SWAN Americas Alliance Teams Up With EPIC, Bluefield Research, Autodesk, And Strategic Partners To Find Out "How Utilities Organize For Digital Innovation" In New Report

The SWAN Americas Alliance, a regional affiliate of the SWAN Forum, collaborates to unpack results from a 2022 survey covering insights on how utilities organize themselves to effectively embrace digital innovation.

This insightful report, supported by SWAN Member Autodesk to ensure public access to all, is based on input from 34 diverse water, wastewater, and stormwater utilities across 10 countries. You can view the full report and accompanying interactive data dashboard on the SWAN website here.  

While data-driven technologies remain a critical part of the smart water movement across drinking water, wastewater, and stormwater utilities, the successful uptake of innovative tools remains largely dependent on people and organizations, from utility management and staff buy-in at the onset of a project, to an operators’ level of comfort with implemented changes following technology roll-out.

Lead authors Eric Bindler (Bluefield Research), Reed Van Beveren (The Environmental Policy Innovation Center - EPIC), Jennifer Suttles (Gwinnett County), Tim Medearis (Autodesk), Nishanth Senthilkumar (HR Green/Houston Water), Sandra DiMatteo (Bentley) and Shirley Ben-Dak (SWAN Forum), collaborated on this concerted effort to uncover intriguing and often complex human and organizational factors impacting technology adoption and implementation.

According to Reed Van Beveren, Senior Manager, Technology Policy at EPIC, “There is no one size fits all strategy when it comes to organizing for innovation. Collaborating on this survey and report has been an exciting opportunity to hear directly from a diverse set of utilities about their experience and tease apart the different factors, roles, and practices that can help build an organization's capacity to innovate.”

Tim Medearis, Solutions Engineer at Autodesk, added, "This timely report sheds light on the complexities of implementing smart water technologies and highlights the need to understand the human and organizational factors impacting technology adoption and implementation. This research not only contributes to the industry's collective knowledge, but also enables Autodesk to better serve water utilities as a software solution provider and partner.”

Shirley Ben-Dak, SWAN’s Senior Advisor, remarked, “We tend to get very excited over both some of the most promising as well as long proven technologies in the smart water market. What I found equally refreshing and rewarding about this particular research project was the ability to seek out best practices and concrete advice regarding structural and organizational related barriers that consistently appear to inhibit innovation. We hope all will find this report impactful and welcome any and all feedback to help keep this sector moving forward.”

About SWAN:

The Smart Water Networks Forum (SWAN) is the leading global hub for the smart water sector, accelerating the awareness and adoption of data-driven technologies across drinking water, wastewater and stormwater networks worldwide. SWAN connects key players in the water sector to advance the use of smart systems and leverage data for more resilient, efficient, and sustainable water management.