How SmartestEnergy Uses EA to Power a Tech-Led Future

Navigating the Complexities of Rapid Growth and Being a Global Leader in Green Energy

With each acquisition and market expansion, the complexity of SmartestEnergy’s systems multiplied. Disparate tools, more people in the mix, and duplicative tech threatened its agility and could stall its green growth ambitions and compromise hard-won customer trust. A clearer overview of their tech and data would be a critical foundation for the company to be successful. SmartestEnergy’s previous EA tool was slow to implement and did not provide the company with the business insights it needed, so the team deployed a strategic approach to Enterprise Architecture (EA), enabled by Ardoq and led by Henrik Magnussen, Head of Enterprise Architecture at SmartestEnergy.

"At SmartestEnergy, we really want to embrace the deep green agenda. We're helping customers make decisions about their future and their energy usage. We want to really inspire and help them to make the change to a greener and hopefully a sustainable, cheaper energy source."

- Henrik Magnusson, Head of Enterprise Architecture at SmartestEnergy

As SmartestEnergy had grown rapidly from one entity in the UK to four across the globe in the last seven years, Henrik and his team faced several critical challenges:

• Consistent Technology Deployment: Ensuring uniform tech deployment across SmartestEnergy's rapidly expanding global footprint, including new acquisitions, was a significant hurdle.
• Fragmented Systems and Data Silos: Rapid growth led to the risk of disparate technologies and data silos forming across different entities. SmartestEnergy needed a tool that could provide them with insights tailored to different business needs.
• Optimizing End-to-End Customer Experience: Delivering frictionless customer journeys required a clear, comprehensive understanding of all digital touchpoints and underlying data.
• Maintaining Agility at Scale: SmartestEnergy's agile culture faced the challenge of preserving its speed and adaptability amidst increasing organizational complexity and navigating a heavily regulated industry.

How Ardoq Enables a Consistent and Strategic Enterprise Architecture

SmartestEnergy addressed these challenges by strengthening its Enterprise Architecture practice, with Ardoq as the foundational tool for visualizing, understanding, and strategically planning its technology. Championed by Henrik and his team, EA provides a critical framework for strategic tech deployment.

• Establishing a Holistic View and Single Source of Truth: Ardoq enabled SmartestEnergy to frame and communicate its entire tech stack, serving as a central repository for critical data, security, privacy, and compliance information. Henrik emphasized Ardoq's role in making EA actionable

"Having the data at our fingertips, being able to pull together all our technology and data to extract what's important for us as a business and baseline it in one single tool is amazing.”

- Henrik Magnusson, Head of Enterprise Architecture

• Breaking Down Silos, Socializing EA, and Driving Consistency: An Architectural Review Board (ARB) was established, using insights from Ardoq to align all new technology deployments with the overall strategy. This proactive governance ensures consistency and prevents duplication, bringing all data together in one place. Another aspect which has been key to EA’s success in SmartestEnergy is Henrik and his team’s ability to champion the value of Enterprise Architecture, securing buy-in from stakeholders by showing them how EA supports the greater business strategy and their objectives.
  
  
• Enabling Customer-Centricity through Data Insights: Ardoq's comprehensive system view allows SmartestEnergy to optimize frictionless customer journeys and leverage data for continuous improvement.
  
  

“As we grow and scale, we've got to have the right systems in place. They've got to talk to each other. Data strategy has got to underpin all of that. EA helps us get that overarching understanding and how it plays a role in our journey.”
- Hayley Thompson, VP Global Marketing at SmartestEnergy

• Maintaining Agility with Clear Guidance: Ardoq helps SmartestEnergy streamline processes, providing clear guidance and frameworks for rapid, informed technology decisions. 
• Fostering Collaboration and Data Quality: Henrik champions Ardoq as "a tool, not just for architects. It's a tool for everyone in the business.” This open access, combined with easy-to-consume ways of presenting data such as dashboards, fosters organization-wide engagement and crowdsourcing of information.

“One of the killer features, for me, is having the data insight dashboards. You know exactly what data is missing, and you're constantly chasing down that goal, and it almost becomes a little bit of a gamification.”

- Henrik Magnusson, Head of Architecture

Key Outcomes With Ardoq: An Organization Poised to “Innovate to Accelerate”

By embracing a modern approach to Enterprise Architecture powered by Ardoq, SmartestEnergy has realized significant benefits, directly supporting its mission and enabling future growth:

• Enhanced Strategic Clarity and Alignment: The integrated view provided by Ardoq has allowed SmartestEnergy to ensure consistency in the way tech is deployed within the business, a critical capability to ensure effective scaling as they continue to grow, either by acquiring new companies or setting up in new markets. This efficiency powers a better, smoother customer experience:

“Being able to effectively manage data through the EA is enabling near real-time asset management, where optimizing generation and battery assets allows customers to detect anomalies and therefore maximises their revenue.”

- Henrik Magnusson, Head of Architecture

• Improved Agility and Innovation: EA streamlines decision-making, allowing SmartestEnergy to remain agile even with increased complexity. This framework that EA provides ties back one of their core values, "Innovate to Accelerate", providing guardrails for strategic adoption of new technologies, including AI. With EA-powered insights, Henrik and his team will be able to champion the most valuable and impactful AI use cases for the business.

“EA can truly help SmartestEnergy stay agile. It simplifies things, streamlines processes, and gives us the guidance and framework we need to deploy effectively.”

- Hayley Thompson, VP Global Marketing

• Stronger Collaboration and Data-Driven Insights: Ardoq serves as SmartestEnergy’s "digital twin", fostering a collaborative environment where information is easily shared and updated. This transparency empowers teams with data-driven insights, leading to continuous optimization of customer experiences and business outcomes.
  
  
• Future-Proofing the Business: By systematically managing its technology landscape, SmartestEnergy is not just addressing current needs but actively designing its future. Hayley's "aha!" moment about EA's value came from conversations with Henrik and being able to see EA’s direct link to the business’s strategy and how that would in turn support her team.

Next Steps

SmartestEnergy's commitment to a sustainable future is deeply embedded in its strategic vision. While the current implementation of EA has focused on streamlining their operations in the UK, they aim to focus on adopting the same approach in the US and Australia, and continuing this as it expands into Europe.

Henrik has a bold vision for what EA will make possible for the organization.

"My vision is that we become a modular, composable modern business, where applications and technology is integrated in meaningful ways to create new business outcomes and really using that as an ignition for innovation and a jump off point to new technologies and just unleashing the amazing potential that is in [our] people all around the world."

- Henrik Magnusson, Head of Enterprise Architecture

As a key business stakeholder who relies on Henrik and his team, Hayley offers this advice to other organizations looking to successfully leverage EA:

“If you're looking for how you can successfully deploy this for your business, you need to have  someone within the business that understands EA and can socialise it. And that's really how you get the right kind of buy-in at all levels to make it a success.”

About SmartestEnergy

SmartestEnergy is a people-powered energy company, empowering customers, generators, and partners to get to net zero. We know the journey to 100% renewable energy is complex, because everyone is at different stages with unique needs. That’s why our model is flexible, and our innovative retail and trading solutions are realistic. As a growing community, we can make the system fairer and more powerful. We can better show the realities and rewards of switching from fossil fuels to clean energy. Connect generators to customer demand. Accelerate the market. Create jobs. And champion greener, smarter energy for generations. SmartestEnergy, empowering a greener generation.