Avanade UK & Ireland’s Post

Transcript

Anglian Water is the largest water and wastewater company in the United Kingdom by geography. Everyday we supply over 7 million customers with safe, clean drinking water, and our purpose is to bring social and environmental prosperity to the region we serve through our commitment to love every drop. Always exploring new partners, new partnerships, new ways of approaching global crises, In Norfolk we have a a real mix of rare chalk streams, but sadly most of our rivers are actually in quite a poor condition at the moment. Globally, we face kind of a twin set of crises, if you like. Firstly, we have a climate crisis and we also have a biodiversity crisis, and we know that the impacts, particularly the climate crisis, are being already felt through through water. One of the issues with rivers not being in good ecological health is species loss, freshwater, our coastal and our marine environments, our oceans are very, very sensitive to the the impacts of biodiversity loss. Later exists in many different pockets, through many different organisations in lots of different formats, so we have a real problem in bringing that together and making it usable. We are a very innovative organization and we're really excited to to be working with Microsoft with Avanade and are really exciting Stiff key project. We're testing the digital twin concept and the River Stiff Key because it's a chalk stream. There's only about 300 in the world and most of them are in this country. They've got a really precious biodiversity that we need to protect the world's first ecological digital twin of a chalk stream catchment. The digital twin allows us to digitally model something from the real world. What we realized was that if we built a digital twin model of the chalk aquifers and the river systems, we could. No cause and effect. We could show how different actors within those environments had different effects. It was really impressive to see Avanade build that spatial map of the River Stiffkey catchment in a computer and to ingest vast amounts of data and make sure that it was all linked so you could see exactly which part of the stiff key catchment all of that data related to is hugely impressive work by them. Complex systems by default are hard to. Understand there's lots of moving parts. There's lots of different disparate data sources. Pulling them all together is not as easy as it sounds. Digital Twin helps us do that. Its use of digital twins was something that the Microsoft Azure platform really helps us to accelerate. It provides us with all of the tools, all of the technology in a completely connected stack to implement these ideas and test them very, very quickly. The key benefits we've seen already, we know a lot more about the the River Stiffkey system, so we can look back in time and we can understand the history. We can drive new solutions to improving river health that could benefit our operational colleagues who are managing assets on a day-to-day basis. We can do it more cheaply, more effectively and with a smaller carbon footprint as well. The partnership between Avanade and Microsoft and Anglian Water has been absolutely vital. To the success of this project, we want to really make a difference, really make human impact. And these sorts of projects are a great example of why. And through that Microsoft partnership with Anglian Water and Avanade, we're able to really think about what we can do here to improve liver health. We can learn all the lessons, we can understand what the barriers are. We can get past some of that and then look at how we can scale that up not just across Norfolk, not just across our region, but thinking across the country and also. Across the world.