The following Utility Voice was authored by Gibs Saint Paul, Senior Director of Information Technology Services at Salt River Project. 

The utility industry is in the middle of a multi-pronged digital transformation, and nearly everyone is going through it at the same time. That’s not yet a cause for celebration; it’s in effect also a resource problem, one that is only growing.

Over the last several years, leading Salt River Project’s Customer Modernization program has given me a ground-level view of this issue. The 24-month effort to replace our mainframe CIS with SAP S/4HANA on RISE constitutes the largest platform transformation in SRP’s history. As I step out of that position and into a broader role as Senior Director of Information Technology Services, one thing remains unmistakably clear: what’s happening at SRP is happening everywhere.

CIS replacements, S/4HANA migrations, RISE with SAP, Service Cloud 2.0: programs that would have been staggered across a decade are compressed into the same window across the industry, running in parallel, chasing the same pool of qualified people to execute them.

There are only so many consultants truly equipped to do this work: the implementation specialists, PMO leads, QA practitioners, and organizational change experts who know these platforms and know utilities. There are no A-teams anymore. Everyone is stretched across too many engagements, and the utilities absorb the consequences: resources lost mid-stream, knowledge gaps at critical moments, timelines under pressure that were already unforgiving.

The deeper truth is that the demand for people with this expertise has outpaced the supply, and every utility running a major transformation right now is competing for a narrowing selection of experts. We’ve lost people mid-program to competing projects—I know other utilities relate.

Utilities Are Better Positioned Than They Think

This challenge is a shared one to which the industry needs to respond deliberately. Each utility navigates the consequences on its own, without stepping back to recognize the structural dynamic driving it. But the utility industry already has what it would need to respond collectively.

In most sectors, peer collaboration at the level we experience would be unusual. Here, it’s how the industry genuinely operates, because the mission is mutual: reliable, affordable water and power for customers.

SRP meets with peer utilities that are also going through transformations once a month, not to exchange vendor presentations, but to talk plainly about what broke, how the team recovered, and what they’d do differently. That kind of exchange is worth more than many knowledge-sharing forums, precisely because it isn’t formal. If the hard lessons of working through something are already behind a utility six months ahead on an identical program, those lessons should travel. And utilities that compare notes carry more weight with vendors than any single organization negotiating on its own.

When SRP finishes this program, the number of utilities that will want to understand what was learned will be considerable. We’re in the utility industry. We help each other. What that means is sharing the harder lessons alongside the successes—the ones no vendor is positioned to teach.

On SRP’s program alone, there are separate vendors for the SI work, PMO, QA, and organizational change management, each with its own methodology, incentives, and definition of done. The coordination burden that comes with managing all of it is what the industry hasn’t fully reckoned with, because the seams between workstreams are where programs get into serious trouble.

What the Program Doesn’t Teach You

No single solution architect can hold all of it. What’s required is deliberate internal structure: product owners and solution architects with clear accountability across every layer, governance capable of keeping multiple partners aligned to shared timelines.

Managing the vendor landscape is only one dimension of the problem. The other is what happens when the program ends, which, on cloud-based platforms, is less a finish line than a handoff to a different kind of pressure. Major releases and new capabilities arrive quickly, and the business expects IT to be ready.

For SRP, moving from the program mindset that has defined this work into a fully operational one is the central challenge of this next chapter: staying close enough to the platform roadmap to guide business areas on what’s coming, well ahead of when they have to ask.

Joining SAP and vendor user groups is central to that. Utilities doing this work at scale have a hard-won perspective on what these systems need to do, and the right place for that perspective is at the table where the roadmap gets shaped.

At the end of the day, the simultaneous demands of the moment may feel overwhelming at times, but our focus will stay trained on our commitment to our customers. Consider this: Our prepay program at SRP covers roughly 150,000 customers, many managing difficult financial situations. When someone makes a payment after a disconnection, we want their power to come back on in under a minute.

For the customer, the processes behind that responsiveness are invisible—yet that minute means everything. Keeping it intact, through a period when every utility is stretched across the same transformation at the same time, is a priority that requires the industry to think collectively.

Qualified consultants are finite, and every utility in the sector is competing for them. The utility six months ahead on the same program, willing to share what went wrong, is one of the most valuable resources in the room.

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