Many water utilities struggle to shift from traditional water meters to AMI or automated metering infrastructure. This means moving from monthly or bimonthly meter reads to a torrent of high frequency regular data. That requires a intricate array of data transfers -- bringing data from the meter via radio, centralizing and storing that data, making that meaningful for billing and also easily accessible for customers on their phone, on the web, via a mailer or really however the customer prefers. 

That is not to mention maximizing the value of AMI for leak detection, improving system operations through hydraulic modeling and developing a seamless customer experience. That involves a set of specific technical problems, many of which are outside the existing area of expertise of utility staff. In addition, rolling out an AMI program requires enhanced coordination and integration across departments. AMI deployment can appear to be a technical problem with a clear set of known protocols, but the growth required beyond existing staff expertise and the necessary organizational coordination makes AMI an entirely different beast: an adaptive challenge. AMI requires changing the operational practices of a water utility and importantly involves evolving several job functions and rolls. This presents a big adaptive challenge, particularly for a utility deploying AMI with in-house resources.

Technical challenges are well-defined issues with clear solutions that can be addressed using existing knowledge, expertise, or established procedures. They are often solved quickly by authorities or experts. In contrast, adaptive challenges are complex, ambiguous problems that require changes in people's attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors. These challenges don't have clear-cut solutions and cannot be solved by authority alone. Here is a good overview of that distinction between technical and adaptive challenges from Harvard Business Review. 

Instead, they demand collaboration, experimentation, and new ways of thinking. While technical challenges can be addressed through the application of known methods, adaptive challenges necessitate learning, adaptation, and often involve longer-term processes to bring about meaningful change.

Crescenta Valley Water District (CVWD), a prototypical California water utility in the foothills above Los Angeles, has had numerous challenges in its AMI rollout. The District began planning for AMI in 2010 and as of early 2014 still only had a handful of customers able to access their AMI information. Funding availability and internal coordination challenges slowed the project down.

Under the leadership of General Manager James Lee and the Board of Directors, the District decided to address this issue head on and commit to accelerating AMI deployment. CVWD management proactively addressed supply chain issues to prepare to accelerate the program. In addition, the district proactively realigned roles and responsibilities to address previous interdepartmental frictions. 

That included moving the project leadership from engineering to customer service to align the project ownership with the overall end user experience. Patrick Atwater served as interim project director to lead the internal transition. 

Moreover through sound financial planning the District was in a place to procure the requisite inventory to complete the program. As a result in the May 28, 2024 CVWD board packet the District embarked on an ambitious goal:

“to integrate the majority of the District’s meters into the AMI network by July 2025.”

To meet that goal, CVWD’s interim Director of Finance and Administration Arturo Montes recognized that existing processes were not going to cut it. Manual data entry was error prone and led to frequent frictions coordinating across departments and the AMI team. Answering simple questions like how many radios had been installed or how many customer portals had been configured required staff to scramble.

Below shows an example form from the previous AMI radio deployment workflow. 

CVWD’s intrepid innovation fellows led by Shwetha Rao built a simple no-code tool using Google’s Appsheet to streamline that field data collection. The tool is shown below. This app automatically syncs with a simple cloud spreadsheet. Moreover, the app is mobile friendly and CVWD’s field crew was intimately involved in user testing and signing off on the final tool. 

Centralizing data collection to a single digital form has multiple management benefits. In addition to streamlining operations and reducing internal coordination frictions, the data enables a simple dashboard to track progress towards the big, hairy, audacious goal of full AMI deployment. That common operational picture* (COP) provides an invaluable asset in ensuring that everyone from field staff to District management to the board of directors knows exactly how far the program has progressed. That COP enables the entire team to help remove bottlenecks like coordinating what work is needed at what address.

CVWD’s no-code tool and common operational picture have shown early successes. The number of meters upgraded to AMI has increased over 10x in a matter of months. The project is still ongoing and will require a big team effort to complete. This integrated all-of-utility effort is part of the broader shift in water management that’s critical as the industry grapples with epochal shifts like climate change, extreme weather and the ongoing challenges of aging infrastructure. From the 2015 Journal of the American Waterworks Association whitepaper that helped launch the modern water data movement. 

“By integrating finance, water resource planning, engineering, operations, and facilities management decision-making into a single collaborative effort, utilities can create opportunities to develop robust cross-disciplinary solutions.”

JAWWA_0615_atwater (2) (2).pdf

The underlying challenge of data fragmented across organizational silos that frustrates business objectives is an industry scale challenge that goes well beyond AMI and CVWD.he California Data Collaborative has provided a proven model for how water utilities can tap into data expertise. Building on that foundation and the success of CVWD’s innovation fellows, there is a great opportunity to bring more civic-minded technology generalists into the water industry to help digitize workflows and integrate data systems. Such a “water data corps” would help to scale the deployment of these common sense solutions across more utilities. 

There is also a need and opportunity for industry scale transformation as we continue to work together to pioneer the future of water management and ensure safe, clean, reliable water no matter what the future holds. 

Further reading:

• For more information on CVWD’s digital transformation and the larger lessons for the California water industry, please see this pair of blog posts by Patrick Atwater.

• For more information on building digital public infrastructure, please see this blog post by the architect of the California Data Collaborative’s data platform Varun Adibhatla.

• *For more information on the value of a common operational picture in the public domain, please see this blog post by Varun Adibhatla.

• California Metering Exchange Protocol