Informed Decisions together with Gothenburg Energy at Enterprise Data Conference Europe, 18-22 November 2019.

Slicing a Big Data Elephant for a Safe Transformation

This is the story of how Göteborg Energi (Gothenburg Energy) managed to break down a huge and complex big data system into manageable pieces. By doing so, the executive managers became aware of what kind of decisions they needed to make, what the alternatives were and the expected consequences and outcomes from those decisions.

A self-made system for monitoring district heating production and distribution has been used since the mid-1980s and has been improved and modernized successfully since then. The system has several custom functions, works in an effective way and is very popular among the users. The system is vital for the operations as it supplies real-time data and statistics based on 20,000 sensors in the production plants and the distribution systems. Furthermore, the data from this monitoring system is processed and flooded vastly throughout the organization, in a way and to various purposes (including business-critical) no person can grasp.

As this monitoring system is self-made and has grown over the years, the data structure has been poorly documented. The technical environment of the system is now outdated, and, the market of monitoring systems has caught up. Altogether it is obvious that a safe transformation plan is urgent.

This presentation will cover:

  • How the gigantic and complex data masses were sliced into manageable pieces using a set of methods.
  • How executive managers were engaged in that process so that they realized what kind of decisions they needed to make.
  • How the outcome of this work became their roadmap for transformation.

Johan Lindholm is the Business Architect and the Data Governance Lead within
Göteborg Energi. He is a well-experienced architect and business analyst and has long experiences from development projects. He has established data governance throughout the entire organisation and is now working on transforming the company to acknowledging the business value of the company’s data.


Håkan Edvinsson is an author, trainer, speaker and consultant within Data
Governance and data-driven Business Architecture. Today, he is a senior partner and the CTO of Informed Decisions Consulting.  Håkan is the author of “Data
Diplomacy” (Technics Publications 2019) and the best-selling ”Enterprise
Architecture Made Simple” book (Technics Publications 2013). He is also
acknowledged author of the Data Architecture chapter in the DAMA Data
Management Body of Knowledge (DMBoK) version 2
.

For more information, please contact Pelle Graveleij at Informed Decisions Consulting. pelle.graveleij@informeddecisions.se