Overview
The District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority (DC Water, then known as WASA) had set itself a demanding goal in its enterprise strategic plan: to deliver "world-class performance." Yet its information technology function was still largely viewed as a back-office service provider — maintaining systems and infrastructure rather than driving the organization forward. WASA's Office of the CIO engaged tieBridge, with partner GivingWorks, to develop a five-year IT strategic framework (2010–2014) that would reposition IT as a strategic lever, connect technology investment directly to organizational goals, and give leadership a clear, prioritized agenda for the years ahead.
The challenge
WASA needed IT to help solve problems that reached well beyond the data center:
- Deliver on a mandate for world-class performance while IT was still seen as a support function rather than a strategic driver of that performance.
- Rebuild public trust and confidence after years of reputational damage over water-quality perceptions, with customers holding less-than-favorable views of the utility's transparency and communications.
- Manage intense cost pressure — a multibillion-dollar Long Term Control Plan, infrastructure more than a century old, and rising energy costs (WASA among the District's largest energy consumers) — demanding real operational efficiency.
- Meet rising expectations for a "greener" and "smarter" utility, as customers grew accustomed to on-demand information and new digital and social channels.
- Deliver an ambitious technology agenda with an IT organization that needed stronger project-management capacity and staffing to execute it.
Our work
tieBridge and GivingWorks worked hand in hand with the Office of the CIO to turn a broad ambition into a structured, executable framework:
- Ran a structured executive session and follow-up consultations with IT leadership — including the CIO and Manager of Operations — to surface and prioritize WASA's business challenges and the IT responses to them.
- Conducted external research on emerging trends — social media and "smart utility" technologies — and their implications for water and wastewater management.
- Reframed IT's role, repositioning the function from a service provider to a cross-functional change agent with a horizontal, enterprise-wide view.
- Structured the strategy around three mutually reinforcing pillars — enhancing performance, improving public perception, and practicing better environmental stewardship — and translated each into specific objectives.
- Mapped those objectives to concrete IT initiatives and systems, from asset management and work flow, GIS, and document management to SCADA, modernized procurement, and a proposed Center for Innovation.
- Defined an implementation and governance model — a strengthened project-management office working to outcome-focused benchmarks, a cross-functional Project Steering Committee to build end-user buy-in, and leadership-chaired quarterly project reviews.
- Aligned the whole framework to WASA's enterprise strategic plan, so IT priorities laddered directly up to organizational goals.
Recasting IT as an agent of change
The framework's central move was to redefine IT itself. Its mandate cuts across every department, which gives it a horizontal view of the organization that no single functional unit has — and because it collaborates closely with those units without reporting to any one of them, it can offer objective insight into performance gaps and cross-cutting solutions that a department head typically can't see. tieBridge built the strategy on that premise, treating IT less as a service provider that keeps systems running and more as an "agent of change" that proactively identifies opportunities for collaboration, efficiency, and innovation across WASA.
Three pillars that reinforce one another
Rather than a flat list of projects, the framework was organized as a virtuous cycle. Stronger operations and better environmental stewardship improve WASA's performance; improved performance builds positive public perception; and positive perception, in turn, mobilizes the resources and political support needed to fund still more performance. Framing performance, perception, and stewardship as mutually reinforcing made the case that efficiency and green gains are also reputation and revenue gains — and gave leadership a coherent logic for prioritizing investment.
Ahead of the curve on the "smart, social" utility
Writing in 2009, well before it was common practice, tieBridge positioned social media and smart-utility technology as serious strategic tools rather than novelties. The framework identified practical applications — real-time notification services, interactive consumption benchmarking, on-site metering that lets customers monitor and adjust usage, and new web-based channels for transparency — as levers to rebuild trust, engage customers, and drive efficiency at the same time.
Impact
- Gave WASA a clear five-year strategic direction for IT, aligned line by line to the goals of its enterprise strategic plan.
- Gave WASA's leadership a shared understanding of IT as a lever for organizational performance, not merely a cost center to be managed.
- Organized an actionable agenda of 11 objectives, each mapped to specific IT initiatives and systems, giving leadership a portfolio view to prioritize, sequence, and resource.
- Connected operational performance to public trust through a mutually reinforcing three-pillar model — making the business case that efficiency and stewardship gains are also reputation and revenue gains.
- Set out an implementation and governance model — a strengthened PMO, a cross-functional Project Steering Committee, and leadership-chaired quarterly reviews — to hold delivery accountable to outcomes rather than outputs.
- Positioned WASA to lead on the "smart, social" utility, identifying early, practical uses of social media, real-time metering, and smart-utility technology to serve customers and rebuild trust.