National Grid CIO champions data-driven business strategy

Andi Karaboutis, group chief information and digital officer at National Grid, believes that companies have an unprecedented opportunity to serve their customers and enable their employees.

"There's been a widening aperture on really understanding what's needed by our customers, our consumers, our employees and all the constituents of the company," said Karaboutis, who recently spoke with SearchCIO via Zoom about National Grid's commitment to using cutting edge technologies and data to drive its operations. "We realized we do really need to understand the power of data and ultimately [AI] … to achieve outcomes."

Karaboutis, who began her career in technology as a programmer and analyst at Ford Motor Company and later went on to become director of global manufacturing and supply chain systems, has had a distinguished career in IT. Following her 15 years at Ford, she was an executive director in manufacturing and supply chain information at General Motors and after that the global CIO at Dell. Prior to joining National Grid in 2017, she served as executive vice president of technology, business solutions and corporate affairs at Biogen, a biotechnology company based in Cambridge, Mass. She will be speaking at this year's MIT Sloan CIO Symposium on a panel titled "Accelerated digital transformation -- where will we land?"

Karaboutis is accelerating National Grid's digital transformation with a raft of new technologies, including IoT and geospatial location software to enable National Grid's field workers to be in the right location and stream any necessary data back to the business. IT is also implementing an edge computing strategy that helps field workers on location to analyze and process data quickly.

"All of those technologies create, curate, stream in, develop and help us bring insights and train models in order to understand our customers, assets and employees," she said.

To hear more about what Karaboutis said about utilizing a data-driven business strategy, watch the video above.