is physically happening at the base of the asset, rather than go back and maybe get to it in an hour, maybe you get to it in a day, maybe you get to it in a month, maybe you never get to it, right? Because you forgot, because you have so many other balls that you're juggling in the air. It's going to keep just fueling this cycle of work not getting done and work not getting done in the right way when you finally do get to it. So mobility is such a key driver in being able to take this to the field in a way that could never be done before with where technology was at. But a lot has changed exponentially fast in the last couple of years. And even just from my time at the utility, what's possible now with all these different mind blowing applications coming out day after day, we really need to start rethinking it. So that brings up a really interesting point when it comes to mobility. And some people may not have the broad scope and understanding of what that really entails. But you guys make it sound like that is something that could be very crucial. Could you guys go into a little bit more depth and explaining why you see mobility as the best place for utility to start? Yeah, I can take that one and probably continue on my last piece of discussion there. So when I was a designer out in the field, you go out to a lot of different meetings, you go talk to a lot of people. Leaving the office in general, you want to be efficient about it. In Florida, where I was, it was very hot, so you have to be smart about it. You got to prepare, you got to put your sunscreen on, you got to do all the safety measures. And you could be in for a long day in crazy traffic. And the last thing you want to do is get back to the office and fire up the desktop, right? So I would just say from the thousands of pictures I had on my smartphone, when I couldn't, would come back from a field visit, trying to then go back mentally, put myself back in the position where I was to now remember everything, every detail, what I said to the customer, what I promised, what I said no to, and now put that into a design. When I've just sat in traffic for the last three hours and in the heat and done all these other crazy things, it's, I think it's not fair to expect that out of both the designers, out of the linemen, to be able to do their job in an efficient way when they get back to the office and remember all these things and be able to do it in this centralized method. As that kind of iterated, I got to the point where I would try to even load these types of systems on like a virtual desktop on my iPad and take it to the field. Now, none of this was optimized for tapping or an iPad or anything like that. So it sounded great on paper. It would usually crash. It would usually there'd be some type of issue. Sometimes you'd get it through and be like, great. I, you know, I talked to the customer on site. I made his work order. The meter is created in the system. I have my high level design plotted. I'll go maybe tweak it and change it up when I get back just to adjust and get it through the system. But you'd be able to walk away, let all that mental load back in the field where you had the conversation and then move on with your life to the next thing that was on your table. So this concept that desktop is king, I've heard that over and over again. And that's been the, that's been the golden rule, if you will, for the, as long as the stuff has been around, as long as we've been doing this in a, in any type of digital manner. But I think that is wrong. It's just fundamentally wrong in the thought that you have to come back to a central location to do the work. So with the mobility approach, with the distributed technology approach, you'd be amazed what you can do on a tablet in the field. And I think this next generation of an empowered workforce is going to understand that. And I think they're going to enjoy that and demand that rather than this concept of having to do everything back at the office. So do you guys feel that these kinds of technology changes can transform the cultures at utilities? Yeah, I can take that one as well. There's a great thing to the effect of the quality of our relationships determining the quality of our life. And I think with how embedded technology is in every little thing that we do, like try to think right now of something that you can do without touching your smartphone, touching your Apple Watch, touching your desktop, touching something or some type of technology watching you, right? It's so embedded. And I think it's naive to think that the relationship that our line workers, that our engineers, that our stakers, that the relationship that they have with their technology is not impacting their day-to-day life, the culture at the company, how they view the company, how they view it. Is it a job or is it a career for them, right? What is their tolerance and what is their appetite for wanting to make a long-term career that truly gives them fulfillment every day and they want to show up and do this for the rest of their lives? So I think technology, whether we like it or not, is creeping into being such a forming factor of the culture at a utility. And unfortunately, it's not even just as simple as looking at technology's impact on culture at the worker level, right? It also, or sorry, the field worker level or the back office level. It also goes into IT as well. Traditionally, from my experience, you know, there's kind of IT's view on these types of projects and then there's the business, right? Put a business aside of how they view and what their priorities. And they've competed a lot of times or maybe butt heads a bit. But moving forward into the future, I think we need to kind of imagine a technology ecosystem where all of those parties can come to the table and be happy with the solution that they walk away with. I think that's a really good point, Troy. And I think one thing that we don't highlight and haven't highlighted enough at this point is as part of that changing the culture at a utility, we've said, well, you know, the younger workers, the new workers who are going to enter the workforce are going to demand this. But we're being very naive to say that the workers who have been career utility guys won't take any benefit from this. I mean, we, I know, I'll speak for all of us, but I'll make fun of myself. But my mom's on Facebook nonstop. She's using tech. Every, so it's, it's ignorant to think anything else. I know one of my favorite stories of, of a, of a use case that we helped somebody with is, um, uh, at a utility, older, older gentlemen, getting ready to getting ready to retire and doesn't have a cell phone, doesn't like going on the internet. I believe doesn't, doesn't enjoy even, even email. Um, we gave him our mobile platform on an iPad, spent maybe two hours showing them what, what everything is, what everything does. Uh, and now I'll, I'll call back to that utility and they go, you don't, don't mess with his iPad. Don't take it away from them. Um, and he's actually gone on to successfully remap a lot of their, a lot of their network. So it's a really big thing to, to say this, uh, updating your field technology is obviously going to hedge your bets for the new, um, for the new workforce entering, because they'll expect it, but it's also got some, some efficiencies that it'll play to, to the current workforce, uh, and make their life even easier. I feel like you guys touched on a point that would be really important to expand a little bit upon. Um, how do you feel that more modern tools help empower the workforce, especially in the field? Yeah. So I think for a long time, and I think software's very, very guilty of this is we, we use the word efficiency and say, we're going to make you do, you're going to do so much more work and so much less time. And a lot of times I think the utility personnel and the, the utility themselves hear that as well, that just sounds like I'm going to do a lot more work. And that, that sounds rough, but what we're aiming to do is reduce the friction of that work. So take for instance, Troy, he was a field designer and I've talked to a lot of field guys who, and field designers who, you know, they're going to have to come, come to the office an hour or two earlier than they wanted to because they've got to either mark up all their PDFs with manual text. They've got to print out and write on their designs to give it to the next person. So therefore that person's next, the start of their next day, they can continue going. Um, we're really looking to reduce that friction and say, well, you know what those field prints, they're, they're automatically sent to that next person over, they've got access to it. So therefore, at the end of your day, you're reducing the friction of not having to come in for that extra, extra hour of what was previous, just mundane, mundane work to kind of keep the cycle going, so on and so forth. Yeah. And speaking from experience in operations as well, it seems from utility to utility, there's always this notion of like, I'm so busy, I don't even know which direction to look in, right? There's always a fire, a quote unquote fire, right? There's always an outage. There's always some customer unhappy about something and it's your job to fix all of that, right? And I think these types of changes to the industry are maybe what's needed to finally change that dynamic, right? It's not fair of us to expect the workforce of the future to constantly be stressed out to constantly have a fire they're putting out to constantly, you know, be switched on 24 seven, just as a baseline to do their job. So with these changes with the future, I personally hope that there is a future that changes that and we can allow them to do their job as they do it best, but also do it in an efficient manner where they can have that work-life balance as well. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Troy and Matt, for that incredible discussion. It is invaluable to be equipped with more insight and knowledge about how modernizing our utility organizations can help us create a more reliable energy future. But we're not quite finished yet. Now let's move on to our Q&A portion of the event. And for our attendees, please feel free to continue submitting your questions and we will answer as many as we can by the top of the hour. So for our first question, one of our viewers asks, outside of affecting the field crews, how is the IT department affected? So I can take that one. So yeah, like you've said, Brianna, we've really hit a lot on how we help out and how, you know, mobility software helps the field crews, but modern mobility software such as IQ.GO and the way it's architected in the sense of it being either a SaaS solution, your cloud or cloud, but also having the ability to, you know, when those field crews come and say, hey, we're, we're, we're want to do this next use case, enabling the IT group and the product owners to just quickly go into a, to a low code, no code configuration and say, all right, hey, give me, give me an hour. I want to throw it to the QA environment, test it real quick and pop it out is really providing those IT teams an invaluable resource and being able to accommodate what's coming from the requests coming from the field without needing to get the vendor involved. Right. We have another viewer who asks, what are the best apps or softwares for field force for utilities? I can, I can take that one as well. So, you know, I can, the, the tongue in cheek answer is obviously IQ.GO and the, the answer that anybody needs to, to go with their perspective vendor is, is built on four things. Can you model anything? Going back to the example of don't allow your software to be encumbered by today's assets. Tomorrow's assets are going to change. There's going to be new DERs, new switches, new, everything that we need to model. Don't let your vendor stop you from being able to, to model it. So model anything. Second is the ability to, to use anywhere. So to Troy's example of, well, this is a desktop application. It doesn't go out in the field. That's, that's, that's, you know, to be able to do mobile is, is table stakes these days. The applications, um, got to be mobile. Third, you've got to be able to use it anytime online and offline. So we all know that not all areas are, are created equal and cellular coverage and cellular coverage can't, uh, encumber your work. You know, nobody's, uh, nobody's boss and nobody's, uh, customers are going to say, well, you know, I didn't have coverage, so sorry, I couldn't do it. So being able to, uh, to take an offline copy and continue your work. And, you know, once you're back online, sync it back up to, to the, uh, to the master system. And I think finally it's finding somebody that's got a, a company culture that innovates constantly. Um, to the, to the point I made kind of with the first question of, well, we've got a number of, uh, we've got a windows seven laptop now, you know, that company stopped innovating a long time ago, being able to, to get with a vendor that'll say, we're going to, you know, today take today's latest cloud technologies, but also take today's latest utility workflows and continually innovate alongside the utility, um, and alongside their workflows to, to make their life more, more easy and more efficient. Perfect. I know that we're almost at the top of the hour here, but I think we have time for one more question. Um, so given what I've seen at our utility with our work, do you really think these tasks could be completed in the field? Yeah, I can take that one and I'll try to be brief. Um, but I think the answer is, is definitely yes. Um, paper is a crutch in my opinion. We use paper because we haven't thought outside the box enough or gotten up to speed enough with technology to understand what's truly possible. The amount of work that you can complete in a streamlined fashion and also be augmented just by the connections that you get, um, by being connected to the, you know, the, the greater technology systems at the utility. There's no way that you can keep up with that in your current, uh, your current ways of working. It's, it's just the fact that we need to accept. So to open up digitization across the entire network lifecycle, which is really what we talk about a lot here at IQ geo is, is the future it's coming. And we're super happy to be a part of that vision and push that vision, um, out to the greater industry. Um, and if you have doubts, come talk to us because I'd be happy to, uh, to show you multiple examples of why I think it can be done across the life cycle. Awesome. Well, thank you guys so much for those answers, but I'm afraid we have run out of time for today. Um, however, our presenters have graciously offered to follow up with as many unanswered questions as possible via email in the coming days. And remember this full presentation will be made available to watch very soon at TD world.com. And that concludes today's webinar empowering a modern utility workforce on behalf of T and D world. I want to thank our sponsor IQ geo and our dynamic duo of experts, Troy Freisel Lewis and Matt Roberts. And let's not forget our incredible group of attendees. Thank you for taking the time out of your day to join us today and for enhancing the conversation with your incredible questions. Thank you again for being a part of this web chat and I hope you all are able to join us for others in the future. Have a great day and goodbye for now.