| | April 20228IN MY OPINIONTHE ROLE OF DIGITALIZATION IN DRIVING BUSINESS SUCCESSBy Erik Burow, Director of IT and Digital Services Business Area, VattenfallErik Burow is currently serving as the Director of IT and Digital Services Business Area Heat at Vattenfall. He has two decades of track record in managing digital business development to support and further improve companies' performance in the utility market. Burow is dedicated to driving digital transformation and sharpening the efficiency and growth of Vattenfall. With his business-centric IT leadership, he has been injecting emerging technology solutions, such as automation, advanced analytics, and cloud computing, to increase the productivity of his business area. As an agile evangelist and fiscally-aware leader, he motivates every team member to achieve success while retaining high-value talent for the long term. What prominent tools and technological solutions have helped in digitalizing Vattenfall?Being an asset-heavy company, Vattenfall spends an significant budget every year maintaining and improving its assets portfolio. This, in turn, creates a scope for us to become digitalized. Typically, assets house tons of data, which allows a company to operate more data-centric. But in order to harvest those data-driven opportunities, companies need to have certain prerequisites in order. Firstly, businesses need a cloud-based technology platform in place. At Vattenfall, we have a strategic partnership with regards to Microsoft Azure. We decided on this platform because of its increasing competency and consistency in launching the latest features and functionalities into the market. Secondly, cloud-based platforms usually come packed with out-of-the-box functions, and combining them creates many new features and functions alongside the business value chain. Apart from technology, businesses also need a competent workforce who are talented in data science and have knowledge in leveraging new platforms and capabilities to increase the efficiency of operations. Data science is no longer about finding answers from data analysis but about asking meaningful questions and utilizing data to answer them. Finally, the hardest nut to crack is governance and company culture. In digital transformation, data and information governance is one of the most vital components as it ensures the proper data quality of an algorithm or dataset. However, companies are often reluctant to invest in this area as it is challenging Before starting a career in this field, it is essential to understand one's ambitions and identify the capabilities one needs to acquire
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