Duke Energy’s CIO Has Driven Modernization And Transformation To Foster Innovation And Resilience
Duke Energy CIO Bonnie Titone
Duke Energy is one of the largest energy providers in the United States. The company, which earned roughly $25 billion in revenue in 2019, provides electricity to about 7.8 million customers and across six states, and the company provides gas to 1.6 million customers in five states. Duke Energy is going through a significant transformation targeting the reduction in carbon, and a significant aspect of the transformation is of the digital variety.
The person who runs technology and digital for the company is Bonnie Titone, the company’s chief information officer. The digital transformation that she leads focuses on delivering cleaner energy systems that are more distributed, intelligent and mobile. The centerpiece of the transformation is a program that the company calls Lighthouse. “In 2018, [we] built an innovation hub to scale practices across the entire company, not just IT,” said Titone. “That framework allowed the IT department to partner with our business, to drive innovation and to ensure transformation is ingrained in our core.”
Another facet of the transformation involves data. Titone highlights artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities as important foundations to the data strategy to help drive innovation, manage the grid and make smart decisions. Drones, sensors, smart meters and cameras are tools that help generate data leading to better insights for the company. “There are three main areas [to focus data-centric innovation on]: our assets, our operations and the experience that we create for the customer,” noted Titone. She is particularly excited about gathering data of such statistical significance to be predictive, as it creates opportunities to undertake preventive maintenance on equipment, for example, making operations more reliable in the process.
The company’s transformation has also been a people transformation. She realized that in order to accomplish the goals that her team and she set for themselves, they would need to focus on building the skills of tomorrow rather than be satisfied with the skills of yesterday. “We use tools such as [the massive open online course company] Udemy that give us courses by experts that cover various topics from development to transformation to design,” she said. She has made training a priority to ensure that these skills become more pervasive.
The team has been a source of resilience during the pandemic, as Titone focused on modernizing the practices of the department in the early part of her tenure at the company, starting in June of 2019. “[Duke Energy’s] mission is ‘a smarter energy future for customers in our communities,’”she highlighted. “I think the modernizing of our grid and generating cleaner energy and expanding our gas infrastructure are all efforts to transform our customer experience.” She underscores that all of that is brought to life with digital capabilities. She and the team have focused on modernizing systems of record, systems of differentiation and ultimately the processes used for innovation.
Looking forward, she sees a number of trends that will be of consequence for Duke Energy. “Leveraging event-driven architecture, microservices and cloud are going to play a major role in our ability to empower, enable us to do this innovation, and integrate so we can create new products and services to meet those goals,” said Titone.
As her team has grown, Titone has been particularly pleased that she is not the lone woman of influence in the IT department. Duke Energy’s IT department reflects the diversity of the company’s customers to a greater extent. “While IT has historically been a male-dominated industry, I have seen that that tide is turning and companies like Duke Energy appreciate and celebrate that diversity,” said Titone. “We should reflect the diverse communities that we serve and maximizing that equal opportunities for everybody.”
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. His has written two bestselling books, moderates the Technovation podcast series and speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.