How is digital transformation impacting the water utility sector? - Insights from a worldwide online utility survey

Water utilities across the globe are facing numerous challenges to their operations and management posed by ageing infrastructure, urbanization, and climate change. Specific challenges include severe floods and droughts, changing urban water demands, costs related to the maintenance of infrastructure systems, and increasingly critical conditions for wastewater overflow in combined sewer systems. Recent developments of digital technologies offer opportunities to address these challenges. Smart monitoring and automatic control, advanced analytics, informed demand management, and digital customer engagement open new paths to more efficient water use, better understanding of resource availability and quality, or faster detection of failures and anomalies. Although many utilities have started the process of digital transformation, few of them are on the same track. The variety of possible approaches to digitalisation raises the following questions: How is digital transformation impacting the water utility sector? What are the drivers and challenges for such transformation? What are the key enabling technologies?

To address these questions, the online “Smart Water Survey” (http://smartwatersurvey.com) was designed to analyse common priorities, best practices and technologies, and challenges entailed by the digital transformation process in the water utility sector. The survey maps out a water utility’s operating network and company structure as divided into five different subsections: (1) water supply & drinking water treatment, (2) water distribution network & operating systems, (3) wastewater & rainwater management, (4) customers & demand management, and (5) data warehouse & IT systems. For each subsection, different aspects of the digital transformation are investigated. Besides providing a general overview on the ongoing digitalisation trends and its determinants, the answers obtained from over 60 utilities worldwide allow assessing the digital maturity of water utilities and deriving recommendations on future digital developments. Independent sections and targeted questions in the survey are organized in a way to overcome the potential information bias due to the utility’s perception of digitalisation and subjective evaluation of its importance.

While the survey will remain open for future updates, the authors have chosen to report the current results available at the end of 2020. The results indicate that most of the participating utilities have already taken on digitalisation and are moving forward by adopting new digital technologies, regardless of their geographic origin, company age, and size. However, differences are apparent among the five subsections mentioned above. For subsection (2), in more than 50% of the cases the digital technology in question was already implemented, while for (4) this number was roughly 30%. Additionally, in 50% of the cases in (4) technology was either being implemented or planned in the near future and not considered in 20% of the cases. As the driving elements for their transition, utilities reported economic factors as most influential across all subsections with a ratio of 66%. Governmental influence and ecologic factors had a comparably smaller influence with a ratio 26% and 8%, respectively.