Water companies across the UK headed into another high-risk summer with a critical blind spot: not just in their pipes, but in their data. Nucleo CEO Bobby Brown – who has decades of experience working with national utilities – lays out three practical fixes to improve operational resilience.
Following a series of major water outages affecting thousands of UK homes, data and AI experts are warning that the biggest threat to water resilience this summer is no longer just physical infrastructure stress, but fragmented, unusable operational data.
The warning comes after renewed scrutiny of South East Water following a May bank holiday outage that left more than 1,000 customers across Kent and East Sussex without running water during a heatwave.
The company is now facing a penalty from Ofwat, following repeated supply failures and resilience concerns.
Most utilities already possess the operational data needed to predict demand surges, prevent service interruptions and prepare for extreme weather – but that critical information remains trapped across disconnected legacy systems and regional silos.
This disconnection means that producing a single report can require pulling from dozens of separate data extracts.
As a result, insights that should be available in minutes can take up to weeks to obtain, and often contain conflicting information, making it much more difficult to identify and resolve issues quickly.
In the case of sudden changes in demand – like heatwaves – the crisis is often over before the data is even ready to use.
It’s time to move beyond reactive crisis management and focus on three practical data fixes that can improve operational resilience before customers are affected:
- Build a single ‘live view’ of demand across your network
Most water companies still operate across multiple disconnected systems – from pump telemetry to customer demand data and maintenance logs – creating a fundamental delay in understanding what’s happening across the network in real time.
Heatwaves turn everyday utilities consumption into a system-wide stress test. Demand becomes highly localised and volatile driven by predictable behaviours like watering the garden, filling paddling pools or simultaneous household uses.
However, in many organisations, demand data is still being analysed retrospectively rather than dynamically. It’s being aggregated too slowly or too broadly to be useful.
In some circumstances, I’ve seen reports take two to eight weeks to generate due to data being scattered across systems and the dozens of manual data extracts that need to be performed.
A single operational view of data is now essential for utility businesses, allowing control rooms to see and connect demand spikes directly to network performance, giving control rooms a live view of how consumption is affecting supply across the entire system.
Without this visibility, early warning signs are missed, and the dots are only joined after customers have already been impacted. Companies can’t keep on responding to outages rather than anticipating them.
- Turn maintenance and asset data into live operational signals
Water companies already collect vast amounts of asset and maintenance data, but much of it is used for reporting rather than real-time decision making.
Pump performance, pipe conditions and maintenance schedules are often stored in siloed systems that don’t cross paths with live network data, and this means that critical systems, such as declining pump efficiency during peak demand, are missed until failure occurs.
Integrating asset health data directly into operational systems offers utilities another lifeline when seasonal demand is high and reduces the likelihood of issues developing into customer-facing outages.
- Prepare data systems for regulatory-grade transparency
With increasing scrutiny from regulators including Ofwat, water companies are coming up against growing pressure to demonstrate real-time control over performance and resilience.
Regulation is moving towards day-by-day, minute-by-minute accountability, so regulatory readiness must be built into the data architecture itself.
Heatwaves expose how well a water company understands its own network, and most utilities are still suffering from a visibility problem. The data exists, but it’s locked in digital silos that don’t communicate quickly enough to support real-time operational decisions.
Under tighter oversight, it will no longer be acceptable to say, ‘We just didn’t see it coming’.
Customers, regulators and government bodies rightly expect utilities to demonstrate that they had the information available, understood the risks and acted before service was affected.
Resilience is no longer just about the strength of your infrastructure and physical assets, it’s about the quality of the data and the decisions you’re making before those assets come under stress.
