Talk Techy to Me: Wading Through Water Technology Options

Water is our world's most precious resource. It's essential for companies and communities, providing for public health, food/energy security, and enabling economies to grow and thrive. Water resource management has come to the forefront as our society endeavors to tackle the issues of our time, including climate change and environmental justice.

We've been on a journey across all industries over the past 10+ years from digitalization as a concept to proofs of technology initiatives around AI/ML/Cognitive and other exponential technologies. We are now entering into the golden era of the virtual enterprise. While individual industries and organizations are in varying stages of maturity, the encouraging news is that we now posses the technologies and techniques to intelligently operate resilient infrastructure in the water and wastewater sector.

In the technology domain, we now have enhanced cybersecurity methodologies and approaches. Data fabric elements enable the integration across systems that control and monitor critical infrastructure. We have the interoperability abilities necessary to establish visibility and coordination across the value chain.

On the techniques topic, we are learning to embrace the wisdom of a crowd - a lesson we have deep experience with as who doesn't recall a summer camp game of tug-of-war where a group of youthful campers triumphed over a few adult campers? This concept holds true in technology as we observe that the more hypothesis tested, the better the solutions that emerge. We're opening our minds to agile approaches and are becoming more willing to fail fast, forward, and often with the reassurance that the benefits of the great ideas that emerge are worth the near term disappointments that are really valuable lessons learned. Finally, the realizations over the past few years around diversity, inclusion, and psychological safety are yielding collaboration that results in organizations that outperform exceptionally.

In short, the way we work is changing. How work gets done is changing. Legacy approaches are no longer an option if we have any hopes of successfully dealing with the grey tsunami (aging/retiring workforce), continuously rising customer expectations, and the pressures of the pandemic driving remote and virtual work efforts. We need to pay attention to technology and innovation in our sector in order to continue to deliver on the promise of safe, affordable, reliable, resilient, and increasingly sustainable and equitable water and wastewater services.

A huge thank you to the Texas Water Development Board for hosting Water for Texas 2021 and painting a clearer vision of the future. To my co-panelists, Ali Abolmaali and Richard Seline, thank you for the lively conversation. To our moderator, Marc Santos, thank you for the inspiring and though provoking discussion. To our audience, you attention and commitment to these issues will be the difference needed to drive meaningful transformation. Let's build a future we can be proud of for generations to come!