1. Context & Strategic Drivers

 

This electricity distribution network organization, located in the Pacific region, serves 1,100,000 customers across regional and remote areas. For several years, this utility has been facing critical challenges: ageing asset‑management platforms, fractured finance/personnel systems, inconsistent customer data, and manual overhead in front‑line operations with about 30,000 paperwork instructions annually.

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Pressure from the federal government accelerated the need for modernization to support distributed energy, renewables integration, and resilience through a clean‑energy transition. Legacy constraints were causing operational inefficiencies, regulatory risk, and sub‑optimal decisions due to inconsistent data. A unified enterprise architecture was essential.

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2. Business Architecture Foundation

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Business Architecture Info’s energy and utility architecture framework was quickly embraced by this organization to underpin its modernization journey. As one stakeholder remarked:

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“Business Architecture Info’s Energy and Utilities business architecture framework allowed our EA team to easily plug and play this information into our EA tool at a very fast pace. Within a very short period, we have been capable to pull together really meaningful information to make business decisions easy. Furthermore, we’re only getting started.”

 

This structured capability‑centric approach enabled this electric distribution utility to:

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1. Map all core business capabilities,

2. Align these to strategic value streams,

3. Prioritize initiatives and projects based on business value.

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By linking legacy systems to the capability maps via Business Capability Models, the Enterprise Architecture team within this utility clarified what to modernize and where to push for rapid wins.

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3. Enterprise Architecture Blueprint & Target State

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Leveraging Business Architecture Info’s framework tailored for utilities, the EA team proceeded to:

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• Define a target architecture decomposition: Business → Capability → Process → Information → Application → Technology.

• Create as‑is architectures, capturing systems such as the legacy asset register, finance systems, human capital management (HCM), and customer integrations.

• Perform gap analysis, identifying redundancies, unsupported finance/HR integrations, and siloed data sources.

 

The aspiration architecture adopted a cloud‑first, modular platform strategy as identified here:

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• Gradual migration to work and asset management cloud services.

• Implementation of a cloud enterprise requirement planning (ERP) and HCM for finance and workforce management.

• Development of a common data model, replacing point‑to‑point legacy integrations.

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Enterprise integration and data governance layers were coordinated via EA principles to support continual quarterly enhancements.

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4. Phased Roadmap & Implementation

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EA governance established a phased “launch and extend” roadmap:

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Phase 1: Core Asset‑Works Modernization

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Over the first 6 months, the following was planned by the EA team:

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• Identification and decommissioning planning of retired on‑premises legacy systems.

• Migration planning to the cloud of legacy systems managing over 14 million assets across the utility’s network.

• Introduced network‑asset digital twin with engineering‑grade modelling to simulate outages, asset condition, and expenditure scenarios.

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Phase 2: Operational Digitization & Mobile Enablement

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In the following 6 months, the EA team assisted in the planning iterations of the following deployment:

 

• Deployed a digital depot tool, replacing 30,000 paperwork instructions per year.

• Utility field staff moved to a field portal app on iPads/phones with real‑time asset, safety, and hazard info.

• Migrated to a new vegetation management system, integrated with task workflows and invoicing.

 

Phase 3: Customer, ERP & Workforce Integration

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In the next 12 months, the EA team will be instrumental in the planning of these activities:

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• Complete integration between their new ERP/HCM systems and their asset/work modules.

• Harmonize customer databases by retiring legacy integration middleware and replacing it with a modern synchronization platform.

• Strengthen cyber‑security governance and deployment across EA layers.​

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All phases were supported by change management, business‑unit workshops, Capability Models, and value‑stream visibility, in line with EA best practices.

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5. Key Architecture Artifacts & Governance

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The EA team of this utility adopted governance across:

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• Living Capability Models: continuously updated to reflect digital twin insights and process improvements.

• Value‑stream maps: showing how the asset, outage, vegetation, customer, and finance streams flow from business need to IT execution.

• Application landscape and technology stack documentation, including cloud-based applications and services, mobile apps, digital twin platform, and integration buses.

• Data governance enforced a central data dictionary and shared semantics for assets, locations, and customers.

• Security architecture is layered into all transition planning.

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The EA team of this utility steered committees, with the participation of business and IT leaders. It also tracked architecture conformance and benefit realization every quarter.

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6. Outcomes & Business Benefits

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So far, this utility has achieved the following:

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• Operational efficiency: enabling proactive asset insights and better maintenance scheduling with new cloud services.

• Cost savings: retiring outdated systems and reducing paperwork instructions led to significant labour savings.

• Data-driven decision making: the asset twin enabled better capital expenditure planning; harmonized systems improved response during outages.

• Customer & workforce improvements: field crews now have up‑to‑date information; customer data consistency has improved hazard management and outage planning.

• Continuous innovation: a quarterly update cycle of cloud apps ensures new features implementation with no downtime.

• AI-enabled pilots: the introduction of computer vision models assisting asset review and inspectors to focus on quality validation rather than manual classification.

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By embedding architecture-directed modernization, this utility transitioned from fragmentation and technical debt to a modern, cloud-first, insight‑driven utility.

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7. Lessons & Architecture Learning

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This use case illustrates several enterprise architecture lessons:

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• Business architecture foundations matter. The capability‑based framework enabled rapid value structuring and clarity in a fast‑paced environment.

• EA is not bureaucracy—it’s architecture for execution. Proper alignment across business strategy, capability models, and solution suites avoids the “accidental architecture” trap that has historically often occurred.

• Integration approaches matter. Moving from point‑to‑point to a unified cloud data model with iPaaS greatly reduced technical debt and improved agility.

• Iterate, don't Big‑Bang. A phased roll‑out, aligned with business-critical value streams, maintained operational continuity and stakeholder trust.

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The legacy systems modernization of this utility shows how an enterprise architecture anchored in grounded business capability and value streams can guide a utility-wide modernization.