Smart Oasis: Doing More with Less

A practical example presented by Mia Forsline (Santa Margarita Water District) showed the strict water regulatory legislation passed in California which water retailers must comply with. Integrating the advanced tools makes this compliance easier. Change adaptation or change management is not necessarily limited to new technology. At the core of those technology operations and decision making, are people, and we need to make sure that people are also advancing and adapting to the changes.

Christine Ow (Bluefield Research) talked about the increases in job vacancy rates in the global water industry partly correlated to retirees in the workforce. Jennifer Morales (City of Omaha), who observed a similar gap in Omaha’s Asset Management programme, offered a tried and tested solution – the Intern Power – i.e., hiring interns from non-traditional academic majors to build a multi-disciplinary team that was well suited to test and adopt new technologies in the Omaha Public Works department. Paula Crowell (LA County Sanitation District) presented a similar trend – the rise of Citizen Developers. With the rise of no-code to low-code platforms, it is possible now to add more cross-domain work without entirely relying on IT Departments. The rapid changes in the smart water industry mean rapid upskilling and out of the box thinking to fill gaps. It was evident how change starts with people and the time for upskilling and collaboration is now.

Quality

 “Garbage In, Garbage Out” -> “What gets measured, gets managed” -> “Don’t let perfect get in the way of doing better”.

The importance of Quality as it relates to data and advanced systems was in many conversations. Miller Truby (Turing) showed several examples of how compromised or interrupted telemetry can lead to bad conclusions in ML-powered systems. One example was an instance where solution providers rushed to find a fix based on results of a new telemetry system – but on the ground it simply turned out to be a poorly aimed sensor. So, what do we do?

Innovation vs Intuition – a roundtable discussion covered the importance of these challenges. We still need talented and knowledgeable workforce to be the managers of these systems, but we cannot stop progress based on minor challenges and setbacks. In fact, more than anything, we need to communicate the challenges so that we keep learning and refining our systems. Tacoma Zach (MentorAPM) offered a three-step solution for the all “Big Optimisation Ideas”.

Almost all roundtables had one thing in common by design – collaboration. Attendees from different backgrounds gathered to collectively discuss lessons on seven different topics. Inevitably, some burning questions like “how do you take into account X?” were raised. In the end, attendees collectively addressed gaps and wins across their different backgrounds, highlighting the importance of collaboration. In another panel, Lacy Carothers (California American Water) offered insights into how an unconventional collaborative microgrid partnership between Generac and several utilities within California Water Association resulted in several socioeconomic and environmental benefits. California American Water now switches to their backup battery power during public safety power shutoffs on extreme heat days to prevent any water and wastewater service disruptions to the community.

Several wins were discussed in the panel focused on use of sensors. Joe Johanesen (City of Sandy) showed how a pre-existing leak was immediately identified after the leak detection system was commissioned in Sandy, Oregon. In addition to leak detection, Patrick Williamson (Badger Meter) discussed several event monitoring examples used in City of Ocala, Florida to enhance customer service and improve operational efficiencies – one of which included reading data on a vacant account indicating potential theft.