Covid-19 has triggered 5 years-worth of digital change in months, says Centrica IT leader

The challenges raised by the pandemic have accelerated Centrica through its digital transformation strategy and prompted mass-adoption of new technologies which the company would otherwise have struggled to achieve in half a decade according to James Boswell, director global end user computing at the energy giant.

Speaking ahead of his appearance in a Utility Week webinar on the topic of digital agility and strategies for the post-coronavirus marketplace, Boswell observed: “The pandemic has transformed the rate of adoption for the technologies we had in place when the it hit.”

“I have a team whose job it is to make sure we get the most out of our digital investments and they’ve been working on doing that, with a network of over 600 technology champions companywide, for a couple of years,” said Boswell. “But Covid has done more for our adoption of those technologies than they’ve said they could have achieved in five years.”

Giving examples of a range of business technologies available to Centrica employees, Boswell said adoption rates across the business have gone up “over 100% in all cases”.

He added that this development has been transformational in terms of highlighting the strategic potential of digital transformation to senior leaders in the business and in accelerating return on recent IT investments, including the adoption of a cloud-based virtual desktop to support widespread remote working.

Boswell will share more detail on Centrica’s digital transformation strategy and the way it has been impacted by coronavirus in  the webinar Achieving Digital Agility: Centrica’s journey through coronavirus and beyond which is set to take place at 11am on 31 July.

The event will also feature speakers from cloud technology experts at Citrix and Fujitsu who have worked with Centrica on executing its digital transformation strategy since 2016.