The District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority, now known simply as DC Water, has a fairly broad agenda designed to help the organization evolve. It is being spearheaded by George S. Hawkins, general manager, who was named to his position in September 2009. Before that, Hawkins was director of the District Department of the Environment, an agency that performs city, county and state environmental functions for the nation’s capital.

The agenda is being driven by some significant issues that Hawkins sees as facing DC Water and the water utility industry in general. “Those of us in the industry understand well the vital nature of what we deliver for every living organization,” he states. “We also understand just how poor the condition of the infrastructure is in most places, including here.” However, he points out, very few consumers really understand what the utilities do. “Few people know where the water comes from when they turn on the faucet or where it goes once it goes down the drain,” he states. “As a result, the financial model that we utilize is broken. If people don’t understand what we do, it is very difficult to raise the kind of revenue we need to invest and improve the system.”

In response, DC Water has created a comprehensive program designed to respond to these challenges. There are two elements to the program. One involves providing more and better external communication with customers. The other involves providing better service to customers through internal improvements.

Communications

The first step was the organization’s rebrand. “We wanted a name, logo, and tagline that would make us much more visible and easily accessible,” he explains. The new name is “DC Water.” The logo is a green “DC” with a large blue water drop. The tagline is “Water is Life.”

Next is a very aggressive use of every communication media that DC Water staff can utilize. A key element of this involves constantly updating the utility’s website. Each month, DC Water provides a report card on its performance indicators, such as how often it achieves first-call resolution when customers call, how quickly it answers calls, how many water main breaks it experiences, how quickly it repairs these water main breaks, how many of its fire hydrants are out of service, how well it meets its environmental obligations, and so on. “We also have a Facebook page, and we are on YouTube and Twitter,” continues Hawkins.

In Spring 2011, when DC Water proposed its rates for the 2012 budget, the law required that it hold a public hearing. DC Water went above and beyond that requirement. “We held dozens of meetings, with virtually every audience we could think of,” reports Hawkins. “We didn’t want to shy away from anyone. We wanted to go out and tell our story – what we are doing and why it matters to people. Our belief is that, the more the public understands what we do, the more we hope they will understand and support the kind of revenue we need.”

Service

The other side of the program focuses on what DC Water can do to improve the internal workings of the organization, so it can improve the service it provides to customers and do so more cost-effectively.

There are three prongs to this:

1. The Team Blue Project is what Hawkins defines as “classic organization development.” “We selected a series of issues that everyone cares about,” he explains. The most important two are safety and asset management. There is a cross-functional and cross-organizational team in place for each of the issues. Members include employees from every level of the organization and across the various disciplines of the organization. The teams are empowered to come up with recommendations on what DC Water should do. It is then senior management’s responsibility to implement as many of these recommendations as possible. There are two purposes for Team Blue. One, of course, is to improve the organization. The other is to provide employees with the opportunity to participate more in the organization.
2. “We will launch the second prong this summer,” continues Hawkins. It is tentatively called the DC Water Science and Innovation Program (SIP), a formal mechanism designed to allow and encourage all employees throughout the organization to come up with ideas on how DC Water can do anything better – answering phones, filling out permits, turning valves, digging in the streets, managing nutrients at the wastewater treatment plant, and so on. These ideas can be on any scale – large to small. “An idea might be a way to do our jobs better for the same money, or actually save money doing the same job,” he notes. DC Water wants to collect these ideas, then highlight them on a website where people can vote for the ideas they think are good. The ideas will then be reviewed by a panel of experts, and if an idea is selected and implemented, DC Water will provide visible recognition to the employee who came up with the idea. “We haven’t figured out yet if we can legally do this, but perhaps we can provide employees with financial bonuses,” says Hawkins.
3. The third prong is a very aggressive program, primarily, but not exclusively, with IBM. DC Water is working with IBM on “Smart Water,” which is an outgrowth of IBM’s “TheSmarterCity” program. “We will be designing analytical products that can take the kind of information that we already collect and use it to make smarter decisions, such as anticipating problems and predicting maintenance,” reports Hawkins. One example might be information that will allow the utility to know which pipe might break next. This will allow crews to select and plan work more intelligently. “IBM is working with us and developing some new software products for this,” he adds.

Results

Although these initiatives are all relatively new, DC Water is already seeing some impressive results.

On the communications side: “There is no question that the public is already more aware of who we are and what we are doing,” he states. “While we still get complaints, we are getting a lot more support. We also have much better relationships with local political leaders.”

On the service side: DC Water is receiving a lot of good ideas from employees that are coming in informally, in advance of the formal launching of the SIP. “Someone came up with an idea of how to use credit cards differently for some past debts,” states Hawkins. “This has helped us save several hundred thousand dollars.” An engineer came up with a better idea for fixing water line breaks that is saving the utility several million dollars. “We are also saving enormous amounts of money in personnel and gasoline costs by implementing a first-of-its-kind automatic meter reading program for our water valves, which are now read electronically,” he explains.

Autovation

DC Water is a host utility for Autovation 2011 Sept. 25-28 in Washington, DC. Hawkins will discuss these innovations during the Autovation Opening General Session Monday, Sept. 26. Hawkins also plans to talk about how he thinks the water utility industry needs to innovate and be flexible in terms of the products that it sells, not just how it does the work. Examples: There are millions of people who visit Washington each year. Most of these people, when they drink water, are drinking bottled water. “In essence, we have ceded that market to private bottled water companies,” he admits. The question: “What kind of device and apparatus can we come up with in order to get people to use public water, and in a way that we can capture some revenue?” he queries.

DC Water occasionally invents things to make its wastewater treatment plants work better. The question: “Can we monetize these products by joint-venturing with a private firm, so that not only are we providing innovation to our operations, but also increasing our sources of revenue?” he asks.

Hear Hawkins discuss many of the great innovations happening at DC Water, then see some of them in action at the Bryant Street Facility tour Wednesday, Sept. 28. Check out the Autovation website for information.

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