| | SEPTEMBER 201919CIOReviewBy Dave Webb, CIO, Nebraska Public Power DistrictWISDOM AND ANALYTICSWhen someone asks you to share wisdom, rest assured you're probably not young anymore. I've learned to be OK with that. I have enjoyed a long and satisfying career in various leadership roles in Engineering and IT. For the better part of a decade, I've served in the CIO role, and I think most experienced CIOs would agree that the Farmers Insurance commercial claim, "We've learned a thing or two since we've seen a thing or two," applies to us as well. Since wisdom often follows mistakes, I guess I'm comfortable acknowledging I am wiser now than I was. So I thought I'd share a few lessons learned (CIO Wisdom) as they apply to something current and timely, our analytics effort. Most will seem like common sense or perhaps based on some quote we've all heard. If quote based, I'll try to give credit to the source if I know it.Lesson One/Two: Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch/The Utility Industry is ConservativePeter Drucker is often credited with the quote "Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast". Turns out it's pretty hard to prove he ever said those exact words. "Culture Beats Strategy" may be closer. One thing I know. It's true. I've worked in the utility industry my entire career. Few would disagree that utility companies are conservative. It might be an insult or indictment by some, but we don't take it that way. We wear that label with pride. The electric grid has been and remains one of the most reliable and vital systems to have ever served mankind. When your job is to keep the lights on, you can't afford to take crazy chances with new technology. When it comes to spending money on things like analytics, expect to be met with healthy skepticism. If we can't see how it improves the safe generation and delivery of low cost, reliable energy, we're not going to buy it. There's nothing wrong with that. It's who we are.A few years ago we entered what I would call our analytics evangelism stage. We talked about analytics. We looked for example use cases and suggested leaders pay attention to what their counterparts in the industry were doing with analytics. We became charter members of the Analytics Institute and I encouraged business unit representatives to get involved with the Institute's working groups."What is Analytics anyway? Sounds like a buzzword to me. We've been doing data analysis for years. Now the marketers are calling it analytics so they can sell us something." I heard things like that. If I'm honest, I thought that myself early on. Thankfully, I wasn't evangelizing alone. There were others who share the passion and are doing their part to help steer our journey towards becoming a data driven company.Lesson Three: It's Better to be Mostly Right Than It is to be Completely WrongI think it was John Maynard Keyes who said "It's better to be roughly right than precisely wrong." What is the difference between CIO INSIGHTS
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