The Case for Digital Transformation in Utility Emergency Management

Events with adverse outcomes—officially termed “incidents”—increasingly pose significant risks and costs to utility operations. The spectrum of potential incidents is broad and can include hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes, floods, extreme weather, chemical spills, active shooter and civil unrest.

Demographic trends exacerbate these impacts, with more people living in areas vulnerable to incident-induced damage nationwide. Escalating costs make recovery efforts progressively more expensive, as the costs to recover and repair damages are typically higher today than in the past.

The frequency of incidents that utilities must manage is rising. For most utilities, the days of occasional Emergency Operations Center (EOC) activations for significant events are long gone. Today’s many hazards necessitate a continuous Emergency Management operation to manage the persistent risks and costs of emergency incidents effectively.

Utilities must maintain constant readiness. The cost of unpreparedness extends beyond physical recovery, impacting reputational integrity and legal liability. Regulators, customers, and investors expect utilities to uphold a fiduciary duty of care. Emergency management does more than restore services; it ensures effective counterparty communication and coordination, mitigates reputation decay and reduces legal liability. This shift elevates emergency management to a board-level issue, transforming it from an esoteric and episodic component of utility operations into a crucial element of a utility’s resilience strategy.

Utilities’ emergency management processes have remained static for decades, employing manual and inconsistent processes that impede effective and efficient incident management. The need and value of digital transformation of utility emergency management is clear—the industry is ripe for a digital transformation.