Guidehouse
Meredith Bodkin is a partner at Guidehouse, specializing in business transformation. With more than seventeen years of experience, she leads large-scale transformation projects for public sector and commercial clients, enhancing performance and operational efficiency.
Meredith is known for her strategic insights and ability to navigate complex challenges in organizational and operational transformation, workforce planning, procurement, program management, and change management. She is dedicated to leveraging technology and innovative solutions to drive impactful change.
How should utilities transform their organizations and workforce to be competitive in today’s rapidly evolving landscape?
Meredith Bodkin: Utilities today face a more rapidly evolving, highly disruptive landscape than ever before, antiquating the static business models and one-way transmission and distribution of past decades.
With heightened regulatory environments, shifting work paradigms, suffering workforce cultures, and increasing customer load demands, utilities that want to remain competitive must make continuous transformation a core component of day-to-day operations. Utility workforce and operating model innovations are essential for cultivating the agility required to adapt to rapidly changing market dynamics.
Utilities must embrace flexible, modern workforce models, including multi-sector workforces, to generate the capabilities and capacity they need to innovate and mature at the pace of today’s market demands. The race for skilled resources is more competitive than ever as the existing workforce ages and labor markets wane, making enterprise alignment on talent acquisition strategies, career pathways, and succession planning critical.
In addition, skill gaps are becoming more apparent with advances in technology (particularly AI) and innovation in core business processes, creating a greater need for investment in upskilling, reskilling, and retaining top talent to drive sustainable change and profitability.
Organizational structures must evolve in lockstep with the workforce. The emerging distributed, intelligent, and mobile grid requires an innovative, collaborative, and dynamic operating model. Utilities must redesign their internal structures, processes, and technologies to deliver greater customer value.
Structures must remain flexible so they can rapidly respond to changing market demand and more easily adopt new business models and emerging technologies, such as advanced analytics and modern IT/OT systems.
Organizational transformation should also include external elements for additional agility and resilience. Building partnerships with technology providers, government, and industry accelerates capability building, allowing utilities to innovate more effectively and set new industry standards. The transformation utilities must experience is ultimately a generational one, and the people side of change cannot be neglected. When these issues are addressed effectively, utilities are better positioned for significant growth.
