Centrica CIO Mike Young deploys data to drive energy efficiencies
Energy giant Centrica is deploying data science across the business, but the army veteran leading the charge doesn’t have a traditional tech background.
CIO Mike Young spent 11 years in the special forces and seven as a police detective sergeant before he entered the world as the head of security at Orange, where had an early encounter with neural networks.
“I knew that my weaknesses were largely going to be around some of the tech, because it was quite high-end stuff, and the big issue back then was people cloning sim cards,” Young tells CIO UK at the AI Summit London.
“Because of my history, I knew all of the pertinent things about security but where it was really going matter was in the technical field. So I spent time with the handset group and the SIM card manufacturers trying to work out what’s what, and as part of that process we got into the very early elements of neural networks. Since that point, I’ve always kept abreast of where some of that stuff is going but from a security point of view.”
Young keeps up-to-date on digital developments through Sunday afternoon research sessions at home learning about new tech and sometimes rediscovering the old. The deep learning he first encountered at Orange two decades ago has now become perhaps the world’s most powerful AI technology, and Young is experimenting with how it can help Centrica.
Young’s team learned how the technology could improve workplace safety. They took the connector module out of an Xbox and put it in one of Centrica’s stairwells, the most common location of accidents in the office. Health and safety policy includes defined routes for going up and down stairs, guidance on holding handrails and carrying hot drinks.
Now, when staff take the wrong path on the staircase with their eyes on the phone and a hot drink uncovered, video of their actions is processed through deep learning algorithms that identify the dangers By the type they reach the desk they will have received an email reminding them of the safety policy.
The plan is to roll the system out to call centres, where another form of data science is having a big impact on customers.
The IT infrastructure at Centrica runs on a complicated back-end system, with two enormous ERP systems that constantly send information to the 7,000 call centre workers answering customer calls and the 15,000 field engineers helping them in their homes.
Centrica relies on high-speed data processing to give them real-time insights on 23 million customer accounts, which the bulky IT estate makes a challenging task.
The data science team recently found a way to improve the process. They developed a web traffic monitoring system that studies customer journeys to tell staff about their problems before they answer the phone. The system is now going live in most Centrica call centres.
They’ve also found new ways to identify the causes of the problems.
Centrica subsidiary British Gas has around four million smart meters in the UK and Ireland. Every 30 minutes, these devices send energy consumption readings to a data lake for analysis. Young’s team detect anomalies in the data to predict when a failure is likely to occur. They can then inform the customer and send out a field engineer to fix it.
