Opportunities in Water: Launching a Digital Platform

By Joseph P. Vesey

Historically, water utilities have been slow to adopt new digital technologies fearing uncertainty in their value propositions and lack of support and guidance from oversight bodies. Fortunately, this behavior is changing. Global regulators and policymakers who play a key role in setting standards for technology adoption are recognizing the proven, game-changing results from real world digital innovation – and they’re taking action to seize the opportunity.

At the same time, technology providers across the water industry have been accelerating the use of digital to differentiate and scale current offerings. As the water industry continues to embrace these technologies, digital platforms will next emerge with the potential of true industry transformation. Companies will need to change, strategies that delivered value for customers will shift to new strategies orchestrating value across platform participants. These platforms will first play out on company hosted cloud servers bringing interoperability within the platform ecosphere (web 2.0), but then will be built on public blockchain environments (web 3.0) that brings data ownership, transferability and interoperability across all platforms.